L
langs
New member
DJ Premier Techniques in Remix MAG
The Beats, the Boom and the Bap
By James Rotondi
Remix, May 1, 2003
“I would never violate the code of how to make my records for my culture,” says Gang Starr's DJ Premier, chilling out on a couch in the lobby of Manhattan's Masterdisk, the studio of mastering maestros Howie Weinberg and Tony Dorsey. “Because I know how my culture really wants to hear it, a label can't tell me how it's supposed to be done and radio can't tell me how it's going to be accepted.”
The producer of tracks for hip-hop icons from the Notorious B.I.G. to Jay-Z to Jeru the Damaja — and even jazzbos like Branford Marsalis — Premier has earned the right to tell it like it is, and from the moment you meet him, you can tell the Texas native and longtime New Yorker, quite simply, takes no ****.
And why would he? After more than 10 years in the hip-hop game, he and his partner, the groundbreaking rapper Guru, have perpetrated some of the most influential music in the genre — along with artists such as A Tribe Called Quest, Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth, Gang Starr gave birth to the jazz-rap symbiosis, which Guru further explored on his Jazzmatazz project. And the duo has sustained a viable and respected career in a business that notoriously burns out performers. With all of this in mind, we find the group casually gathered in the studio, gobbling jerk chicken, trading blunts and adding the final touches to the second single from their new, four-years-in-the-making LP, The Ownerz (Virgin, 2003).
“The Ownerz represents that people are renting and leasing a version of hip-hop,” says Guru (an acronym for Gifted Unlimited Rhymes Universal), whose lyrics on 1994's “Mass Appeal” decried long ago the commercial lust of rap's Johnny-come-latelys. Although Premier and Guru tip their hat to newer artists such as Jadakiss, Nas, Ludacris and 50 Cent, they don't mince words when it comes to the many groups, radio stations, labels and press outlets that have let corporate culture invade what they see as the sanctity of hip-hop culture.
“Rap's being exploited,” Guru spits plainly. “It's corny, and it's getting more watered-down all the time. Mother****ers can rent it, but when the time comes, they got to return their ****. But we own our share — we don't have to give it back, because we earned it. We've been here; we're still here. We're in it for the right reasons.” Guru trumpets that pride of place on new tracks such as “Skills,” “Natural” and “Rite Where You Stand,” with defiant battle-cries from an elder statesman of rap: “Gang Starr keepin' it real / Just like a gat'll do.”
If that sounds a bit righteous, consider the many exemplary hip-hop acts that came up in the same late-'80s second-wave era as Gang Starr and whose profiles have dipped well below the popular radar or disappeared completely: Arrested Development, The Pharcyde, De La Soul, Digable Planets, Black Sheep, Jungle Brothers — all of those acts are bursting with creativity: brilliant rhymes and badass beats. Is hip-hop's quick turnaround time just a generational change, cultural moments coming and going in the same way that grunge gave way to nu-metal or acid-house gave it up to trance and two-step? In a recent MTV interview, even man-of-the-moment Eminem explained that adapting to the changing flavors and currents in hip-hop was the key to staying afloat in what is a very competitive milieu.
HIP-HOP METAMORPHOSIS
Even for acknowledged originators like Gang Starr, the maxim holds true. “Absolutely,” Guru says. “You're only as good as what your latest **** is in this game. Though I appreciate the cats who look at me as a legend, it doesn't pay my bills; I've still got to spit.” Sure enough, as Guru's flow has morphed to reflect new styles and vocabularies, so has Premier veered from swing loops to electro sounds to straight-up head nods — all, though, demonstrably faithful to hip-hop's pioneers (see the sidebar “Credit Is Due”). “That's why I don't have a lot of sympathy for older-school rappers who are bitter at the game and hating on the young dudes,” he says. “I don't hate on the young dudes, but I think a lot of them forget about the history. Then they **** up because you can't have longevity unless you respect the origins of the art form. There needs to be a balance, and I think me and Premier represent that balance.”
Guru and DJ Premier (born Keith Elam and Christopher Martin) began striking that balance back in the late '80s after Guru — caseworker for troubled teens, graduate of Atlanta's Morehouse College and son of Boston's first African-American judge — relocated to New York “with $1,500, a duffel bag and a dream,” he says. After hearing a demo from a Texas group called ICP, Guru contacted the group's young producer and DJ, who was then going by the handle of Waxmaster C, and eventually the two began living and working together in New York. They released the seminal jazzy hip-hop single “Manifest” with producer DJ Mark, “45 King,” for the Manhattan-based Wild Pitch label. Shortly thereafter, Waxmaster C changed his name to Premier, and a new production star — and sound — was born.
