Category: DJ Premier

Jeru the Damaja – Just One Record

just oneDuring his travels touring through France, Jeru the Damaja recently contributed to online series Just One Record, where an artist breaks down their favorite album. Jeru picks an absolute hip-hop classic, The Great Adventures of Slick Rick. Towards the end, he also breaks down the producers he’s currently working with. No mention of that reunion with DJ Premier, but hopefully Primo is one of the artists he says he can’t reveal yet.

Big Shug – ‘Off Rip’

shug 2We recently got some snippets of Big Shug’s upcoming Triple Ogzus album, and now we’ve been treated to a video for single Off Rip, featuring Termanology and Singapore Kane. The beat is DJ Premier by numbers, but an average Primo beat is still better than most other producers. Listen out for Shug addressing that whole shady business with Solar that transpired after Guru’s death.

Lord Finesse – The SP1200 Project: A Re-awakening

lord-finess-cover1Diggin’ in the Crates crew member and all-round legend Lord Finesse is releasing an extended version of his excellent The SP1200 Project: A Re-awakening album in March, and you can hear snippets from eight of the new tracks below. Pay your respects to one of the most gifted rappers and producers of all time when it hits stores in a few weeks time.

Why we are all just hypocrites (but with good taste)

Screen Shot 2015-01-14 at 00.13.37The Music Snobs is one of our favorite podcasts, and on the latest episode, the panel of experts discuss that age old problem. In short, the issue is this; are we hypocritical for liking the music of an artist we know has either done or claimed to be doing bad shit? And are we super-hypocritical if we stop liking some artists for the bad shit they have been accused of having done, but give a pass to others, purely because they are so good (case in point: MJ).

It’s an argument that has and always will be most relevant to hip-hop, where a lot of what we like is music about negative subjects. Even the naive rap fan knows that most of what comes out of a rapper’s mouth is fiction, but many rappers would like us to believe that what they are saying is real. We also know for sure that some really have lived the life they rap about, from drug dealing to murder charges, assaults to sexual misdemeanors. Should we be supporting and helping to make wealthy a person we know has broken the law in a horrible way? Here in lies the conflict.

Ultimately, we are all more than a little hypocritical in our tastes. Personally, we pride ourselves on liking only the finest, intelligent, non-commercial hip-hop, yet we’ll confess to having many guilty pleasures, even if we know the content of the song we are listening to is down right immature and several types of wrong.

We’ll also give a pass to a work like Pinata, justifying our love of an album all about slanging dope largely because the whole thing is produced by Madlib. We find ourselves sugar-coating Royce Da 5’9″ and his frequent misogyny on the latest PRhyme album because he’s saying those words over a DJ Premier beat, just like how we’ll excuse the casual homophobia on a Tyler, The Creator or Mac Miller record. And the reason why we’ll do all of this is because we are massive hypocrites. Albeit hypocrites with impeccable taste.

It’s a debate that will rage on forever, but one that can’t be fully ignored. Most of us got into hip-hop because we were intrigued by the stories the songs told us, mostly negative. Over the years, as we have grown up with rap and matured into responsible adults, our tastes in hip-hop have matured too. Yet we’ll still regularly listen to a track like Put it in your Mouth by Akinyele or Bridgette by The Doc, or tracks from M.O.P., Kool G Rap and Biggie Smalls, where they rap about murdering people in all manner of bloody and violent ways, and hundreds of other songs about seemingly bad people doing bad things. And that’s because we are hypocrites.

Listen to the debate for yourself below, and let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Let’s hope 2015 is full of MF Doom goodness

mf doomDJ Premier has been busy conducting interviews over the last few days, documenting the sad demise of his beloved D&D Studios. We’ve been reading along with a few tears in our eyes, but there was also some enticing details from Primo about an extended deluxe version of the PRyhme album. That alone would be exciting enough, but when Preem added that one of the tracks will feature MF Doom, us and everybody else started losing our shit.

There’s many artists we’ve dreamed about hooking up with Metal Fingaz over the years, but Premier has always been right around the top. Catch them both at their best, which is pretty much always, and this could be incredible. It would also be the prefect way to kick off a year that, metal fingers crossed, will bring us a lot of Doom.

There’s that long-delayed and almost mythical full length album with Ghostface Killer. GFK himself recently hinted it is coming this year, and for now it has at least been confirmed that Doom will feature with Ghost on his upcoming Sour Soul album with BADBADNOTGOOD.

In a rare interview with Bonafide magazine last year, Madlib also seemed to suggest that he and MF are at the very least throwing around ideas for the next Madvillain project. That news almost trumps everything else listed above.

Who else is on that list of our dream MF Doom collabs, you ask? Well, some are from way back, like the thought of him sharing the mic with Sir Menelik (currently somewhat AWOL from the game), Company Flow era El-P, Edan, Ill Bill and Kool Keith (before you purists go nuts at us, we know Kool Keith was on Venomous Villain, and there are also tracks with El-P dotted around online, but we want a more significant set of hookups).

Current artists on the wishlist include Action Bronson, Your Old Droog, and the modern era El-P (riding shotgun with his Run The Jewels partner Killer Mike of course). A few months back, 9th Wonder also mentioned how he’d love to work with Doom, and the prospect of that is equally incredible.

If just some of these projects see the light of day, this could be another vintage year for good hip-hop music.

Watch Raiders of the Lost Art, Part III

Screen Shot 2014-12-07 at 16.57.56The latest installment of the PRhyme documentary series Raiders of the Lost Art is out now, with DJ Premier and Royce da 5’9″ inviting us further behind the scenes of their new collaborative project.

What impresses most this time is just how serious both artists are taking the social media and promotion, even going as far as personally setting up meetings with some of the most important companies in the world.

Younger artists know just how important it is to get their shit together across Twitter, Soundcloud and YouTube, but its refreshing to see a vet like Primo at the cutting edge too. Compare that to others from the classic era who seem to think its fine not to have an online presence, and it isn’t hard to figure out why they are fading fast into obscurity, while Premier is as popular as ever. We also get to see highlights from the photo shoot that gave us the dope album cover, again thanks to the perfectionism and entrepreneurial spirit of Primo.

Watch the video below, and buy the PRhyme album from December 9.