DJ Premier talks about veteran artists, the Canibus situation, LL Cool J vs Canibus, 50 Cents albums, Busta Rhymes, … on his interview with ThisIs50.com Radio last night. check it out:
Busta Rhymes on the upcoming DJ Premier Remix for Eminem & Royce “Writers Block” or??
Premo keeps us up to date with an interview from DJ 279:
Can’t stop wanting to hear that shiiiieeeet!!!
Recorded in december 2010, shout out to Phat Phillie!
Last week, when we dropped our epic post DJ Premier Tells All: The Stories Behind His Classic Records, a few things got left on the cutting room floor. After all, Primo is one of the greatest producers ever and he’s just got so many damn classics there wasn’t enough time for us to properly discuss them all. However, Premier did tell us a few interesting tidbits about working with greats like Mobb Deep, Rakim, and others. So we figured we’d scrap them together and post some of the outtakes. It may not be the 38-slide odyssey our previous post was, but Primo did tell us about the time he got caught riding dirty, what he considers one of his best produced albums, and how Statik Selektah brought him back to doing mix shows.
On working with Mobb Deep
“Large Professor was working with them, then he trickled them down to me. They were little guys, 16 years old [at the time]. I went out to Long Island to link up with them. I remember we got pulled over by the cops on the highway and we were dirty, we had stuff in the car. And we thought we were going to go to jail, but they just let us go. Ironically, we just did a record called ‘Cop Hell’ which didn’t come out because that’s around when Ice-T’s ‘Cop Killer’ kicked in. The label wasn’t trying to hear it, so we had to dead that. We didn’t work together after that, but it was more so a timing thing. I actually broke ‘Shook Ones (Part II)’ because I used to be on WBLS. Mobb Deep brought it to me personally. I heard that record and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I’m going into this.’ I broke it right after commercials. Hav was making beats back then and they were ghetto. They were very elementary, but you could tell Havoc was on his way. They were very hardcore and his music was designed for Mobb Deep to spit on it. That’s what I like about Havoc: He made beats that just sounded like Mobb Deep. He just had so much color in his beats. I’m a big fan of him.”
On working with Rakim
“He’s very picky. It’s hard to get Rakim to jump on anything. He doesn’t like anything. You have to go all out to please him. And that’s cool, he can do that, he’s got the leverage. He takes a while [to write]. That’s the only thing. You have to be like, ‘Come on, Ra, when am I going to see you again?’ Several months later he’ll just be like, [Imitates Rakim’s voice], ‘Yo, G. Yo, I’m about to lay that, you nah’m sayin’? Yeah, G. Word, G. Right, right, G.’ [Laughs.] That’s Ra.”
On Group Home’s Livin’ Proof album
“It’s one of my best and well-produced albums ever. Lyrically, it wasn’t all that. But beat wise, it was. That’s what Dap wanted the album to be called, so I said, ‘Let’s make that the next single.’ When it’s time to make them, I make my singles, literally. I don’t make all the songs and go, ‘Oh, that should be a single.’ I go in like, ‘We’re making a single today.’ ‘Supa Star’ did well for us. We sold 200,000 copies as a single. That’s major. It did well for my reputation on the production side. It made a lot of people in the industry go, ‘Man, they ain’t saying nothing, but you gave them all the nice beats.’ But you know what? That’s their stuff and it belongs to them, I’ll make more and more. The production had to be well done to compensate for their lyrical ability not being all the way 100% on par. That helped to camouflage it. They had the look and the image in them. And you know Dap was a little stickup kid. Now he’s rapping, he had to learn the ropes. It’s a whole different world but he learned it.”
On working with Bahamadia
“Guru met Bahamadia down in Philly, they clicked, and he signed her to Ill Kid Records. After they put out ‘Total Wreck,’ she got a deal with EMI, and she wanted to work with me. Guru executive produced it and he also produced some of the album. He told me, ‘Yo, I need three joints from you.’ Bahamadia, she’s a beast. She just turns all the lights out and goes in the booth and does her thing. She’s real quick. I just saw her recently and we talked about working together. There are many people from that era that are ready to roll again. And if I can help them, I’m going to try and help them.”
On working with O.C.
“O.C. and me, we’re just cool, man. We went to Japan together. He had just gotten back from going to Japan with Big L. One of my boys who went to the hospital to see Guru—Big Eon—went out there as road manager for Big L. When they came back, another promoter wanted to bring O.C. back out. And Eon couldn’t go, so I was like, ‘Look, I’ll road manage and DJ for O.C.’ So we got really close on that tour. We had fucking super fun on that tour. It was one of the most fun tours ever. And from then it was just like, ‘I got you whenever you need me on some tracks.’”
On his relationship with Statik Selektah
“Statik Selektah actually has a lot to do with me getting back into mix show radio. He sent me a lot of stuff I needed in order to be back. Through the pipeline I wasn’t really savvy with the net at the time. So Statik would send me all this stuff. He gave me more than two hours worth of stuff I didn’t have on vinyl yet. I started reaching out to people and people found out I was on, and they started to send me shit. And then it just went cycling how we took it from there.”
