Harry Fraud has stayed in the same part of Brooklyn his entire life. “I ran around Gowanus when it was word of mouth the mob was dumpin’ bodies here,” he says with a hint of sarcasm. Fraud’s studio is situated in a relatively industrial patch of a neighborhood that has seen a real estate boom in recent years. In a warehouse and overlooking the Gowanus Canal -- still as toxic as ever -- is where some of New York’s best rappers, from French Montana and Action Bronson, to the late Chinx and the late Sean Price, have spent countless hours recording some of their best work.
Today, he came in with Harlem rapper Smoke DZA, as after their mini press run they were headed back to Gowanus. DZA is one of Fraud’s most frequent collaborators, and vice versa, joining forces for the stoner essential Rugby Thompson in 2012 and The Stage, a three-man collab tape that also included Curren$y, a year later. A few days before our interview, Fraud and DZA released He Has Risen, a 9-track joint release on DZA’s RFC records and Harry Fraud’s Surf School (stylized: SRF SCHL), the first official release on the producer’s three-year-old label.
All of the sounds heard on He Has Risen are live recordings. “We had a band in there with one of my engineers just working on stuff that we could pull from and sample for the project,” said Fraud about what he called the “lushness” of the project. “I just feel like sonically it’s not just some shit where it sounds like a bunch of two-finger keyboard beats you put together. It’s lush instrumentation and orchestration going on.”
Fraud is adamant he’ll never leave New York, but he’s built a reputation far beyond his native town, working heavily with top stoners like Wiz Khalifa and Curren$y. Other credits include Pusha T, Ab-Soul, and even The Weeknd. He’s also been composing music for the Emmy Awards for years. During a live broadcast of the award show in 2010, upon winning the ‘Founders Award,’ Simon Cowell asked that the show’s production staff play back the music that was heard as he made his way to the stage. “And the one before,” he said, after cueing to the first of two Fraud instrumentals. “That’s a hit record.”
The Coke Boys Wave
Fraud has been aligned with French Montana’s Coke Boys since the beginning, back when it was Cocaine City, built off of the success of French’s widely-circulated street DVDs. Chinx Drugz had started the Riot Squad with Stack Bundles, who was slain in 2007, while Chinx had been in prison. A couple of years after his 2008 release, Chinx was introduced to Montana by way of Max B, with whom Fraud has developed a rapport during the Harlem rapper’s incarceration, now going on seven years. “I guess I’m grateful would be the word to the groundwork that he’s laid,” says Fraud of Max B’s legacy, “So anything I can do to contribute positively -- I’m there.”
“N*ggas in there talkin’ about our lives, n*ggas is baldin’ and n*ggas was like blood,” says Max B through the jail phone on the intro to the Fraud-produced, Breezy-featuring opener on French Montana’s recent Wave Gods mixtape. He continues, in a nostalgic burst about the early Coke Boys wave: “that shit was fun. We was doin’ that shit because we believed in this shit.”
Wave Gods was released shortly after Kanye West had suggested titling his album Waves before settling on The Life of Pablo. Kanye’s use of the word prompted outsiders to speculate on its foundations, and indeed, an attempt to pinpoint a definition of “wavy” is against the idea of the word/genre originated by Max B and purveyed by the Coke Boys. But here goes: Be innovative and sound cool as shit doing it. Don’t be afraid to experiment with flows, or to bring the groovy sound back to street rap. Have fun with it.
Over a year after Max B was sent to prison, French, Fraud, and Chinx -- the new Coke Boys -- connected for the first time on “Tunnel Vision.” The track samples Eddie Money’s 1986 stadium anthem “Take Me Home Tonight,” and French’s product takes on an opposite ethos of the original. French and Fraud’s first big hit -- with the help from Jadakiss -- came on “New York Minute.” This one samples Don Henley’s 1989 hit of the same name, placing Henley’s hook, pitched up all the way, amid ominous bursts of Montana’s slick street talk -- combining flashes of bright lights with the grime of the outer boroughs, a fairly precise approximation of the Coke Boy sound.
