Behind the Beats: Lex Luger (video)

Last year, Virginia native Lex Luger emerged on the scene as a producer on the rise with a pair of breakout numbers: Waka Flocka Flame’s rumbling “Hard in da Paint” and Rick Ross’ industrial-strength banger “B.M.F. (Blowin’ Money Fast).”

This year, however, he’s already showed a more diverse approach to projects, a full-length effort with Three 6 Mafia’s Juicy J and the first single from Jay-Z and Kanye West’s Watch the Throne joint LP.

The young beatsmith — who, like Big K.R.I.T., learned how to produce using the PlayStation video game “Beat Generator” — expects to showcase his range in 2011.

“My sound is hard, but I want people to hear another side,” Luger said. “I got R&B, pop, everything, and I want people to see that and hear that. I feel like I could do that now because of this Kanye West and Jay-Z record. I feel like I can go where I want to go.”

Bow down. From 2010 up to now: He produced smashes from Ross, Waka, Slim Thug and his recently completed Juicy J mixtape, Rubba Band Business. Currently, he’s hoping to get in the studio with Curren$y, Drake, Nipsey Hussle and Wiz Khalifa

Rick Ross’ “B.M.F. (Blowin’ Money Fast)”: “To take something that a lot of people thought was nothing and to turn it into another dimension of sound was crazy to me,” Luger said. “The reaction from people that I saw was crazy to me. That’s when I really knew this is what i wanted to do.”

Waka Flocka Flame’s “Hard in da Paint”: Luger said he was in Atlanta the first time he heard it. “I don’t listen to the radio or go out that much; I just work,” he explained. “When I got to Atlanta, I think I was on the way back from the airport and my boy turned on the radio. My boy was like, ‘Yeah, this is it.’ I said, ‘Turn it up,’ and it felt crazy.”

Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “H.A.M.”: ” ‘H.A.M.’ really came about in New York City. Me and Kanye, we had did ‘See Me Now.’ I played him a lot of beats, but he liked the ones that I didn’t expect him to like. I left, like, eight beats with him; he called me, like, two weeks later and he said he wanted, for sure, two. That was one of the ones. … I sent him the track out. He did what he did to it, still I didn’t hear the song. I couldn’t hear it until everyone else heard it. Working with Kanye was crazy. I can’t really explain it. He’s a perfectionist. He has to have everything perfect and out the ordinary, 10 times greater than everything. He’s a crazy guy, but he’s fire.”