At that time, Guru explains, “Everyone was wondering what was going to happen after all the James Brown breaks were taken! You had the generation of producers and DJs like Marley Marl, 45 King, Jazzy Jeff and Stetsasonic, who'd done so much great ****. But then it was like, you ran out of James Brown, now what? Guys like Premier, Pete Rock, Diamond D, Large Professor and Lord Finesse started finding jazz grooves that blended right with hip-hop breaks. They weren't trying to create jazz-rap; that's just the way they started using these sounds. From a DJ's perspective, it wasn't jazz-rap. It was a way of taking it all to the next level.” Guru couldn't have picked a better running mate than Premier, who not only boasted serious production skills but also was one of the few producers who had the chops to rock a party old-style — cutting between two turntables and scratching samples the way hip-hop intended.
In 1990, Spike Lee asked the band to contribute a track — ”Jazz Thing” — to the soundtrack of his film Mo' Better Blues, in conjunction with jazz-trumpet great Branford Marsalis. That led to soundtrack appearances in White Men Can't Jump, Training Day and Trespass. But as the jazz-rap buzz increasingly took hold, Guru started looking for a way to simultaneously exploit its possibilities and escape its clutches. “We never wanted to be categorized as jazz-rap,” he explains, “because we figured that if that happened, when jazz-rap was finished, we'd be finished. And truth be told, there's no one else from that era who's still around. Those are all my peoples, but I didn't want that happening to us.”
EXTRACURRICULARS
Around 1993, Guru notes, everyone was “fiending” for Premier's beats and production style, wanting to “get a piece of the Gang Starr sound.” Guru asked himself, “What I can do as a solo project that will both protect Gang Starr and claim my own turf in the hip-hop jazz evolution?” His answer? Go to the source and make music with the jazz players who everyone had begun sampling in the first place. “The first guy to contact us was Dr. Donald Byrd,” Guru recalls of the legendary Blue Note and Verve trumpet player. “And he really became a mentor to me. He put the word out in the jazz community about what I was trying to do, and since then, I've worked with Courtney Pine, Roy Ayers, Herbie Hancock and Lonnie Liston Smith.”
With Premier at the helm for several tracks and with help from singer N'Dea Davenport — the sultry chanteuse for jazz-funk revivalists the Brand New Heavies — Guru's Jazzmatazz, Vol. 1 (Chrysalis, 1993) was a watershed album for alternative hip-hop, with tracks like “Loungin'” and “Slicker Than Most” opening the door to the more mainstream success of acts such as US3. Guru followed it with Jazzmatazz, Vol. 2 (Chrysalis) in 1995 and Streetsoul (Virgin) in 2002, featuring duets with Macy Gray, Big Shug and even Isaac Hayes.
But despite Guru and Premier's many outside projects — including the independent labels that both own, Ill Kid and Year-Round, featuring artists Krumbsnatcha, Panchi and NYG's — their chemistry in Gang Starr is ultimately their most crucial and public contribution to hip-hop, best sampled on the Virgin anthology Full Clip: A Decade of Gang Starr (1999). From early joints like the funky, chamber-string-orchestrated “Soliloquy of Chaos” (from 1992's Daily Operation on Chrysalis) to the slow, Wurlitzer-woozy backbeat of “Betrayal” (from 1998's Moment of Truth on Virgin), Gang Starr has maintained a working relationship and signature sound that ought to be the envy of any MC-DJ alliance.
GOODBYE, JAMES BROWN
“A lot of producers just throw a beat at you,” Guru says, “but Premier is more like a tailor. Once you hear the basic tracks, you can already hear the rapper's voice over it.” Indeed, Premier says, his overall philosophy is “to make the track identify with the way I hear a person's voice sound over my music. I try to make the track fit their tone and their attitude. Like with Jeru the Damaja — he wanted more of that dark, dense vibe, so I was shooting for that. So I always like to really know the artists, themselves, and what it is that I like about what they've already made.”
“When Guru and I got together,” Premier says, “I was trying to make tracks that fit his voice because he sounded a lot different than other MCs at the time. I was free to do stuff that had a different sound but still sounded like a hip-hop track. I started messing with jazz samples, based on the fact that they were more instrumental and didn't have a lot of vocals on them. It was easier to experiment and try different things, compared to what he had been rhyming to, which were a lot of James Brown loops and samples.”
