The genre-defining hip-hop odyssey of Bob Power began by chance. The influential studio engineer and producer, who died on March 1 at the age of 74, forever expanded the two-fisted beats and rhymes soundscapes of rap on pivotal late-Eighties and early-Nineties works by left-field troubadours A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, the Jungle Brothers, and the Roots. And Power helped R&B and soul return to their earthy essence with the iconoclast likes of D’Angelo, Meshell Ndegeocello, Erykah Badu, and Angie Stone.
Yet before he was immortalized on Tribe’s “The Chase, Part II” (“Ayo, my mic is sounding bugged, Bob Power, you there?”), the Chicago native was just an award-winning jingle writer turned studio rat who was asked at the last minute to fill in during a fall 1986 session for Brooklyn hip-hop band Stetsasonic.
“We were working on our first album On Fire [at New York’s Calliope Studios],” recalls Stet leader Glenn “Daddy-O” Bolton to Rolling Stone. “The other engineer couldn’t make it, so the owner, Chris Julian, sends in Bob Power. All we ever wanted to do was be complimentary of what we heard in the parks. Our heroes were Cold Crush Four, the Fantastic Five, The Funky 4 + 1, Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five and Busy Bee. We knew we wanted to make records, but we also wanted that live, raw authenticity. So, we had to teach Bob because he didn’t know anything about hip-hop.”
The unlikely pairing got off to a rocky start with heated arguments. “That wasn’t my world,” Power told me for a previously unpublished interview last year. “There was some trial and error for sure with the Stet guys. Daddy-O and Prince Paul were very committed to keeping a spontaneous element in their music. We were learning from one another.”
Power, who made his bones playing guitar in R&B and soul bands during college, had studied classical theory and composition at Webster College in St. Louis in the mid-1970s. He gigged around San Francisco, earning a master’s degree in jazz before moving to New York in 1982. Power favored a more pristine sound that cut through the noise. The children of DJ Kool Herc were not ready for him.
“I would sample a snare and have it sounding nice and dirty and Bob would clean it up and make it into a rock & roll snare,” laughs Daddy-O. “He didn’t understand the concept of what we were doing.” But Power proved to be a fast learner. He gated the TR-808 drum machine, hip-hop’s then-booming weapon of choice to better balance the bass. Power moved the high-hats to the left instead of having the entire mix go down the middle and added more clarity to the reverbed vocals.
The story goes that when Tribe visionary and producer Q-Tip heard Stetsasonic’s “Go Stetsa I” for the first time at New York club Latin Quarter in 1987, he was overwhelmed by the loud decibel levels of the live drums emanating from the speakers with no trace of rattle or hum. Who in the hell engineered that? Just a few years later, Power would become an in-demand studio auteur following his universally hailed work on A Tribe Called Quest’s back-to-back boom-bap classics The Low End Theory (1991) and Midnight Marauders (1993).
Power, however, wasn’t the first recording engineer to elevate the auditory experience in hip-hop. Rod Hui’s pioneering work on Run-D.M.C.’s groundbreaking 1984 self-titled debut rocked harder than any white hair-metal band on MTV. Akili Walker’s arena-ready mixes on the Fat Boys’ 1985 sophomore LP The Fat Boys Are Back were so thunderous that he was asked to handle the boards on the infamous 87 Def Jam Tour headlined by LL Cool J. A year later, Bryan “Chuck” New took a more leveled approach on Whodini’s buttoned-up Back in Black, one of the earliest hip-hop releases to receive daytime airplay on what was then conservative R&B radio.
But Power specialized in making the rebellious, the weird, and the unconventional sound like a million bucks. His studio credits are rich with unimpeachable hip-hop and soul gems: A Tribe Called Quest’s “Electric Relaxation”; De La Soul’s “A Roller Skating Jam Named Saturday”; Meshell Ndegeocello’s “Outside Your Door”; D’Angelo’s “Brown Sugar”; Erykah Badu’s “On and On”; The Roots’ “You Got Me”; Common’s “The Light.”
“Bob made us competitive,” Daddy-O says of his late collaborator whose eclectic resume also includes recordings by Chaka Khan, Miles Davis, Pat Metheny, Macy Gray, former Talking Heads mastermind David Byrne, and Citizen Cope. “His thinking was, ‘How can I make Stet, De La and Tribe sonically equal to where Luther Vandross is … to where Whitney Houston is? I’m not making little records. I’m not fucking with y’all to make some shit that sounds like them tapes y’all be making. I’m making big records.’ That was Bob’s philosophy. He understood the assignment.”
