This week, NPR Music’s Sheldon Pearce considers how a small LA record label managed to shape a community, the careers of many artists and the sound of hip-hop.
Photos by B+, Eric Coleman, Yanran Xiong, Jeremy Weiss and Israel Ramos / Illustration by Jackie Lay/NPR / Courtesy of Stones Throw
This weekend, the Los Angeles-based indie label Stones Throw Records is celebrating its 30th anniversary with a festival near its headquarters in Highland Park. The lineup features signees from across its history, as well as those from within its broader orbit. Stones Throw is fundamental to the development of my taste, and so I jumped at the opportunity to dig into its history and gather many of its trendsetters to assess its influence. Over the last few weeks, I’ve talked to a dozen people associated with the label about its run and legacy as it crosses this milestone, and now that the moment is upon us I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of a thing’s cultural footprint.
If you don't know Stones Throw — and the name might not ring a bell even if you’ve heard songs they’ve released or seen their albums in Urban Outfitters — it was initially a label for vinyl-obsessed hip-hop enthusiasts, anchored by indie-rap figures who would develop cult followings. But it evolved into something far more sprawling. The label produced significant successes, including landmark releases from vaunted MPC maestro J Dilla and the off-kilter pulp lyricist MF DOOM. Yet it never really had a big crossover moment, and it never quite broke the containment of its little sampler’s commune to reach the wider public consciousness and become an institution. And yet, it arrived at something just as important: a watering hole for prospectors, a home for the curious crate-digging sensibility. For a certain kind of listener it became a road map for following the less traveled path, and, perhaps more importantly, for a certain kind of artist, it became a haven through which to realize the more outré ideas.
As the DJ, producer and indie exec A-Trak put it, the label represents a hip-hop mindset that is larger than just hip-hop music — one that is, at its core, about turntablism and the act of sampling as means to get lost in the stacks, blow the dust off something brilliant and overlooked, and put it in conversation with the present and future. Like a great used record store, Stones Throw makes a habit of collecting rarities, things that may not be mass-produced but will be cherished by a chosen few. It is not just a business; it is a cornerstone of a community.
That’s what I was most struck by as I set out to get to the bottom of what was so special about the place, as I had conversations with the artists who gathered there. It starts with the founder Chris Manak, aka the DJ and performer Peanut Butter Wolf, who created the label to put out the shelved major-label music made with his late MC partner Charizma. Soon, he’d gathered a crew of friends and like-minded aficionados to staff the label, and signed artists strictly based on whether or not they moved him. At first, that meant being plugged into local outlets — a record distributor, the scratch community, LA’s burgeoning beat underground.
Increasing infrastructure coincided with the steady output of the cornerstone producer Madlib, the reclusive genius whose imaginative and prolific nature drew two more crucial artists to the label: Dilla and DOOM. A highly influential corner of 21st century indie rap is indebted to that triumvirate. In a 2013 documentary about the label, Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton, Kanye West called Dilla’s drums the greatest of all-time, and Stones Throw intern turned indie label boss and instrumental luminary Flying Lotus once said all hip-hop ever needed was Madvilliany, the now-worshipped collaborative album Madlib and DOOM released together in 2004.
But rap was just the tipping point. There was retro-soul (Mayer Hawthorne and Aloe Blacc), alt-R&B (Gabriel Garzón-Montano), funk (DaM-Funk), jazz (Karriem Riggins), pop (Mild High Club, Benny Sings) and stuff even further out (Gary Wilson, Jonti, The Stepkids). A little network started to sprout. Sometimes that meant Stones Throw interns becoming artists on the label, as in the cases of James Pants and Sofie Royer. Sometimes that meant pulling in members of an extended creative family, as with Royer’s roommates, the beat-makers Mndsgn and Knxwledge. And that network was feeding into the wider pop sphere: If not for Knxwledge, who brought Anderson .Paak to the label for the duo NxWorries, Dr. Dre might never have connected with the rapper and singer, and .Paak might not have collected record of the year and song of the year Grammys for his work with Bruno Mars in Silk Sonic.
So often we think about cultural footprint as the tangible impact that can be felt as a reverberation across the zeitgeist. Stones Throw can claim to have that too. But I think its more notable impact is the way it has created and sustained an insular, for-us, by-us kind of ecosystem that has, against all odds, managed to shift our musical reality. Soon the label moved from an identity shaped by a wide-ranging roster of artists on similar wavelengths to something more sonically integrated; it felt like the artists joining the label were embodying its ethos, entering a realm shaped by its output.
Though it can’t take all the credit, the label feels at least partially responsible for the new world order of genre-agnostic, thrill-seeking wanderers who treat the many soundscapes of the hip-hop soul continuum like a spirit force to be tapped into. As more and more artists come into the fold each year, if any of them ever need a soft place to land, there’s already an incubator ready to welcome them.
5 entry points into the Stones Throw canon
Madvillain: Madvillainy (2004)
Two geniuses, both inscrutable oddballs in different yet complementary ways, team up for a raw and cinematic masterpiece serving as a tectonic shift along rap’s fault lines.
Dilla: Donuts(2006)
A beat-making virtuoso stripping it all down to the essence as a grand swan song.
DaM-Funk: Toeachizown (2009)
A colossal, five-LP collection treating Zapp and G-funk like gigawatt batteries in an electrical grid powering its own megalopolis.
NxWorries: Yes Lawd! (2016)
A perfect marriage of loopy, beat-tape simplicity and soul-forward croon-rap eccentricity.
Sudan Archives: Natural Brown Prom Queen (2022)
The magnum opus of a violinist turned shapeshifting neo soul futurist epitomizing the Stones Throw vision.
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