And he just did it through the whole song. Cause "The World is Yours" already had me open, like I said, I was there for that, to watch Pete lay the scratches, like just hit record. We were like, 'Where the fuck did he?' I didn't know who the Heath Brothers were at that time, and I was like damn it. He said, it's just pause mixed right now, but he's programming the drum machine. He said, 'Yo, pop this cassette in.' And Q-Tip just gave me this joint. So it was like dropping him off was no big deal. Me, Big we were all hanging, all the time, cause I lived in Big's neighborhood. Can you give me a ride? I was like, 'yeah.' Cause we were all hanging out in '94. To Premier, it's just his life.ĭJ Premier: He said 'Yo, I got to go to Puff's studio. And Nas needed a ride to the studio and he played me this demo beat that Q-tip had for "One Love." So I knew that I had to up my game and I went back and I made "New York State of Mind."' I mean, this is Mount Olympus stuff to us fans. 'Yeah, me, and Nas, and Big were all hanging out at that time. And before you know it you're in the middle of some story that literally feels like hip-hop history is playing out. I mean, you only have to ask him about how he made "New York State of Mind" for Nas, one of the hardest beats of all time.
He was a very big part of Watch the Sound, the music doc series I hosted and co-created for Apple TV.īut I still can't help the super-fan part in me from geeking out when I'm in the presence of this master.
We've crossed paths quite a bit over the past few years. It's a fantastic picture, and I highly recommend Googling it. You can't believe these three people were in the same place at the same time. The cover itself is so remarkable it almost seems photoshopped. It was a joint feature with Zack de la Rocha of Rage Against The Machine, and Rev. In fact, it was issue number two, winter, 1999. Premier graced the cover of The FADER very early on. He was the go-to hitman when you needed that gutter song that somehow could also play in the club and on the radio. Then as an outside gun for hire, he gave Nas, Biggie, Rakim, KRS, Jay-Z, some of their greatest records ever, and certainly their grimiest. Premier's musical evolution, album to album, being a huge part of that. And album by album they cemented their reputation as one of the greatest rap groups of all time. Premier came into the game in the late eighties with the rapper Guru and they formed the group Gang Starr. That beat that I talk over at the beginning of each episode, that is a DJ Premier beat.
His sound has been imitated innumerable times, but it's never the same as the real thing. A few words from Erykah Badu here, a couple of lines from Wu Tang and voila he would make some iconic, Mos Def chorus. Iconic choruses he would construct from impeccably scratching snippets of other voices, stringing together the phrases like some kind of musical ransom note. Rugged drums, rare samples chopped up in his MPC drum machine, and replayed in his signature field.
He single-handedly changed the sound of New York rap in the nineties with his signature boom-bap style.
All I knew how to do was emulate this man, because like millions of hip-hop heads, I was in love with his beats. He's my favorite hip-hop producer of all time, and in fact, for the first 10 years of my career, I was just a straight DJ Premier clone. Actually, just music history in general and it would also be impossible for me to overstate the importance of his musical influence on my own career. It's impossible to overstate his importance to hip-hop history.