Without a doubt, DJ Premier is top-five dead-or-alive, one of the greatest hip-hop producers ever, and your favorite producer’s producer won’t tell you any different. The Houston, Texas native’s sound, which consists of chopped samples looped over crisply punched drums, and accented with a signature scratch chorus, hasn’t changed much, but still fits as the perfect hip-hop soundtrack for New York’s Timberland-boots-certified street aesthetic. Even after 22 years in the game, reports about his production credits possibly surfacing on the upcoming albums of everyone from Drake to Immortal Technique keep fans on their toes. His continuous relevance asserts that East Coast boom-bap sound is still beloved by many, and upcoming projects like the collaboration album with Pete Rock will only maintain the flame. With that said, to the jizzing joy of those who masturbate to MPC noises, we recently went to the legendary HeadQCourterz (formerly known as D&D Studios) in Manhattan, to hear the master craftsman share anecdotes behind some of his all-time classics as one-half of the legendary Gang Starr and also as a producer for all-time greats like Jay-Z, Nas, and Notorious B.I.G. Records certainly accumulate dust, but resume of a legend never gets old.
Lol at the end, I was thinking I just watched MTV Cribs 😀
To mark this month’s 20th anniversary of Preemo and Guru’s sophomore LP, Premier provided the background of the defining duo’s first timeless full-length. Preemo revealed rarely known details about the album’s creation, including the real life robbery-gone-wrong that inspired one of Hip Hop’s greatest cautionary tales, “Just To Get A Rep,” how Preemo’s surprising Punk Rock roots affected the length of certain album cuts, and every other possible detail you could ever think of wanting to know about the album that cemented Gang Starr as a timeless tag team.
DJ Premier has produced revered songs from Jay-Z, Nas, The Notorious B.I.G, and of course his group with the late Guru, Gang Starr.
But as a top-tier producer (who just released the DJ Premier Presents Year Round Records Get Used To Us compilation album), there are songs that Primo wishes he would have concocted. Below are five tracks on his wishlist.
Produced by Marley Marl. Initially released in 1986. “I’m from Texas originally and I went to Prairie View A&M University. It was my freshman year in college and Run-DMC came to perform in at my school with Dana Dane and Clark Kent and they would put on music in between acts and it was 98.7 KISS. I guess it was one of their cassette tapes and they popped it in for the music to switch sets and ‘The Bridge’ came on and I was like, ‘What the fuck is that?’ It was just, ‘The Bridge,’ ‘The Bridge,’ ‘The Bridge’ and then the drum roll with the duh, duh, duh, duh. The way it sounded with the echo, it was just so hard. I thought it was saying, ‘The Breaks.’ I was like, ‘That shit is hard,’ because I had already liked ‘The Breaks’ by Kurtis Blow back in 1980, so to hear someone saying ‘The Breaks’ and it was ill the way he was saying it. Then, to find out it was ‘The Bridge, from there on, I was a Marley Marl fiend. No one’s a Marley fiend more than me. To this day, it’s so fucking ghetto. That record’s so dope.”
Produced by Audio Two and Daddy-O. Initially released in 1987. “Who would take [The Honey Drippers’] ‘Impeach The President’ and just chop it like that? I remember King Of Chill showed me the little trigger machine that they used. It was like the size of my BlackBerry. They used it to get it like that, the dun, dun, dun dun dun, because back then we weren’t on MPCs and all that stuff yet. The way Milk sounded on it and they just kept stopping, you can hear the next line echoing before he said it. I was like, ‘What the fuck?’ It blew me the fuck away, man.”
Produced by Eric B. & Rakim, remixed by Marley Marl. Initially released in 1986. “It’s ill because I used to love ‘Funky President’ by James Brown because I’m a James Brown fanatic and to hear those sounds in the beginning and they’d do it every time he went into another line and you’d hear that little quick drum roll, I was like, ‘Yo, that shit is ill.’ That’s when we started doing the wop. To this day, you know when that comes on everybody does the wop.”
Produced by Just Blaze and initially released in 2001. “I wish I had made this and I told [Just Blaze] this the other day. First of all, I have the original sample, so Just Blaze just destroyed that. He showed his scientific side with that record and Jay just slaughtered it lyrically, even just the ‘Turn my music high’ part. I just can’t stop just playing that part before you get to the lyrics, and the lyrics are dangerously ill. Jay always goes in, but that’s definitely one of the most incredible records ever made in hip-hop.”
Produced by Darryl Dee, co-produced by Laz-E-Laz. Initially released in 1993. “I saw the video on Video Music Box and they were just grimy. And that sample, it’s dope when you just play the original anyway. But it’s emotional when you hear it and those horns go, ‘dananana.’ They just shitted on that. We used to see The Source magazine back when they were really a hip-hop magazine and Select Records would always advertise and [the “How About Some Hardcore” single] had that cover with the knife it in. I was like, ‘What kind of shit is that?’ ‘How About Some Hardcore’ and there’s a fucking knife on the cover? I thought it was kinda silly. Then the video has the same knife in the wall. I saw it and how they looked and they’re from Brooklyn and they just looked like they could hurt something, which they do. I’ve been in brawls with them. It’s a well done record. Well done.”
DJ Premier has produced revered songs from Jay-Z, Nas, The Notorious B.I.G, and of course his group with the late Guru, Gang Starr.
But as a top-tier producer (who just released the DJ Premier Presents Year Round Records Get Used To Us compilation album), there are songs that Primo wishes he would have concocted. Below are five tracks on his wishlist.
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This article is so dope i’m not even going to copypaste it here, check it out on them site please! Props to the author…
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