The Beats, the Boom and the Bap
By James Rotondi
Remix, May 1, 2003
“I would never violate the code of how to make my records for my culture,” says Gang Starr's DJ Premier, chilling out on a couch in the lobby of Manhattan's Masterdisk, the studio of mastering maestros Howie Weinberg and Tony Dorsey. “Because I know how my culture really wants to hear it, a label can't tell me how it's supposed to be done and radio can't tell me how it's going to be accepted.”
The producer of tracks for hip-hop icons from the Notorious B.I.G. to Jay-Z to Jeru the Damaja — and even jazzbos like Branford Marsalis — Premier has earned the right to tell it like it is, and from the moment you meet him, you can tell the Texas native and longtime New Yorker, quite simply, takes no ****.
And why would he? After more than 10 years in the hip-hop game, he and his partner, the groundbreaking rapper Guru, have perpetrated some of the most influential music in the genre — along with artists such as A Tribe Called Quest, Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth, Gang Starr gave birth to the jazz-rap symbiosis, which Guru further explored on his Jazzmatazz project. And the duo has sustained a viable and respected career in a business that notoriously burns out performers. With all of this in mind, we find the group casually gathered in the studio, gobbling jerk chicken, trading blunts and adding the final touches to the second single from their new, four-years-in-the-making LP, The Ownerz (Virgin, 2003).
“The Ownerz represents that people are renting and leasing a version of hip-hop,” says Guru (an acronym for Gifted Unlimited Rhymes Universal), whose lyrics on 1994's “Mass Appeal” decried long ago the commercial lust of rap's Johnny-come-latelys. Although Premier and Guru tip their hat to newer artists such as Jadakiss, Nas, Ludacris and 50 Cent, they don't mince words when it comes to the many groups, radio stations, labels and press outlets that have let corporate culture invade what they see as the sanctity of hip-hop culture.
“Rap's being exploited,” Guru spits plainly. “It's corny, and it's getting more watered-down all the time. Mother****ers can rent it, but when the time comes, they got to return their ****. But we own our share — we don't have to give it back, because we earned it. We've been here; we're still here. We're in it for the right reasons.” Guru trumpets that pride of place on new tracks such as “Skills,” “Natural” and “Rite Where You Stand,” with defiant battle-cries from an elder statesman of rap: “Gang Starr keepin' it real / Just like a gat'll do.”
If that sounds a bit righteous, consider the many exemplary hip-hop acts that came up in the same late-'80s second-wave era as Gang Starr and whose profiles have dipped well below the popular radar or disappeared completely: Arrested Development, The Pharcyde, De La Soul, Digable Planets, Black Sheep, Jungle Brothers — all of those acts are bursting with creativity: brilliant rhymes and badass beats. Is hip-hop's quick turnaround time just a generational change, cultural moments coming and going in the same way that grunge gave way to nu-metal or acid-house gave it up to trance and two-step? In a recent MTV interview, even man-of-the-moment Eminem explained that adapting to the changing flavors and currents in hip-hop was the key to staying afloat in what is a very competitive milieu.
HIP-HOP METAMORPHOSIS
Even for acknowledged originators like Gang Starr, the maxim holds true. “Absolutely,” Guru says. “You're only as good as what your latest **** is in this game. Though I appreciate the cats who look at me as a legend, it doesn't pay my bills; I've still got to spit.” Sure enough, as Guru's flow has morphed to reflect new styles and vocabularies, so has Premier veered from swing loops to electro sounds to straight-up head nods — all, though, demonstrably faithful to hip-hop's pioneers (see the sidebar “Credit Is Due”). “That's why I don't have a lot of sympathy for older-school rappers who are bitter at the game and hating on the young dudes,” he says. “I don't hate on the young dudes, but I think a lot of them forget about the history. Then they **** up because you can't have longevity unless you respect the origins of the art form. There needs to be a balance, and I think me and Premier represent that balance.”
Guru and DJ Premier (born Keith Elam and Christopher Martin) began striking that balance back in the late '80s after Guru — caseworker for troubled teens, graduate of Atlanta's Morehouse College and son of Boston's first African-American judge — relocated to New York “with $1,500, a duffel bag and a dream,” he says. After hearing a demo from a Texas group called ICP, Guru contacted the group's young producer and DJ, who was then going by the handle of Waxmaster C, and eventually the two began living and working together in New York. They released the seminal jazzy hip-hop single “Manifest” with producer DJ Mark, “45 King,” for the Manhattan-based Wild Pitch label. Shortly thereafter, Waxmaster C changed his name to Premier, and a new production star — and sound — was born.
