R&B Producer Combines Ivy-League Pomposity With Music-Biz Preposterousness

It’s a shame that R&B producer and songwriter Ryan Leslie (pictured here with Cassie, his big discovery) comes off as just another self-promoting putz in this recent New York Magazine profile; when we first heard some of the tracks from his still-unreleased album Just Right, we had high hopes for him. But this guy’s ego is seriously overfed, as evidenced by some of these choice quotes:

“I think I’m over being a producer,” he says. “I should just be an executive-slash-visionary. The Puffy formula.”

“I’m just trying to polish my natural talent,” he says. “It’s like a diamond–it’s already a diamond, but if you polish it, then it really pops.”

“The biggest thing to come out of that meeting,” Leslie tells me later, “is that apparently I’m now getting put on a level with [Timbaland and Babyface]. That’s huge.”

Such words of wisdom–and from a Harvard grad, no less! Call us old-fashioned, but we miss the old-school music producers, who would rather sprinkle angel dust in the mixer board and re-record the same snare drum over and over again than worry about launching a sneaker line.

The Perfect Score [New York]