Words by Emma Warren

Music Producer, Sound Designer and Founder of Public Enemy Hank Shocklee met director John Oluwole ADEkoje when the former was dispensing wisdom to the latter’s film students at Boston Arts Academy.

When ADEkoje finished the first part of his independent Afro-Surrealist trilogy, a short titled YE! A Jagun Story, he knew exactly who he wanted to score it – Shocklee.  “Music gives life to film. It’s the heartbeat of it,” he says from his studio, over Zoom. “I like to work in an environment where I’m free and John gave me the latitude to do whatever I saw fit. Same as with Ernest Dickerson with Juice.”

Shocklee rose to fame with the seriously powerful and groundbreaking sample-based production style under the auspices of The Bomb Squad, most famously for Public Enemy. The first film that he scored was Dickerson’s aforementioned, Tupac-starring, Juice, back in 1992. The music industry multi-hyphenate dipped in and out of film, bringing his game-changing production styles to music artists from Run DMC to the Manic Street Preachers and working behind the scenes with a near decade-long stint as a Senior VP at MCA/Universal Records and his own Shocklee Entertainment. He was persuaded back into a scoring role in 2007 for Ridley Scott’s American Gangster, which was nominated for two Oscars.

That score involved an inevitably creative approach. “I recreated all the songs that are supposed to replicate being back in the Sixties [and] I wanted to create something new that would fit in that time period. I had the luxury of creating the stems for it. The songs are all broken down to the stems so that I could pull them apart and then the score goes seamlessly with the tracks.” The effect was to combine the feeling of the score and the songs in the film, something he describes as ‘a movement that’s continuous... The vibration is continuous as if you were listening to a DJ play a set.’

YE! is focused on the story of Stellar (Dakore Egbuson-Akande) who is a member of a ‘covert celestial league of brilliant women’ and who is seeking revenge for the murder of her family. It was the right project, he says, at the right time. “Now, everybody has access to video, whether it’s on your phone or your iPad or you’ve got a full screen, immersive environment. It’s an opportunity to show another side of film scoring, which I bring to the table. The use of sound, the use of samples, of electronics, things like turntables – whatever it takes. Now we’re more open-minded about what you can do with sound in film. I’m not trapped in the old school, traditional way of scoring.”

He began by working with sounds that were already embedded in the world of the film. When John ADEkoje gave him the rough cut, the dialogue wasn’t cleaned up. “It gave me a starting place of where to take the sound,” he says. “I’m a firm believer that if you want to make something that connects with people you’ve got to start at the roots. The things that people mostly want to clean up, so they can hear the dialogue in a film – I want to cue in on and develop and sound from that.” Dialogue, he believes, ‘leads the symphony’ of the environment in a film: “That’s where it starts from.”

It goes without saying that Shocklee has had a major influence on music production techniques – he was inducted into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame in 2013 and the Grammy Hall of Fame five years later. Is he still searching for new techniques or is he adapting existing techniques for the current time? “I’m doing a mixture of both. I don’t particularly believe in music that has to be done one way and I never create a template. I don’t have any presets that I’ve created. Everything is a one-off. What something needs is what I’m going to design.”

“Do I want something retro or modern or do I go into the future and do something I’ve never done before? I was lucky enough to be at the beginning of sampling when nobody knew what it was when it wasn’t even an art form. I came into it when sampling was on an instrument level. When E-mu came out with their SP12, the first sampling percussion machine, it was made with nothing but sample of a kick drum or a hi-hat.” These were, he says, ‘terrible sounds’ but they formed the basis of his world of design. “Everything for me came from somewhere else: a record, something you’d put a microphone to. I’ve come from that school. I’ve developed a lot of different techniques – it depends on what fits at that particular moment in time.”

He gives an example from YE! In one scene, where the lead character encounters her ancestors, he recorded the sounds, moved them to CD, and then replayed it back at various speeds. “I needed something different, something that gave a different texture and feel,” he explains. “There’s a lot of different characteristics that come from sound when you’re using different mediums. It’s not just a sonic thing, it’s a feel thing. I don’t think you listen to sound with just your ears – you listen with your body. CD, vinyl, MP3, you may get a similarity but how they vibrate to you will be totally different. Those are the kinds of things I try to play with.”

As well as scoring and sound design, Shocklee was involved with YE!’s music supervision – which in his hands, provides a central point from which to select and write all the film’s sonic moments. The rough cut of the film used Fela Kuti’s 1972 Trouble Sleep Yanga Wake Am which is retained in the final cut. “It was the heartbeat of the film; the entire score was designed off of that. If you take any part of the score it all fits perfectly in with that song. It’s being echoed from the beginning to the end.”

Shocklee describes his work on the film as ‘three dimensional’. “The Fela song is acoustic, the score is a combination of acoustic and synthetic and the sound design as the third dimension,” he explains. “Then you have this world that’s there. I wanted to bring the sound design into the world, into an immersive environment.” New music was also commissioned, including bespoke tracks from Nigerian-American OWO, Lagos-based ‘afro-fusion’ artist Ninety and Zim-born South African-based house vocalist Jackie Queens with the joyful ‘I’ll Find A Way’. The track contains lyrics in English and isiZulu, reflecting a pan-African intention that’s evident across the whole film. “Me and my producing partner Jo-Ann Nina – she’s amazing – wanted to show the diversity in the African diaspora. I wanted to create something that unifies the vibration rather than segments that tribalise or ghettoise it. Putting things in one little space. I want something to branch out, to get different perspectives.”

Most of the work took place in his studio. “Me, I’m like a mad scientist,” he says, “stuff is everywhere. There are wires all over the place. I just like to have everything within arm's distance so I can get to anything when I need to get to it.” His sonic space encompasses analogue gear he picked up way back in the 1970s and ‘80s right up to the Dolby Atmos environment he works in. “Also, I’m a big fan of great monitors,” he says. “Which ones? Neumann. They sound nice and they’re not delicate.”

He’s had Atmos for a few years now. “I was looking for a particular project, to display my take on it,” he says. “When you’re in an immersive environment you want to spin things around and do all the little tricks. That’s cool, but I wanted to place you in the centre of the film, to make you feel like you’re inside it.” The hardest part, he says, is maintaining ‘atmosphere in dimension’. “There’s a careful balance of it being an environment and it being a gimmick. It’s a fine line.” 

Shocklee brings a similar carefulness to his role at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts as a mentor. “It’s like having a guidance counsellor – but a cool one, in the area of music,” he says with a chuckle. “I was a music executive as well as a creator, at the same time I’m a manager. I understand how those systems work together. I’ve always been an advocate that the best marketing you can have is music. It starts with the music. That’s where it grows from.”

All mentors know that the work involves a two-way relationship, with the so-called teachers often learning as much as the so-called students. One of the things Shocklee has learned from his students involves genre. “I always thought about [this] but never had confirmation. There really is no genre. To the new kids that are coming up they – they’re creating from an amalgamation of all those different experiences: what they’ve heard from their mothers, their grandparents, their peers. They’re meshing it all together.” The generation coming through, he says, is one of the greatest. “They embody the spirit of the artists of the 1970s. They don’t care what it is. All they’re concerned about is the vibe and I think it’s brilliant.”

More information about YE! A Jagun Story can be found here.