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“Curls” is a portrait of MF Doom as teenage delinquent - “a rhyming klepto…showing up to class with Moet in a flask…known to smoke a whole mountain of hash to the ash.” The beat is a perfectly tonal match to Doom’s tongue-in-cheek epic, but it also tells a story by itself. But I decided to limit things to a few favorites from that album and incorporate other highlights from across Madlib’s far-flung oeuvre.

This list could have easily devolved into a breathless ode to the profoundly zooted production at the core of Madvillainy.

With Bandana, his second album with Freddie Gibbs, just around the corner, now is a perfect time to celebrate Madlib’s career-defining beats. Despite his prolific output he remains elusive, and he hasn’t released much music in the past five years.

Using literally dozens of aliases, Madlib has built a career as a genuine pioneer who, through sampling, has covered a mind-boggling amount of musical terrain, and who views the musical frontier to be limitless. An enigma who has always seemed more interested in communing with his E-mu SP-1200 or Roland TB-303 synthesizer than collaborating or mixing at a studio. He is the bedroom producer’s bedroom producer. Madlib has spent the last 25 years either feverishly rifling through record store bins looking for new music to sample or cooped up at his house or freemason castle where he now rents space churning out beat after beat after beat.

Photo Credit: Daniel Boczarski/Redferns via Getty Images A roundup of the best Madlib beats throughout the Oxnard, California producer’s career.

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