At that time, Guru explains, “Everyone was wondering what was going to happen after all the James Brown breaks were taken! You had the generation of producers and DJs like Marley Marl, 45 King, Jazzy Jeff and Stetsasonic, who'd done so much great ****. But then it was like, you ran out of James Brown, now what? Guys like Premier, Pete Rock, Diamond D, Large Professor and Lord Finesse started finding jazz grooves that blended right with hip-hop breaks. They weren't trying to create jazz-rap; that's just the way they started using these sounds. From a DJ's perspective, it wasn't jazz-rap. It was a way of taking it all to the next level.” Guru couldn't have picked a better running mate than Premier, who not only boasted serious production skills but also was one of the few producers who had the chops to rock a party old-style — cutting between two turntables and scratching samples the way hip-hop intended.
In 1990, Spike Lee asked the band to contribute a track — ”Jazz Thing” — to the soundtrack of his film Mo' Better Blues, in conjunction with jazz-trumpet great Branford Marsalis. That led to soundtrack appearances in White Men Can't Jump, Training Day and Trespass. But as the jazz-rap buzz increasingly took hold, Guru started looking for a way to simultaneously exploit its possibilities and escape its clutches. “We never wanted to be categorized as jazz-rap,” he explains, “because we figured that if that happened, when jazz-rap was finished, we'd be finished. And truth be told, there's no one else from that era who's still around. Those are all my peoples, but I didn't want that happening to us.”
EXTRACURRICULARS
Around 1993, Guru notes, everyone was “fiending” for Premier's beats and production style, wanting to “get a piece of the Gang Starr sound.” Guru asked himself, “What I can do as a solo project that will both protect Gang Starr and claim my own turf in the hip-hop jazz evolution?” His answer? Go to the source and make music with the jazz players who everyone had begun sampling in the first place. “The first guy to contact us was Dr. Donald Byrd,” Guru recalls of the legendary Blue Note and Verve trumpet player. “And he really became a mentor to me. He put the word out in the jazz community about what I was trying to do, and since then, I've worked with Courtney Pine, Roy Ayers, Herbie Hancock and Lonnie Liston Smith.”
With Premier at the helm for several tracks and with help from singer N'Dea Davenport — the sultry chanteuse for jazz-funk revivalists the Brand New Heavies — Guru's Jazzmatazz, Vol. 1 (Chrysalis, 1993) was a watershed album for alternative hip-hop, with tracks like “Loungin'” and “Slicker Than Most” opening the door to the more mainstream success of acts such as US3. Guru followed it with Jazzmatazz, Vol. 2 (Chrysalis) in 1995 and Streetsoul (Virgin) in 2002, featuring duets with Macy Gray, Big Shug and even Isaac Hayes.
But despite Guru and Premier's many outside projects — including the independent labels that both own, Ill Kid and Year-Round, featuring artists Krumbsnatcha, Panchi and NYG's — their chemistry in Gang Starr is ultimately their most crucial and public contribution to hip-hop, best sampled on the Virgin anthology Full Clip: A Decade of Gang Starr (1999). From early joints like the funky, chamber-string-orchestrated “Soliloquy of Chaos” (from 1992's Daily Operation on Chrysalis) to the slow, Wurlitzer-woozy backbeat of “Betrayal” (from 1998's Moment of Truth on Virgin), Gang Starr has maintained a working relationship and signature sound that ought to be the envy of any MC-DJ alliance.
GOODBYE, JAMES BROWN
“A lot of producers just throw a beat at you,” Guru says, “but Premier is more like a tailor. Once you hear the basic tracks, you can already hear the rapper's voice over it.” Indeed, Premier says, his overall philosophy is “to make the track identify with the way I hear a person's voice sound over my music. I try to make the track fit their tone and their attitude. Like with Jeru the Damaja — he wanted more of that dark, dense vibe, so I was shooting for that. So I always like to really know the artists, themselves, and what it is that I like about what they've already made.”
“When Guru and I got together,” Premier says, “I was trying to make tracks that fit his voice because he sounded a lot different than other MCs at the time. I was free to do stuff that had a different sound but still sounded like a hip-hop track. I started messing with jazz samples, based on the fact that they were more instrumental and didn't have a lot of vocals on them. It was easier to experiment and try different things, compared to what he had been rhyming to, which were a lot of James Brown loops and samples.”
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