Jermaine Dupri on the Art of Making a Hit | On the Spot | TED

00:03What's up y'all? (Cheers) Who here is not from Atlanta? OK, well, welcome to Atlanta. Let's get started. What do I love most about producing? It's almost like having a baby for me. Like, you go in the studio, and it's not an idea that, you know, most people will be looking around the studio trying to figure out what we're going to do.

00:29And then we get an idea, and then we start making that idea come to life. And depending on how long it takes, you know, sometimes it takes five minutes, sometimes it takes two days to get this, but it’s still like making a baby -- well it’s not like making a baby -- (Laughter) -- but you know what I’m saying.

00:48Yeah, so, that's what it feels like, though. It's like, that's how I feel when I make music. I watch it go from, you know, nothing to something, and then I give it to you guys, and then y'all have to digest it. So it's a trying process. But that's the one thing that I love about watching, you know, watching it grow from the bottom up.

01:11So that's my first little question. How has Atlanta played a role in my success? Well, I'm from College Park. Who was from Atlanta here? (Cheers) Alright. For anybody that's not from Atlanta, that's the South Side, that's where I come from.

01:27And I feel like Atlanta, when I first started making music with Kris Kross and even earlier in '91, '92, the whole city was building at this time. The music scene prior to me was here, we had like, S.O.S. Band, Brick, Peabo Bryson -- y'all know who I'm talking about?

01:50OK, make sure. So we had a cool music scene here, but it still was, you know, in the birth. And I just feel like my success came with the growth of this city. That's why I feel like I'm the mayor. I am the mayor, but, yeah. But, yeah, you know, I feel like people watched me grow and they watched the city grow, and they came to the city.

02:17And that's why I created "Welcome to Atlanta," because I felt like, I saw people taking other cities more serious than this city. They used to have this shirt and they had hats and all of this, they would have Detroit, LA, Tokyo and London.

02:33Y'all remember these shirts? Oh, y'all don't. Huh? OK, maybe I'm older than all of y'all. Damn. (Laughter) OK, well, anyway, they had these shirts that they used to sell at the airport, and they used to say this, and I used to go to the airport, and I'd see these shirts all the time.

02:51I’m like, damn, why they don’t put Atlanta on these shirts? And it felt like the city wasn't doing what it needed to do. So I just kept pushing, working, trying to create artists and create music and bring more and more people to the city and show how beautiful this city is.

03:08And so I'm happy to see everybody here today. Because this is what I wanted. I wanted this. (Applause) So that's that. What's my formula for making songs? Anybody in here that want to make music? (Cheers) Oh, over here on the left side, somebody is screaming.

03:28OK, so my idea of making music is that once you get a hit, you have to follow whatever it was that you did to get to that hit. So, like, the first time that I did "Jump," I don't know how I made it, but I made it, and you guys liked it. And then I started tracing back what I did to get to that song and I realized that, you know, you can't.

03:58I couldn't really just, like, do exactly what I did to get to that song, but I had to find the little different things that the crowd liked or the people liked or what was really, really interesting about the song. So say, for instance, like, with “Jump,” the hook over and over again, "Mac Daddy will make you --" Audience: Jump.

04:22Jermaine Dupri: See what I’m saying? Yeah. So what I had to figure out is, how do I make other songs that have that same lasting impression on people? And you have to -- It's almost like baking a cake. I know I keep saying babies and baking cakes, but anyway, yeah, this is really like baking a cake, because when you bake a cake, every time you bake the cake, you do basically the same things.

04:52Whether you put different icing on the cake, whether it's a lemon cake or it's a red velvet cake. Whatever it is, you go into baking that cake the same. And for me, when I go in the studio without me telling the people that I'm in the studio with, I basically do some of the same things over and over again.

05:11I'm going to give you an example. I had a little song that came out last year called "Made for Me." That was by Muni Long. Y'all know that song? OK. Yeah, it won a Grammy or something like that. (Laughter) And in making the song, she called me one day and she was like, "Jermaine, I think" -- we made the song prior in the studio, and she was like, "Jermaine, I think the beat needs to have a little bit more bounce to it."

