Troy Noka had been working with Bishop Lamont, so was happy to send him the beat that would eventually become “Get My Gun.”
“I sent it to him, and it kinda happened the same was with Tyga [and the ’Stampede’ song I produced],” Troy Noka says during an exclusive interview with HipHopDX. “The next thing I know, it ended up on a mixtape. And at the time Frank Ocean was just going by Lonny Breaux, so he was just a writer. I don’t even know if at this time Bishop knows who that is on the hook….A lot of people don’t know that’s Frank Ocean on the hook.”
“Get My Gun” appeared on Bishop Lamont’s The Shawshank Redemption Angola 3 mixtape, which was released in 2010.
Troy Noka, who was going as T-Wiz at the time, subsequently worked extensively with Frank Ocean. The Los Angeles-based producer says the Odd Future singer is a distinctive artist.
“He knows what he wants,” says Noka, a Grammy-winning producer who has also worked with Chris Brown, Dom Kennedy and Miguel, among others. “He’s creative. He has a vision. A lot of artists don’t have vision. And a lot of artists aren’t writers. He’s an actual writer, so he knows what he wants to say. He knows how to say it, and that’s actually his craft that he spent years mastering so he actually stands out. His writing is exceptional, like he has a vision for who he is as an artist. I think that’s a real artist, because he’s able to have people perceive him the way he wants to be perceived. He’s honest. Some people are artists but they aren’t able to be exactly who they want to be or sound exactly how they want to sound. So that’s what stands out with him from other artists.”
