This is likely why rappers are so responsive to his productions – not only do they play well in clubs, but they’re spacious enough that a rapper isn’t crowded out of the track.įrom the smooth The-Dream indebted croon of recent collaborator TeeFlii to the guttural croak of Atlanta veteran Young Jeezy, Mustard’s beats have uniquely accented the sounds of the majority of his collaborators. He might take just a single, simple synth line, or a woozy looped pad as the basis for the track, and simply build his familiar sounds (which almost always contain a clap on the 4 th) around that, never garnishing the core elements with too much filler. His beats are easy to pick out from a line-up and deceptively hard to duplicate: the sounds themselves might cheap and weedy, but Mustard’s tenure as a DJ has gifted him a sixth sense for arrangement.
Fast forward to 2013 and 23-year-old DJ Mustard’s sound is ubiquitous – his fusion of Bay Area hyphy and LA jerkin sounds is what made Tyga’s ‘Rack City’ a break out success, and since then he’s been on the rolodex of pretty much any major label in the U.S. His uncle, a DJ, left the then pre-teen Mustard to play a party one night, and as they say, the rest is history. Dijon McFarlane, better known as DJ Mustard was a mere eleven years old when he started DJing.