05:39Now, my initial making of the beat, I didn't put this bounce that she's talking about in the record, just because I don't try to make all my records sound the same. But I was watching TikTok when she sent the message to me and I saw that they did a mash-up of Mariah Carey and this group, this artist named Yeat, and they put Yeat over top of "We Belong Together."

06:05And these kids was dancing to the beat. And I'm like, OK. Because people always try to make me seem like I'm old. (Laughter) These young kids dancing to my beat. So I'm like, OK, so they like the beat, they love the beat. So then I start thinking about why everybody loves the Mariah Carey record beat and what I did to the beat and what the hi-hats were doing in that beat.

06:27I said, OK, I'm going to take that same thing and I'm going to put it in "Made for Me." And sure enough, it became a number-one record. It sounds easy. It's not easy, but it's just like making a cake. Like I said, it's just something that you have to put in there.

06:44And if you see it happen one time, it can happen again. You just have to know how to grab it and catch it. I'm pretty good at that. All right. How do I know what's cool? Person in audience: You are cool. (Laughter) JD: I must say, I don’t. I'm going to say that I don't.

07:05I don't know what's cool, I just try things. So if you go back to, like, Kris Kross, one day, one of the Chrises came to my house and he had a jumper on, a Girbaud jumper, and the jumper was bigger than me, right? And you could basically turn yourself around inside the jumper.

07:24And I said, "You should put it on backwards." And, you know, he looked at me like, "What's wrong with you?" (Laughter) And the other Chris looked at me like, "Yeah, what's wrong with you?" And I was like, "Just do it. Why don't you do it, why not?"

07:40And this was before "Jump" came out. And I was like, "You just put it on backwards." And, you know, I don't know why he did it, but he did it. And I said, "Let's go to the mall." And we went to Lenox Square. And when we walked through Lenox Square, I kid you not, the whole mall seemed like they saw something that they'd never seen before.

08:03And I was amazed because I'm like, this ain't nothing, but he just put his jumper on backwards. But what I learned in that process was that it was the coolest thing that they had ever seen in their life. So to answer your question, I don't know, but I'll try something that I don't believe somebody else is doing.

08:25And it normally turns out to be the coolest thing, you know? Alright. (Applause) Thank you. What's next? What song do I want y'all to remember me for? Oh, what a song. Let me think about this. I could say I ain't made it yet, but ... I will say "We Belong Together" because it was the song of the decade.

08:53And it's like, when you go in the studio and make music, that's one of the things you do not forecast. "I'm going to make a song that's going to become song of the decade." That sounds crazy, right? So I would say "We Belong Together." Alright?

09:10(Applause) Here's my lightning round. Hip hop or R&B? A fun fact is that I'm a real hip hop guy. I started out breakdancing, I hated R&B music, so I'm going to go with hip hop. Working with legends or rising stars? I would say new stars would be my answer.

09:32Legends always got ego. (Laughter) Reality TV or docs? Docs. Because I have a new documentary. (Laughter) It's called "Magic City." It's on Starz. (Applause) Alright. Rhythm or melody? I'm going to go with the melody or depending on whatever I'm drinking that night, it might be the rhythm, but the melody most of the time.

10:03Oh, who mentored me? Now I was mentored, I'm sure, by my father. But not really mentored for the music business, just more or less showing me around and showing me how to be. And then I started watching other people from afar, like Teddy Riley, Quincy Jones, Berry Gordy, Andre Harrell, Russell Simmons, all of these guys, I just watched them from afar and they basically are the ones that mentored me without me actually talking to them.

10:36I am a person that usually forecasts things that I want to see happen in my life. And I saw this on YouTube one day, people up on stage, talking at TED talk, and I was like, "I'm going to do that." (Cheers and applause) And I'm here. Thank you.

10:59(Applause)