Lil Jon

If Lil Jon had never produced a beat of his own, he still would have been a pivotal figure in the Atlanta rap explosion of the late 1990s and 2000s. Born Jonathan Smith in 1971, he was in high school when he became a sought-after DJ in the city’s most popular nightclubs; before long, he was also a radio personality and an A&R scout for Jermaine Dupri’s So So Def Recordings. There he helmed the So So Def Bass All-Stars albums, which showed a fluency in Miami bass, house, and brash, maximalist hip-hop alongside an innate feel for the way those seemingly divergent scenes could be synthesized. That streak is even more evident in his own work, be it through codifying crunk music with the East Side Boyz (as perfectly distilled on 2003’s Ying Yang Twins-featuring megahit “Get Low”), bringing hyphy to the mainstream with E-40’s “Tell Me When to Go,” or fusing rap and EDM on his massive DJ Snake collaboration, “Turn Down for What.”