Timbaland
- First Name
- Timothy Zachery
- Last Name
- Mosley
- Additional Name
- Timbaland
- Date of Birth
- March 10, 1972
- Place of Birth
- Norfolk, Virginia
- Notable Work
- Aaliyah’s One in a Million (1996), Missy Elliot’s Supa Dupa Fly (1997), Justin Timberlake’s FutureSex/LoveSounds (2007)
- Discography
- Tim’s Bio: Life from da Bassment (1998), Shock Value (2007), Shock Value II (2009)
- Notable Awards
- Grammy Awards – Best Dance Recording, Grammy Awards – Best R&B Song
When Tim Mosely was growing up in Norfolk, Virginia, in the mid-1980s, his friends didn’t know he would go on to revolutionize the sound of popular music — they just knew his family had a house that was usually free in the afternoon. Classmates from Salem High School in Virginia Beach would come by after school to rap over the beats made by the kid they knew as DJ Tim. Flash forward a decade to 1996, and the whole world was bouncing to his signature fusion of hip-hop and R&B on Ginuwine’s “Pony” and Aaliyah’s “If Your Girl Only Knew.” A new superproducer had entered the picture, and his name was Timbaland.
As the Nineties went on into the early 2000s, he scored hit after hit, establishing a reputation as the single most forward-thinking producer on the charts. (His only real competition in that department was arguably the Neptunes, featuring his cousin Pharrell Williams, who made music with Tim in high school under the name Surrounded By Idiots.) Timbaland blew countless minds every time one of his beats came on the radio, which was often. There was nothing quite like the rubbery grooves he gave to Jay-Z (“Big Pimpin'”) and Ludacris (“Roll Out”), or the entire albums’ worth of bugged-out, visionary sounds he produced for his childhood friend Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott on 1997’s Supa Dupa Fly and 1999’s Da Real World. Around this same time, Timbaland picked up the mic himself for a series of LPs recorded as a duo with Magoo, another old friend from Virginia.
Timbaland maintained a tight grip on the charts in the next few years, continuing to work regularly with a trusted circle of R&B and rap vocalists that had grown to include Aaliyah, Missy, Tweet, and Bubba Sparxxx. He also expanded further into pop, making hits with Nelly Furtado (“Promiscuous Girl”) and Justin Timberlake, who became one of his most frequent partners in the studio (their collaborations include “Cry Me a River” and the majority of the FutureSex/LoveSounds and 20/20 Experience albums).
In 2020, he and fellow superproducer Swizz Beatz launched the popular online series Verzuz, featuring artists performing dueling selections from their catalogs in a battle format. And acts across genres continue to revere him for his uniquely inventive way of hearing the world. — Simon Vozick-Levinson