“Hitman” Howie Tee (Jamaica)
Born in England to Jamaica parents and raised in the Caribbean culture hotbed of Flatbush, Brooklyn, “Hitman” Howie Tee has kept a low profile in recent years, and his online footprint hardly stretches past the impressive credits on his Discogs.com page. But we don’t need the Internet to be able to tell you that he was one of the most significant and diverse hip-hop producers of the 1980s. We can still remember hearing his productions like UTFO’s “Roxanne Roxanne”—the record that spawned a million answer tracks and basically inspired the entire cottage industry of attention-seeking diss tracks that still thrives to this day—and Whistle’s “Just Buggin” everywhere back in ’80s New York. The latter part of the decade saw him team with fellow yardies Special Ed and Chubb Rock (the latter being a cousin of his), laying down some of the earliest bashment rap tracks. In what was easily one of the most brilliant sample flips of its day, he turned the guitar riff from Desmond Dekker and the Aces’ “007 (Shanty Town)” into Special Ed’s “I’m the Magnificent,” spiking that track with vocal samples from another Jamaican classic in Dave and Ansel Collins’ “Double Barrel.”(To hear that all broken down piece by piece, run tune on our aptly titled reggae-in-rap mixtape, Double Barrel).
Despite all of his contributions to rap (we could go on and on), his biggest hit would have to be “I Wanna Sex You Up” from R&B/New Jack Swing group Color Me Badd—one of the defining tracks of 1990. Whatever you want to give him credit for, the Hitman definitely deserves his props.