Gang Starr's 7th album One Of The Best Yet will be out this Friday, so I wanted to look at their career up to this point. Guru died in 2010, and he spent the last few years of his life on the outs with DJ Premier and seemingly under the control of his late period collaborator Solar, a sad ending to one of hip hop's greatest duos. So I never really thought we'd get a posthumous album of unheard Guru verses over new Premo beats, and I'm excited to hear it, could be a nice final chapter to the group's complicated ending.

Gang Starr deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Now You're Mine
2. Work
3. Name Tag (Premier & The Guru)
4. Soliloquy Of Chaos
5. Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
6. Tonz 'O' Gunz
7. No More Mr. Nice Guy
8. Daily Operation
9. Moment Of Truth
10. The Ownerz
11. Speak Ya Clout featuring Lil Dap and Jeru The Damaja
12. All For Tha Ca$h
13. What You Want This Time?
14. B.Y.S.
15. Above The Clouds featuring Inspectah Deck
16. Mostly Tha Voice
17. Gotch U
18. The Place We Dwell
19. Battle
20. Robbin Hood Theory
21. Who Got Gunz featuring M.O.P. and Fat Joe
22. Blowin' Up The Spot
23. Conspiracy
24. Betrayal featuring Scarface
25. DJ Premier In Deep Concentration
26. The Meaning Of The Name

Tracks 7, 17 and 25 from No More Mr. Nice Guy (1989)
Tracks 3, 5, 13 and 26  from Step In The Arena (1991)
Tracks 4, 8, 14, 18 and 23 from Daily Operation (1992)
Tracks 1, 6, 11, 16 and 22 from Hard To Earn (1994)
Tracks 2, 9, 15, 20 and 24 from Moment Of Truth (1998)
Track 12 from the Full Clip: A Decade Of Gang Starr (1999)
Track 19 from 8 Mile: Music From And Inspired By The Motion Picure (2002)
Tracks 10 and 21 from The Ownerz (2003)

It's funny, sometimes I will think of Gang Starr as having perfected the sound of New York hip hop, and then I'll remember that Premier was from Houston and Guru was from Boston. Gang Starr had a pretty great run, progressively making bigger and arguably better albums for a decade until they finally broke through with their first gold album, Moment of Truth, and went gold again a year later with their 2-disc compilation Full Clip, which I listened to a lot when my brother bought a copy. Gang Starr were always kind of underdogs, as evidenced by the fact that it was a big deal when they finally went gold a couple times in an era when their contemporaries, many of whom used DJ Premier beats, were going multi-platinum.

As I've said in this column before, sometimes a group having a great best-of comp can kind of tide you over to the point that you don't appreciate their proper albums enough, especially in the CD era when it felt redundant to buy both. Getting a 120-minute primer in a catalog that at that point had 5 proper albums meant that Full Clip was the first place I heard a lot of Gang Starr album tracks, and 8 tracks on this playlist were also on that comp, including one of the new songs made for that release, "All For Tha Ca$h," which I always loved. Full Clip also covered a number of their soundtrack contributions, so I wanted to include just their most notable soundtrack song that came later, from the quadruple platinum 8 Mile soundtrack.

A while back I got to interview DJ Premier and it was just such a thrill to talk on the phone for a few minutes with a guy who was a big part of my falling in love with hip hop and still one of my favorite producers, and hear him make sound effects with his mouth to describe different kinds of DJ scratches. The way he chops samples is just incredible to me, often taking these shards of 2 or 3 different records and fitting them together like jigsaw puzzles into catchy little riffs. And going back through Gang Starr's albums, I was reminded how varied the drums could be on his tracks, not just the straightforward boom bap he's associated with.

"Work," originally made for the 1998 movie Caught Up and then included on Moment Of Truth a few months later, has long been one of my favorite Gang Starr tracks, it wasn't a single but I remember it appearing on the free CD compilation that came with the CMJ issue when the album came out, and I was just blown away by it. So I've been happy to see "Work" become a sleeper hit over the years, their most frequent song featured in TV shows and their 2nd-most streamed song on Spotify ahead of most of their radio singles.

Some of the 13 Gang Starr songs that provided the episode titles for season 1 of "Luke Cage" included the deep cuts "Soliloquy Of Chaos," "Blowin' Up The Spot," "Now You're Mine," and "Moment Of Truth." No More Mr. Nice Guy's title track featured the first flip of Myra Barnes's "Message From The Soul Sisters" that was later imitated on the Geto Boys' "City Under Seige," LL Cool J's "God Bless" and most famously the Lil Kim hit "No Time." And "Gotch U"'s chop of James Brown's "Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved" became the basis of Kanye West and Jay-Z's "That's My Bitch." A couple years after Gang Starr released the album track "Robin Hood Theory," their friends M.O.P. referenced it in the title of their biggest hit, "Ante Up (Robbin Hoodz Theory)," which wasn't produced by DJ Premier but does appear between two Premier-produced tracks on Warriorz.

When I took my CD of Hard To Earn out to the car to listen to last week, I was struck by the back cover stating "produced by DJ Premier and Guru" and remembered how much Guru helped guide the sound of these records and . DJ Premier produced tracks every album that Biggie, Jay-Z and Nas released in the '90s, so there's no shortage of great MCs on Premo beats, but he had undeniable chemistry with Guru and stretched out and did some of his most interesting work in Gang Starr. Guru, the self-proclaimed "king of monotone," doesn't get brought up in conversations about all-time great MCs as much as he used to, but he's a great subtle writer who should be remembered more for his clever turns of phrase than his occasional awkward "lemonade was a popular drink" lines. I think "Tonz 'O' Gunz" is one of his best performances, the song sounds tough as hell but you don't miss that it's a lament about gun violence that considers a lot of different perspectives. At a time when the walls were starting to come up between 'hardcore' rap and 'conscious' rap, Gang Starr bridged the gap.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 30, 2019 at 10:37 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.