One of The Best Yet: The State of the Gang Starr Legacy Remains Strong

Death in hip hop always comes as a shock despite it being a common theme and our mortality as living creatures. But when DJ Premier, one of hip hop’s most iconic beatmakers (producers) and one half of the famed rap duo Gang Starr, knew that his friend and longtime collaborator was about to pass, it still didn’t make seeing him in a hospital bed any easier. Guru’s death in 2010 was a shock to hip hop, he was only 48, just a few months shy of his 49th birthday, yet by all accounts, he still had so much life in him.

Nine years later, after lengthy legal battles to attain ownership of unreleased recordings, dealing with grief, and supporting Guru’s family, DJ Premier decided 2019 was the right time to release a new Gang Starr album. “I came to terms with it from the day that I went to the hospital and I could tell that he wasn’t going to make it. On top of that, I just had to make sure his family was all good with the publishing, all the rights and everything that comes with all that. We still had a brand that we could make money off and that is still important to me,” DJ Premier says.

Gang Starr’s impact is difficult to measure, not in the sense that it’s not visible — DJ Premier’s (AKA Preemo AKA Preem) skills are still highly sought after — but because their work had touched so many across the span of three decades. Each episode of Luke Cage’s first season on Netflix was named after a Gang Starr song, they’ve been sampled (officially) nearly 800 times, and the Gang Starr logo is a global brand in itself.

On the intro to “You Know My Steez,” from Gang Starr’s album Moment of Truth (1998), we hear a young Guru talking about Gang Starr never straying from their musical identity but updating their formulas. The song went onto become one of the biggest rap songs of 1998 following its release in ’97, but I was keen to find out if Premier’s formula had been updated once again for the work on One of The Best Yet, the first new Gang Starr album since Guru’s death.  “Yeah, we’re still sounding like us, the formula’s still being updated. The key was that we sounded like where we left off in 2003, and the most important thing was that I wanted it to sound like he’d written them there and then, spiritually he did. I walked into the studio with a blank canvas and started searching for the sound. That’s my approach still,” Premier says.

It’s evident in the album’s sound that every facet of the project felt purposeful from the specific Guru verses that were used to the featured guests, which included Ne-Yo, J. Cole, Royce da 5’9”, Q-Tip, M.O.P, Big Shug, and Jeru the Damaja. “Everybody that I got to be on the album they sounded like they paired off with Guru correctly, it didn’t sound forced,” Premier says. Nas was also asked to feature on “Bad Name,” but the Queens rapper was unable to due to conflicting schedules.

The process of recording One of The Best Yet was, in its nature, a ritualistic event. Before each recording session, Premier would bring with him Guru’s ashes and some sage to burn in the studio. It’s a practice used in spiritual circles and in where hip hop is all about honouring traditions and embracing the new, those small practices allowed Premier to feel as though Guru was there in the room with him. Perhaps that’s why One of The Best Yet doesn’t quite feel like your standard posthumous rap album; its purpose is about honouring the legacy of one of rap’s forebears.

Since Guru’s passing, DJ Premier has been at odds with Solar, a close friend with questional business ties to Guru. According to Solar, Guru wrote a letter that forbade Premier from using Guru’s name or likeness after his death. To this day, both Premier and Guru’s family (and the wider hip hop community) believe that the letter was falsely written by Solar. “I know how Guru writes, and when we used to live together, he’d leave little notes around the house and you don’t put ‘ex-DJ’ when we’ve known each other for so long, besides there were a few DJs Guru had worked with even before me,” he says. When a loved one passes, the whirlwind they leave behind will often cause family rifts, but it seems as though each party wanted to preserve the legacy of Guru, each in their own way. However, in DJ Premier’s words and in some way, a final line on the whole matter: “I bought the thirty tracks from him, and he relinquished all rights and why would I need help co-producing a Gang Starr album when I never needed one? I’ve got it from here.”

Premier has been a lighthouse for the Elam family during the storm, particularly for Guru’s son Keith, whom he’s been like a second father to. “That’s my guy, man, we’re very close and I used to babysit him. There are tons of pictures of us, and I’ve watched him grow up, that alone adds confidence in who they go to when they need to know how to handle Guru’s affairs,” he says. I think our die-hard Gang Starr fans get it already, I made it for them and for his family because they should be able to eat off the proceeds. Guru’s son was nine when he passed, so for him to be nineteen now, it was important for me that he was able to hear his father on this record,” Premier adds.

Throughout the conversation and just through the tone in which Premier was speaking, it’s clear that he misses his friend greatly. “I miss everything, man. Even when he was mad or drunk out of his mind and cursing us out saying ‘Fuck y’all!’ I miss that too. I’ve been going through all of our archive footage, and the other day I came across when we were in Australia. Watching all of this footages takes me back and allows me to remember all of the fun we had.”

“I wouldn’t call this the final chapter of Gang Starr, we still have a lot of unreleased material that I want to share one day,” Premier says. He believes strongly in the idea of archiving, after all the practice allowed him to release a new Gang Starr record with unreleased vocals in 2019. However, Premier is still figuring out how to adapt One of The Best Yet to a live setting and he’s vehemently against recreating the Coachella hologram moment of 2Pac back in 2012. “I’m not doing any holograms. We have years of footage from ‘89 – ‘92 and ‘98 up until his passing, so we’re figuring out how to extract his voice and to use it in sync with the footage. Thank goodness we filmed our shows because they’re now being put to use.”

One of The Best Yet shouldn’t be seen as a reminder of the impermanence of life, instead it’s a time capsule of both hip hop’s past and present. Throughout their career when Guru was alive, Premier’s production was the vessel through which the former’s voice was carried. And if anyone was ever in doubt about Gang Starr’s influence and irreverence, even in death, Guru is still giving hip hop life, which means the state of the Gang Starr legacy is strong.