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this episode is brought to you by Ground News In a world where the same story gets spun a hundred different ways, how do you know what's actually happening? That's the challenge. Ground News solves Ground News isn't a news publisher. It's an app and website that shows you how every story is being covered across the political spectrum and around the world. Take the recent Supreme Court hearing on social media Age verification. Many sources covered it, but the headlines tell vastly different stories on Ground News. You can swipe through each headline and see context about the source, such as its political bias, how reliable the reporting is, and who owns them. Ground News empowers you to figure out what's really going on. That's the kind of critical thinking TED champions exploring multiple perspectives before drawing your own conclusions. Right now, ted listeners get 40% off the vantage subscription. For unlimited access, just go to groundnews.com talks that's groundnews.com talks code talks for 40% off. You can only get this limited time offer by using our link. See the full picture. Visit groundnews.com talks today. This episode is brought to you by Dell. Have you been waiting for the perfect time to upgrade your tech? Good news, the wait is over. Dell Tech Days annual sales event is here and they're celebrating their best customers with fantastic deals on the latest PCs like the Dell 14 plus with Intel Core Ultra processors. They've also got incredible perks like Dell Rewards, fast free shipping, premium support, Price match guarantee, and more. And while you're upgrading your PC, you may as well go all out because they're also offering huge deals on their premium suite of monitors and accessories. You know what that means? That's right. You can get a whole new setup with amazing savings. Clearly this is a sale you don't want to miss. Visit Dell.com deals that's Dell.com deals. You're listening to TED Talks Daily where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hume for music mogul Jermaine Dupri, who you might know as the producer behind hits like Mariah Carey's We Belong Together and Usher's Nice and Slow. The magic of producing music is that you always start with nothing but the seed of an idea, and yet you're able to build a song that people can feel and connect with. Tremaine took to the TED stage for a rapid fire Q and A style talk to share his creative process and why the city that shaped him, Atlanta, Georgia, in the US Matters so much to his work.
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Who here is not from Atlanta? Okay, well, welcome to Atlanta. Let's get started. What do I love most about producing? It's almost like having a baby for me. Like, you go in the studio and it's not an idea that, you know, most people be looking around the studio trying to figure out what we gonna do, and then we get an idea, and then we start making that idea come to life. And depending on how long it takes, you know, sometimes it take five minutes, sometimes it take two days to get this. But it's still. It's like making a baby, and. Well, it's not like making a baby, but you know what I'm saying? Yeah. So. But yeah, that's what it feels like, though. It's like, that's how I feel when I make music. I watch it go from, you know, nothing to something, and then I give it to you guys, and then you all have to digest it. So it's a trying process. But that's the one thing that I love about watching, you know, watching it grow from the bottom up. So that's my first little question. How has Atlanta played a role in my success? Well, I'm from College Park. Who's from Atlanta here? All right, all right. For anybody that's not from Atlanta, that's the south side. That's where I come from. And I feel like Atlanta, when I first started making music with Kris Kross and Even earlier in 91, 92, the whole city was building at this time. The music scene prior to me was here. We had, like, SOS Band, Brick, Pevo Bryson. Y' all know who that. Y' all know who I'm talking about. Okay. All right. Make sure. Okay. So we had a cool music scene here, but it still was, you know, in the birth. And I just feel like my success came with the growth of this city. That's why I feel like I'm the mayor. I am the mayor, but, yeah, but, yeah, I feel like people watch me Grow. And they watch the city grow. And they came to the city. And that's why I created welcome to Atlanta. Because I felt like I saw people taking other cities more serious than this city. They used to have this shirt, and they used to have hats and all of this. They would have Detroit, L.A. tokyo, and London. Y' all remember these shirts? Oh, y' all don't? Okay, maybe I'm older than all of y'.
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All.
