Ester Dean Wrote the Hooks That Ran the Pop-Rap Era

Ester Dean wrote the hook to "Super Bass." She sang it too. Her voice is literally on the track, buried in the background while Nicki's name went on the marquee, the billboards, and the Grammy nominations. That is Dean's whole career compressed into one song, and it is also why that career deserves a full accounting. The early 2010s pop-rap crossover moment, the one where hip-hop's biggest names started dominating pop radio without apology, ran on her pen. She was the invisible architecture.

Dean was born in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and raised in Tulsa. At fifteen, she and her sister moved to Omaha, Nebraska, where she started writing for local rappers and producers and learning the mechanics of the studio. At twenty, she packed a bag, left Omaha with $500, and drove eighteen hours to Atlanta to break into the music industry. She sang for anyone who would listen. At a Gap Band concert, music producer Christopher "Tricky" Stewart overheard her singing in the crowd and set up a meeting. Impressed by both her voice and her catalog of songs, he eventually signed her to a publishing deal. Before that, she had already connected with producer Polow da Don in Atlanta, who introduced her to Interscope's Jimmy Iovine. She landed at Zone 4 Records under the Interscope umbrella. Her 2009 debut single "Drop It Low," featuring Chris Brown, peaked at number 38 on the Billboard Hot 100. That was her ceiling as a lead artist. As a writer, she was just getting started.

The commercial breakthrough came when Dean sat down with Norwegian production duo Stargate, Tor Hermansen and Mikkel Eriksen, to write for Rihanna. What came out of those sessions was "Rude Boy," released February 5, 2010, recorded at Metropolis Studios in London. Co-written with Rihanna, Makeba Riddick, Rob Swire, and Stargate, the track became Rihanna's sixth number-one single in the US and Dean's first as a songwriter. Then came "What's My Name?" and "S&M," both also written with Stargate, both on Rihanna's Loud, which earned Dean a Grammy nomination for Album of the Year at the 54th Grammy Awards. At one point in late 2010, "Firework," which Dean co-wrote with Katy Perry, Stargate, and Sandy Vee, and "What's My Name?" held the top two spots on the Hot 100 simultaneously. That is a reign.

In 2012, The New Yorker profiled Dean in a piece by John Seabrook that called her "The Song Machine." The piece described her process in the booth: she would start with sounds, not words, moving through grunts and vocables until something locked in, then build language from there. She told the magazine: "I go into the booth and I scream and I sing and I yell, and sometimes it's words but most time it's not...and I just see when I get this little chill and then I'm, like, 'Yeah, that's the hook.'" That chill is what produced the "oh, na-na, what's my name?" opening of "What's My Name?" — a hook that started as a pure vocal sound and only later became language. The process sounds loose. The results were surgical.

"Super Bass" is where this matters most for the community that built itself around Nicki, Cardi, Drake, and the entire pop-rap era. Released April 5, 2011, as the fifth single from the deluxe edition of Pink Friday, the track peaked at number three on the Hot 100, which was Nicki's first top-ten placement as a lead artist. Dean co-wrote it alongside Nicki Minaj, Daniel Johnson, Roahn Hylton, and Jeremy Coleman, with production from Kane Beatz and JMIKE, and her background vocals are audible throughout the final recording. The song's opening "boom, badoom, boom" is pure Dean methodology: rhythm before meaning, feel before words, the body before the brain. That sonic instinct is what made the track work as both a hip-hop record and a pop crossover. Nicki could rap over it. Radio could play it. The club could move to it. Dean built the bridge that let all three things happen at once.

By 2012, Dean had accumulated five Grammy nominations. Her credits stretched from Nicki's Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded to Kelly Clarkson's "Mr. Know It All," which she co-wrote and co-produced. The breadth is almost absurd. The name recognition never matched the output, because that is how the songwriting economy works. The artist gets the face, the writer gets the publishing check. Dean got both, which is more than most. What she never got was the cultural credit she earned. The pop-rap crossover of 2010 to 2012 had a sound, and she was a primary architect of it. The chill on her arm told her when the hook was right. She was right a lot.