Daddy-O was not alone in his praise of Power. His death inspired numerous tributes led by the Roots’ Questlove, who credited Power with helping take hip-hop out of its hardcore “chaotic & muddy” period. “Bob was our training wheels for how to present music,” he wrote on Instagram. Thank you for changing our lives.” Badu called him a “great engineer, producer, mentor and friend,” adding, “Our community will forever say your name.”
Alternative jazz bassist, composer, and vocalist Ndegeocello shared a picture of her and Power together in the studio, thanking her old sensei who earned a Grammy nod for his work on her debut Plantation Lullabies (1993) and adding, “You changed my life.”
“Bob was not trying to be a Chris Lord-Alge type,” best-selling Dilla Time author Dan Charnas tells Rolling Stone, contrasting the more low-key Power with the bombastic, A-list mixer. The two unabashed music nerds met in 2013 when Charnas joined NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts as an associate professor at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. Power had taught audio engineering, production, and music philosophy there since 2006 before retiring in 2025.
“He was not trying to do a gazillion remixes,” Charnas adds of his friend and colleague. “We all knew hustlers in the business, people who were really trying to big up themselves as producers. Bob had the capability of any of those people, but that wasn’t his goal to be an industry macher, as they say in Yiddish. I remember he came to the last Dilla class that we ever did. Bob respected him as a producer. Three years later, when I was teaching a class on Paul McCartney it was Bob who came in to give a lecture on Paul as a bassist. Dude was deep. He nurtured his students in real ways and nurtured the rest of the faculty as a teacher.”
During one of the last interviews Power granted last April, we discussed the legacy of his old musical soulmate Michael “D’Angelo” Archer just months before the R&B enigma’s untimely death last October. But our talk soon segued to Power’s improbable career as arguably the most influential ear of hip-hop’s golden era.
The following is an unpublished Q&A with the man who made beautiful noise. “I want people to remember me as an engineer, producer, mixer and all-around nice guy,” Power mused. Mission accomplished.
Let’s go back to the moment you got the call to work with D’Angelo on what would become his landmark debut Brown Sugar. He was pretty much a kid at that point, right?
Yeah. Mike was this young, quiet dude. D’s publisher, Jocelyn Cooper, contacted me. They reached out to me because of my association with everyone I had worked with at that point, particularly Tribe.
Right, D’Angelo was a hardcore A Tribe Called Quest fan.
Who isn’t a hardcore Tribe fan [laughs]?
What was your initial reaction to D’Angelo’s demo?
Blew my mind. There are certain artists who come to you far well advanced with such a heavy-duty concept; artists that have something unique and compelling to say. Meshell Ndegeocello is exactly that. Working with her you felt like, “Wow, we are going to be chasing these demos.” I felt the same way with D. He was so sophisticated musically that I forgot that he was barely fresh out of Virginia. D came in with his songs totally sequenced using a sampling keyboard from Ensoniq called the EPS 16.
Oh, that’s old school …
Yeah, really primitive by today’s standards, but that was the thing to have back then. I believe he had that and four-track cassettes. That was the way D made his demo. And those songs were fucking ferocious… incredible. I came to the realization that most of the songs that would end up on Brown Sugar did not need to be straightened out. There were some instances where I felt like we should bring in live musicians to elevate some of the tracks, but what D did was so incredibly dope. If you heard those demos today you would say, “Oh, my God!”
Is it true that he initially pushed back on the idea of adding live musicians?
D was very resistant to it. So, I said, look, if you don’t like it, we won’t use it. I did some playing. And we also had Larry Grenadier, who was a highly regarded young jazz bassist who I knew. He ended up playing bass on “Smooth.” And on “Me and Those Dreamin’ Eyes of Mine,” Mark Whitfield and I played guitar. Mark is a standout jazz guitarist of our age, period, end of story. That riff that you hear in the beginning of the song before the track starts is him. But Brown Sugar was pretty much all D with help from Raphael Saaqiq, [A Tribe Called Quest’s] Ali Shaheed Muhammad, and Angie Stone.
What did you make of D’Angelo’s playing style on the keys?