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Damn. Okay. Well, anyway, they had these shirts that they used to sell at the airport, and they used to say this. And I used to go through the airport, and I see these shirts all the time. Like, damn, why they don't have. Like, why they don't put Atlanta on these shirts? And it felt like. It just felt like the city wasn't doing what it needed to do. So I just kept pushing, working, trying to create artists and create music and bring more and more people to the city and show how beautiful this city is. And so I'm happy to see everybody here today. Cause this is what I wanted. I wanted this. So that's that. What's my formula for making songs? Anybody in here that want to make music? Oh, over here on the left side, somebody's screaming. Okay, so my idea of making music is that once you get a hit, you have to follow whatever it was that you did to get to that hit. So, like, the first time that I did jump, I. I don't know how I made it, but I made it, and you guys liked it. And then I started tracing back what I did to get to that song, and I realized that, you know, you can't. I couldn't really just, like, do exactly what I did to get to that song. But I had to find the little different things that the crowd liked or the people liked or what it was, what was really, really interesting about the song. So, say, for instance, like, with jump the hook over and over again, Mack Daddy will make you see what I'm saying. See? Yeah. So what I had to figure out is how do I make other songs that have that same lasting impression on people? And you have to. You have to. It's almost like baking a cake. I know I keep saying babies and baking cakes, but anyway, yeah, it's like, this is really like baking a cake. Because when you bake a cake, every time you bake the cake, you do basically the same things. Whether you put different icing on the cake, whether it's a lemon cake or it's a, you know, red velvet cake, whatever it is, you go into baking that cake the same. And for me, when I go in the studio without me telling the people that I'm in the studio with, I basically do some of the same things over and over again. I'm gonna give you an example. I had a little song that came out last year called Made for Me that was by Money Long. Y' all know that song? Okay, yeah, it won a Grammy or something like that. But yeah. And in making the song, she called me one day and she was like, jermaine, I think we made the song prior in the studio. And she was like, jermaine, I think the beat needs to have a little bit more bounce to it. Now, my initial making of the Beat, I didn't put this bounce that she's talking about in the record just because I don't try to make all my records sound the same. But I was watching TikTok when she sent a message to me, and I saw that they took. They did a mashup of Mariah Carey and this group, this artist named Yeet, and they put Yeet over top of We Belong Together. And these kids was dancing to the beat. And I'm like, oh, okay. These people always try to make me seem like I'm old, but they got these young kids dancing to my beat. So I'm like, okay. So they like the beat. They love the beat. So then I started thinking about why everybody loves the Mariah Carey record beat and what I did to the beat and. And what the hi hats was doing in that beat. I said, okay, I'm gonna take that same thing and I'm gonna put it in Made for Me. And sure enough, it became a number one record. It sounds easy, it's not easy, but it's just like making a cake. Like I said, it's just something that you have to put in there. And if you see it happen one time, it can happen again. You just have to know how to grab it and catch it. I'm pretty good at that. All right. How do I know what's cool? I'm gonna say I don't. I'm gonna say that I don't. I don't know what's cool. I just try things. So if you go back to, like, crisscross, and I had one day, one of the Chris's came to my house and he had a jumper on, a Jabot jumper. And the jumper was bigger than me, right? And you could basically turn yourself around inside the jumper. And I said, you should put it on backwards. And, you know, he looked at me like what's wrong with you? And the other Chris looked at me like, yeah, what's wrong with you? And I was like, just do it. Why don't you do it? Why not, right? And this was before jump came out. And I was like, you just put it on backwards. And, you know, I don't know why he did it, but he did it. And I said, let's go to the mall. And we went to Lenny Square. And when we walked through Lenny Square, I kid you not, the whole mall seemed like they saw something that they'd never seen before. And I was amazed because I'm like, this ain't nothing. But he just put his ch jumper on backwards. But what I learned in that process was that it was the coolest thing that they had ever seen in their life. So to answer your question, I don't know, but I'll try something that I don't believe somebody else is doing, and it normally or it turns out to be the coolest thing, you know. All right, thank you. What's next? What song do I want y' all to remember me for? Oh, what a song. Let me think about this. I could say I ain't made it yet, but I'm good. I will say I'm going to say we Belong Together because it was the song of the decade. And it's like, when you go in the studio and make music, that's one of the things you do not forecast. I'm going to make a song that's gonna become song of the decade. That sounds crazy, right? So I would say we Belong Together. All right. All right. Here's my lightning round. Hip hop or R and B. A fun fact is that I'm a real hip hop guy. I started out breakdancing. I hated R and B music, so I'm gonna go with hip hop. Working with legends all or rising stars, I would say new stars would be my answer. Legends always got ego reality TV or DOC docs, because I have a new documentary. It's called Magic City. It's on Starz. Yeah. All right. Rhythm of melody. I'm gonna go with the melody. Or depending on whatever I'm drinking that night, it might be the rhythm, but the melody most of the time. Oh, who mentored me now? I was mentored, I'm sure, by my father, but not really mentored for the music business, just more or less showing me around and showing me how to be. And then I started watching other people from afar, like Teddy Riley, Quincy Jones, Barry Gordy, Andre Harrell, Russell Simmons, all of these guys, I just watched them from afar and they basically are the ones that mentored me without me actually talking to them. I am a person that usually forecasts things that I want to see happen in my life. And I saw this on YouTube one day, people up on stage talking at TED Talk. And I was like, I'm going to do that. And I'm here. Thank you.
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That was Jermaine Dupre speaking at ted next in 2025. If you're curious about Ted's curation, find out more@ted.com curationguidelines and and that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact checked by the TED research team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Greene, Lucy Little and Tansika Songmanivong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Faizy Bogan. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Balarazo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.
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Hi, this is Hannah Berner, co host of Gigli Squad. Let's be honest, we've all done things in our lives that may have just followed the crowd, like drinking Matcha, even if you think it tastes like grass. Or pretending skinny jeans were actually comfortable. Have we been doing the same thing with Zero Sugar Cola? Last year, people across America took the Pepsi Challenge. No labels, no bias, no judged on taste alone. 66% of participants agreed Pepsi Zero Sugar tastes better than Coke Zero Sugar and Pepsi Zero Sugar won in every single market. Go out and try Pepsi Zero Sugar today. You deserve taste. You deserve Pepsi.
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