The 45 King, producer who worked with Jay-Z, Eminem and others, dies at 62

The 45 King, an influential New York City hip-hop producer known for his jazzy beats who worked with Queen Latifah, Eminem, Jay-Z and others, died Thursday. He was 62.

His death was announced on social media by DJ Premier, a fellow hip-hop producer. He did not say where he died or specify a cause.

“His sound was unlike any other,” DJ Premier wrote, adding that “his heavy drums and his horns were so distinct on every production.”

The 45 King, who was born Mark Howard James, was a pioneer in the 1980s New York hip-hop scene and worked with early rap stars including the Funky 4. His first hit track was the highly sampled The 900 Number, released in 1987, on which he slowed down a saxophone solo, “dropped the results over an irresistibly funky break,” and the result exploded, according to AllMusic, which added that the horn line was “forever ingrained in the collective hip-hop psyche.”

He also worked closely with Queen Latifah, a fellow member of the music crew known as the Flavor Unit. He produced the hit song Wrath of My Madness on her debut album, All Hail the Queen (1989), among other tracks.

“Thank you for teaching me, taking me under your wing, teaching me about this thing called hip-hop, and so much more,” Queen Latifah wrote in a Facebook post Thursday.

James also produced one of Eminem’s best-known songs, Stan, released on the 2000 album The Marshall Mathers LP. The rap, set to a throbbing beat sampling Dido’s 1998 hit Thank You, tells the story of a perturbed superfan named Stan. (The word “stan,” as both a noun and a verb, has come to be widely used to refer to an obsessive fan.)

“I took a first verse and made into an eight-bar hook for Eminem,” James said in a 2021 interview clip posted to social media by Eminem on Thursday.

Mark Howard James was born Oct. 16, 1961, in the Bronx. He adopted the moniker the 45 King because of his fondness for sampling old, obscure 45-rpm records.

His other hits included Jay-Z’s Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem), which sampled the song It’s the Hard Knock Life from the musical Annie, and a remix of Madonna’s Keep It Together.

Information on survivors was not immediately available.

James credited his production style, and much of his success, to the time he spent in the 1980s working for DJ Breakout, a Bronx hip-hop luminary.

“I like to say I got lucky,” he said in the 2021 interview, with YouTube channel Unique Access Ent. “I was in the right place at the right time.”