D is a savant. And that’s not implying that he doesn’t know a lot of shit, but what happened to come out of his fingers was stuff that we’ve heard all our lives; stuff we’ve heard on the organ in church. But D just ended up doing it in his own brilliant way.
From 1991 to 2000, you went on this dizzying run as an engineer working on some of the most celebrated hip-hop and neo-soul works of the era. Did you get the sense that you were part of a new and exciting musical movement?
I knew something special was happening. I come from an older music background. I played guitar in R&B bands. Albert King was and still is my favorite. I listened to a lot of Al Green and Marvin Gaye. That’s why I connected to D. He could have been on Stax Records in the late Sixties. The Roots are a hip-hop band that can play anything. Badu sounded like a throwback Blue Note artist. They weren’t chasing trends. Listen to the samples De La Soul and Tribe were using…very obscure stuff. And you really cannot even categorize Meshell.
People are still trying to figure out Dilla …
Right! It took me a while to catch up. Dilla was a shock to the system.
One of the hallmarks of your sound was clean vocals and samples. What made you embrace that less-is-more ethos?
That was always my approach dealing with vocals. I like to let the musician do the talking. Yes, I use reverb. Yes, I use delay. But my records are not super wet-sounding. At that time in hip-hop, reverb was a big no-no. It was like, nope, this is not a Barbara Streisand record. Q-Tip would always say, ‘No reverb!’ [Laughs]. But there is something about the immediacy of a vocal that’s right in your face. We are not doing voiceovers for a commercial or something. There should be this whole universe coming out the speakers. It’s an imaginary universe, but you can create it through skill.
Speaking of Tip, I think you may be the first engineer to get a shout out on a hip-hop song. How did Tribe convince you to speak on Midnight Marauders?
Ha! We were just having fun. Tip, Ali, and Phife were a blast to be around. They made my life in the studio easy. I don’t have a lot of rigid rules, but I don’t allow smoking in the studio. I didn’t have to worry about that with those guys.
There was definitely a very noticeable artistic leap from their first album People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm to The Low End Theory. How soon did it dawn on you that Tribe had raised the bar?
It was apparent early on during the sessions. The production was more complex. I think as the sampling technology expanded from just a few seconds to being able to sample a complete musical phrase that gave Tip and Ali more room in the sandbox to play. But the biggest leap was Phife as a lyricist. He really came into his own.
He shut a lot of his detractors up. Phife had a way of making punchlines sound both sharply witty and hilarious.
Yeah. But that was Phife. He was really competitive even with Tip [Laughs]. Phife was a MC’s MC. I was moved that I got the chance to be involved in [his posthumous 2022 album Forever. I really miss Phife.
It could be argued that Tribe was the first in hip-hop to go deep in the digging-in-the-crates approach to sampling beyond traditional soul, rock, and funk. They were seemingly in a race with Gang Starr to see who could track down the most esoteric jazz sample.
It was a breath of fresh air. Tip and Ali were not known for [using] well-known loops and breaks. There was a lot of layering going on. It was my job to elevate the sample, to un-clutter the sound. I wanted people to really hear the richness of that Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers’ bassline on “Excursions.”
I still can’t get over the fact that’s Minnie Riperton’s voice in the background on “Lyrics to Go.”
That’s the brilliance of Tip. I don’t think anyone else would think to sample a vocal break [from Riperton’s “Inside My Love”] and stretch it out in such an elongated, sustained way. It took a minute for people to figure out that was Minnie’s actual voice. Tip was very meticulous when it came to producing. He was brilliant at layering and reconstructing entire samples.
What was your toughest engineering feat?
Working with D’Angelo [Laughs]. I love D like a brother. We’ve had our disagreements, but we are family, so it’s always cool afterwards. When it comes to time and D, the time it takes to gestate different things, to formulate different ideas and to bring it to realization, he runs on his own clock. But I never expect anything else but the greatness that D embodies.
You’ve been fortunate to work with some pretty singular talents. Do you ever think to yourself, I’m the luckiest bastard in the world?
I do. There are not a lot of true artists in this business like Joni Mitchell, Miles Davis, Stevie Wonder, and Prince. No one played and sang like them. I feel the same way about D, Meshell, Badu… they are in that singular pantheon. Tribe’s Low End Theory is as important as Sgt. Pepper’s. If they never played another note, they have already climbed Everest. I’m honored to have my name associated with them.
