Underground will live forever baby, we just like roaches, never dying, always living. (Premo - Above The Clouds intro)
All hail the king, the best hip hop producer in the world (fuck the Rza, forget about Dre, leave Diamond glinting in the dust). DJ Premier has proved for more than a decade that he can perpetually create the most memorable, the catchiest and the best crafted beats in the world. Just peep the evidence: You Know My Steez, Full Clip, (Words I) Manifest, Jazz Thing, Mass Appeal AND all the rest. And that’s only from the Gang Starr output. We can’t forget the work he’s done with Biggie, Jeru, Nas, DITC, Common, Jay Z, Show and AG, Big L, J-Live, M.O.P. and (what seems like) hundreds of others.
Morpheus in this hip hop matrix, exposing fake shit (Common - The 6th Sense)
I can’t overestimate the ability the man has to create a head nodding break. Talking to Steve and Steve, the managers of Switch Records in Ipswich (check the website, people), we agreed that where most producers produce mainly mediocre tunes and the odd classic mixed with a whole lot of shit, Premo is the only producer out there who consistently creates classics and only occasionally slips to a mediocre groove. Have you ever heard a shit Premier track? There are the tunes that I’m not too keen on, but I couldn’t call any of them shit. Not by a long chalk.
The secret is in his craftwork - the way that the music is made. The textures of Premo’s beats and the atmospheres he produces with his well-placed and innovative samples. It’s pretty easy to find out what his sources are: for a start, you could buy The Premo Collection, a compilation LP of the tunes he’s sampled. The fact that everyone can find out what his source samples are is a great bone of contention for Premier, as anyone who’s heard the intro to Above The Clouds on the Moment Of Truth LP can testify. Premo’s got a big chip on his shoulder about people giving away his secret breaks, quite understandably I think. Considering he spends most of his life locked up in D+D studios, perfecting his next production, he’s got a right to want some kind of confidentiality on what his sources are. However, I think that everyone (including the copyright cats) knows that You Know My Steez is based on Joe Simon’s Drowning In The Sea Of Love. I’m not discovering e=mc2 by pointing that out. The opening four notes of Drowning were sampled and chopped up over an old beatbox break (courtesy of Grandmaster Flash), and the result is as far removed from the original as it is possible to be. Several bpm slower, funkier, not about lurve, a headnodding club killer, You Know My Steez was the Gang Starr comeback in 1998. After Hard To Earn in 1994, they had done little together (bar the odd soundtrack), and it was You Know on white labels in clubs that really caught everyone’s attention. Light years ahead from the layered but simple (Words I) Manifest in 1990, or the looped jazz of Mass Appeal from 1994, You Know was a chopped up kick to the head of hip hop. The groove, the ideas, the easy wordplay of Guru, but - over everything else - Premo’s chopped beat. It was jaw dropping at the time, and still is now. How can you listen to it and STILL not marvel at the skill it took to take the off-time sample and manipulate it over the beatbox?
But this is just a small drop in the ocean in the world of hip hop’s most accomplished and acclaimed producer. List your top ten hip hop tracks ever - go on, do it now.
Finished? OK. I’ll lay money on the fact that there is AT LEAST one Premo tune in there. Which one is it? The 6th Sense? Unbelievable? Come Clean? So Ghetto? Everyone knows that Premo is the man that can produce a hit for anyone. (He’s worked on a Sinead O’Connor track, y’know.)
Premo - history in the makin' (Jay Z - So Ghetto)
Chris Martin, originally from Houston, Texas (home of the Geto Boys), moved to Brooklyn, New York in 1989 and hooked up with Keith Elam - Guru - to form Gang Starr, one of the most influential and most respected hip hop groups in history. Check their LPs if you haven’t already - some of the nicest collections of hip hop tunes ever released. (One thing that Gang Starr have always had is consistency. From their first release right up to their last, Premo has always represented production skills.) With critical acclaim under his belt as a polished producer, Chris (or DJ Premier, as he then came to be known, after a dalliance with the rather old school name ‘Waxmaster C’) began creating tunes for other hip hop artists. A lot of the artists he worked with were from the same borough as his adopted one - Brooklyn. Hence high profile and respected collaborations with Kendrick Jeru Davis (the Damaja), Jay Z, Group Home and M.O.P., amongst many others. Starting off simple, and then developing an increasingly more sophisticated approach towards beat making (Premo himself says that he didn’t really crack the secret of making classics until DWYCK in 1992), it is pretty clear when listening to a collection such as Full Clip that his style has moved on over the last 11 years. Loops used on tunes such as Jazz Thing (video mix) gave way to combined samples and drum machine patterns - check Mass Appeal or Jeru’s Can’t Stop The Prophet. Then, spliced and diced samples with drums taking the fore on tunes such as Biggie’s Unbelievable, Full Clip or Robbin Hood Theory came the order of the day.
For me, although his early work was fantastic, Premo’s finest moments started with the release of Gang Starr’s Hard To Earn. This LP was one of my favourites for months and still is a classic: there are some fantastic tunes on here, and if you see it then grab it (especially on the UK double vinyl). Mass Appeal, DWYCK (with Nice + Smooth), F.A.L.A., I’m The Man, The Planet, and others.After this he moved to Jeru’s first two LPs, working with Biggie on Ready To Die and then Life After Death, Jay Z collaborations, a few tunes with DITC (and their individual members Show, AG and Big L), the majority of M.O.P.’s output, and recent productions for Common, Nas and J Live, and a host of others. Fantastic music. It’s not just production that he excels at either, as Brooklyn’s Tony Touch handpicked him for a mixtape in ’97 as one of the best mixtape DJs in NY. (Anyone got a copy? I’ll pay GOOD money.)
Niggas know the steelo, unbelievable (Notorious BIG - Unbelievable)
Premo signifies hip hop - he utilises other music from different artforms to create the most amazing soundscapes ever produced, dragging noises and fragments of melodies into the realms of head nodders, jeep beats, club bumpers. In the annals of hip hop he is a God, standing tall above others and holding the torch for us, leading the way for true heads. There’s a way that he manages to do it that’s difficult to isolate. Other producers have tried to emulate him, but rarely do they come up with anything resembling his creations. Basically, (apologies to HHC): dope beat + chord stabs / chopped melody = Premo production.
All Hail The King... Profile and Retrospective