Denaun Porter

Denaun Porter

Denaun Porter has the best of both worlds. As part of the Detroit collective known as D12 he takes on the role of Kon Artist, then when working diligently on production for the likes of Dr. Dre, Busta Rhymes and Keyshia Cole he adopts his moniker Mr. Porter.With an ingrained respect fro music and its purveyors, Mr. Porter has taken it upon himself to provide an outlet for artists who might not necessarily have the money for big name production. His site gives artists beats from his own catalogue for considerably lower rates.Here he talks to FemaleFirst about the loss of two of his best friends, his hometown and the reasoning behind his new venture.

Where did your love of music come from?
Well my father is into music. He is a Gospel singer and it pretty much started there. Growing up in church and seeing my Dad and my uncles sing with all this feeling, that was where I got my start, but I didn’t take it serious for a long time.
Coming up in Detroit there is an overabundance of talent in both performing and production. How influential was the vibe in Detroit in encouraging you to become the producer you have become?
It is more important today as there were always different musicians and things of that nature. There were all different people that helped and being here certainly played part. Coming up under Dilla and Eminem and then moving over to Dr Dre, it was like different extremes. It plays more of a part today being from Detroit as I can cope with a lot of the kids of the musicians. Being able to work with them, I think it is better for me to be here as there are so many struggling musicians that have been left here. More so now than when I was younger

You have launched your own web site, which allows general fans to buy beats that you have worked on over the years. What inspired you to do that?

I was looking at all the music that I had. I was out in LA and when I came back from LA, Dre looks for certain things and certain ideas and I think what happened was I would get frustrated.

You know I would make all of this music but we didn’t use it all; so it got to a point where I was getting a lot of e mails and fan mail from people and they were looking to work with me and it was hard to go in the studio with a guy who is just starting when you have a career to uphold yourself.

Sometimes I do that if someone hits me with some shit, but a lot of these guys need work and this was a way for me to spread that love to these people without having to say, ‘come back after you got five more songs.’

Now I have made this site where I have put a lot of the music up there. You know this is stuff that I have sitting on hard drives, not quite sure how many I have (laughs). There was just a lot of music sitting there and I thought it was a waste.

Some of these kids don’t know how to negotiate prices for beats so I set it up where they can go to the site and if they like a beat, they can take it off and put it on their own album. They negotiate their price and in doing so they have to learn about producer agreements and about licensing.

It just turned into a great tool to work with artists around the world. I really wanted to do it for those artists in the UK and in Australia and places like that. They love us over there and I don’t want to have to wait for a tour to have to do something with people over there.

I hate that, as I love being over there. It just made so much sense for me to do this and that s why I got into it. I felt like all this stuff would go to waste and it is really great stuff, you know the stuff labels will be afraid of.

The lack of communication and the fact that I am a person that likes to do things for everybody that made sense to me. I wanted to help all these people but I knew I had to figure out a way to do this without having to be in a million places at once and it just made sense.

Do you think that artists coming up nowadays do need that big name producer behind them to get attention nowadays?

Not at all, but it’s like this. When we did the first D12 album, I felt like I was doing great but then I would rap over my own beats and then Eminem would come with a beat that I could rap over.

But when we got to Dre’s studio, and we started working on his stuff, it was staggering. You know get a beat here or there from a different producer and its nice when you are in the hood saying, ‘I got a beat from Mr. Porter,’ I never had that chance when I was coming up.

Melanie Cornish