There wasn’t supposed to be another Gang Starr album. From 2006 until his death, Guru was adamant that the group was over and that there wouldn’t be a comeback, even calling DJ Premier his “Ex-DJ.” He seemed to be longing to recreate himself, to put distance between himself and his legendary partner. He was growing edgy about being asked questions about Premier all the time, and even refused to answer them. He had started a new label with a new DJ named Solar, with whom he seemed conjoined at the hip, and his death only further complicated the matter. Controversy surrounded a note allegedly written by Guru on his deathbed disassociating himself with Premier specifically and praising Solar. An oncologist testified that Guru never woke up from his coma and couldn’t have written a letter, so Solar was forced to forfeit everything pertaining to Guru’s estate. Solar later sold 30 unreleased Guru recordings to Premier—“Some of them had two verses, some of them had a verse, some of them just had a hook and then faded,” Premier told the New York Times. The producer molded them into One of the Best Yet.
While the circumstances of the album’s creation remain a point of contention, it’s undeniably awesome to hear the two artists together again. On the intro to One of the Best Yet, the first Gang Starr album since 2003’s The Ownerz, Premier turns an interpolation of “DYWCK” into a sample tour of the group’s storied catalog—“Mass Appeal,” “Work,” “Code of the Streets,” and “Full Clip,” among others—as a little reminder of all they accomplished. The diehards who have dreamt of this throwback will salivate over “Hit-Man,” a Q-Tip-assisted cut that approximates vintage Gang Starr, wherein Guru plays rap assassin and Premier adds a touch of menace, and “From a Distance,” with Guru and Jeru the Damaja barring out over a swelling Premier sample. There are Foundation members at nearly every turn, and they sound very grateful for the opportunity to be a part of another Gang Starr project. There are other things to be grateful for, too: the second Guru verse of closer “Bless the Mic,” the J. Cole appearance on “Family and Loyalty,” a series of carefully devised beats designed to salvage Guru’s afterimage.
Once the initial thrill of the reunion wears off, though the album starts coming apart. Gang Starr was all about balance; Guru’s feel for how best to wade through Premier’s vandalizing, resourceful, and visionary sample work was stunningly natural. With Premier trying to reverse-engineer that process, much of the intuition and congruence is lost. In his prime, Guru was a rapper of singular monotonic charisma. He was so calm and clear and collected that his raps were a balm, and his rhymes themselves felt like proverbs. Bigger names rapped over Premier beats, but no one was better at finding their place in them, navigating their moving parts precisely. There isn’t the same effortless proficiency in these songs. Premier does his best to make sure they don’t sound like a hastily cut-together craft project of scraps, but they are missing a soul. On “What’s Real,” an in-form Royce da 5’9’, who has become DJ Premier’s new partner in recent years, displays just how hollowed-out many of these Guru verses sound.
If there is a theme to be gleaned from these leftovers, it’s that Guru had clearly grown disillusioned with the industry and was sounding its death knell. Gang Starr has always been about rap purism and outing sellouts; a song like “Mass Appeal,” its joke aimed squarely at radio, commercial interests, and posers, set a standard for such meta-mainstream rap crit. But that wasn’t the only thing on their minds then, and their claims were bolstered best by the quality of songs they were making. Here, there are mostly gripes about how fucked up the game has gotten, swipes at lesser rappers, and curmudgeonly grousing about how nobody really raps anymore. “Word to God, if Big and Pac were still here/Some of these weirdos wouldn’t act so cavalier/We all know that the game has changed/It’s crazy out here and rap’s got a bad name,” Guru raps on “Bad Name,” and that’s the hook. “Think about it, what if bling never happened/And the true artists were gettin’ rich from rappin’?/Word to God, some should give/Let’s delete the politics so real hip-hop can live.” Where these moments were once radical, renegades challenging the status quo, they now just sound like old, out-of-touch men yelling at kids to get off their lawn.
There are moments when it’s hard to imagine that at least some of Guru’s ire wasn’t aimed at Premier, a man he’d sworn off working with in life but now gets the final word on his legacy in death. It’s no secret that Guru felt betrayed by the machine that devoured the genre he loved, and came to see Premier as part of that machine, but there’s little disputing that his music is better off in Premier’s hands than Solar’s, either. Through all of this chaotic history, DJ Premier is trying to patch together an album that will pass the smell-test, and he does a decent job. Anyone who held out this long for a Gang Starr album will likely be pleased with the results: Premier meets his standards for sampling and scratching, and it’s just close enough to not feel wrong. Still, doing a tag-team album when your partner can’t consent feels like the kind of breach of trust that ended Gang Starr in the first place. This isn’t exactly a hologram tour, but it reasserts an imbalance. A secondhand Gang Starr album may be better than none, but it’s far less than the sum of its parts, and even less than the late Guru deserves.