Then came “Shot Caller,” released in late 2011, which sampled an immediately recognizable New York classic in Lords of the Underground’s “Funky Child,” taking the opening high-pitched horn solo from before the boom-bap drop, and looping it into a dizzying club beat. It was the first track released after French signed a joint deal with Bad Boy and MMG, and he soon got the bosses of both labels to guest on the remix.
French was the first to blow, and as two industry moguls would help him climb to superstardom, Chinx was emerging as a Wave God in the making. Early on in his steady rise, he displayed a remarkable talent for singing hooks and having them arise out of his verses in perfect transitions. His naturally melodic flow inspired Fraud to speed up his drums and use more new-age source material, such as sampling a record by The XX on “Now or Never,” taken off their 2011 joint tape Flight 2011, to form a rare sound that retains an urban grit whilst remaining smooth as butter. Chinx apparently brought that sample to the table -- “he was always in tune with it,” Fraud reflects -- and it was also Chinx’s idea to use the squeaky violin sample on “I’m a Coke Boy.”
The track that came to be the definitive Coke Boy anthem appeared on Chinx’s Cocaine Riot 2, and the sample is taken from another New York classic, Royal Flush’s “Worldwide.” In many cases, the Coke Boys were taking once-familiar sounds and reinserting them into the new wave, with a renewed focus on charisma and making the records come alive -- records that, like “I’m a Coke Boy,” demand the listener’s full attention.
Persevering After Losing Chinx & Sean Price
Though he’s been important to New York -- he’s sure of that, Fraud isn’t one to anoint himself as the torchbearer of any of citywide movement. He came into the game as an avid fan, and he’s been lucky enough to meet some of his heroes along the way, such as Max Biggavelli and the late Sean Price, the latter whom Fraud cites as the first rapper to ever show him love. He sees himself in the lineage of his city’s underappreciated innovators, and Fraud was heavily inspired by the bold stylings of Price. “He would like rap on the most beautiful soundscape and just say the wildest shit. Sean Price was amazing at that.”
Last May, Chinx was gunned down in Queens. He had been planning his debut album, which was posthumously released with the help of French in August, the same month that 43-year-old Sean Price suddenly died in his sleep.
“You can’t explain the feeling. It’s like you got the wind knocked out of you but you can’t get your breath back,” Fraud said, touching on his reaction upon hearing of his friend’s murder. “As far as what he was going to be as an artist, without question he was going to be one of the top dudes...he was really an emcee who also understood how to balance being an emcee with making good songs, which is such a hard thing to do.”
There came a time when Fraud had to escape the city and lock himself up in his family home in Florida, surrounding himself with work and little else. Indeed, Fraud’s productivity didn’t wane much in the wake of all that he’d faced. In addition to his new project with DZA, he produced one of the hardest bangers on Diddy’s MMM, featuring French and soon given a necessary tribute remix with an added verse from Chinx.
In discussing Mac & Cheese: The Album, French’s long-awaited follow up to 2013’s Excuse My French, on which Fraud expects to have some “crazy” production, I asked him if it was important to him that he and French continue to collaborate in order to keep the Coke Boys legacy alive, in honor of Chinx. His answer: Of course -- but, in his mind, their legacy is already cemented, and at this point in their careers, his rapport with French has little or nothing to do with whether or not they’re actively collaborating.
“With guys like French, like DZA, if we never made another record again musically, it would have no effect with who we are with each other. That’s still my man forever.” And for that reason, in fact, it’s only a matter of time until Fraud will pull up on French again with his fiercely guarded laptop, which Montana refers to as the “Book of Eli.” “He’s like, ‘Take out that ‘Book of Eli’ cause I know you got missiles in there’,” Fraud laughs. “And that’s what I’m doing. I’m coming in, putting a playlist together, and dropping 10 missiles on you.”