Today, our host Brandon Jenkins sits down with Dissect’s Cole Cuchna. Dissect is a serialized podcast that dives deep into albums by artists such as Kendrick Lamar, Kanye West, and Frank Ocean, forensically dissecting one song per episode. Cole Cuchna joins us to discuss the show’s highlights and walks us through the production process of Dissect’s newest season, focused on Kendrick Lamar’s critically acclaimed album DAMN.. Stream Dissect now on Spotify.

In this episode of Behind the Beats we go behind the scenes and find out how Nana Kwabena wrote the music for the second season of Mogul. It’s a wide ranging conversation that touches on Nana’s creative process, his thoughts on the Miami bass movement, and the history of African talking drums.

This is Behind the Beats. In this series we’ll go behind the scenes to discover how Mogul got its distinct sound. In this first episode we’ll hear from the woman behind the show’s sound design, So Wylie. Her inspirations, her process, her beats.

On September 10th 2001, Miami lost a local legend: DJ Uncle Al. In this episode, we hang at home with DJ Walshy Fire of Major Lazer, and he breaks down why Al was so special. It’s a tale of perseverance, positivity, pirate radio, and songs about Santa Claus.

Miami bass may have been thriving, but lyrical hip hop was still struggling to find a foothold in Miami. And with little chance at getting airtime on popular stations, Miami DJs have to find a way to get their music heard—and the best way to do that was to set up an illegal pirate radio station. In this episode: a pimped-out tour bus, a barrel full guns, and a lunchbox full of cocaine.

After pissing off the authorities, the 2 Live Crew start to piss off each other. In this episode, things fall apart, and we contend with the complex legacy of one of hip hop’s pioneers. 

The fight rages on. Luke and the Crew fan the flames in the court of public opinion, and when they go head-to-head with their biggest critics, things get heated. In this episode we bring you 90s daytime TV and rapping prosecutors, and the nastiest album in the history of the world is put on trial.

The 2 Live Crew drop their classic hit “Me So Horny,” which takes the Miami bass sound out of the Pac Jam and spreads it across the nation. But not everyone wants the 2 Live Crew's music on the airwaves. A group of conservatives and a notorious Miami sheriff conspire to take the Crew's records off the shelves and off the air. When the Crew hits back, it lands them in jail.

The 2 Live Crew is starting from the bottom: crashing at Luke’s girlfriend’s mom’s house. Nobody will sign them, so Luke starts Luke Skyywalker Records, the first hip hop label in the south. And Luke dreams up hip-hop’s most shocking stage show.

Our story starts with Luke Campbell of the 2 Live Crew getting thrown in jail. Luke wound up in handcuffs because, according to a Florida judge, his music was obscene. To understand how this happened, we have to go back in time to 1980s Miami, to a sweatbox teen disco that birthed a new kind of hip hop: Miami bass.

In Season 2, Mogul explores the birth of southern hip hop. It all started in Miami with The 2 Live Crew, a group that took rap music and made it faster, harder, and nastier than anything anyone had heard before. The new season returns September 18th.