Gang Starr always looked at rap as a problem to be solved. The Brooklyn-based duo of Guru and DJ Premier started with a sort of ideal vision of rap-- thick and organic beats and smoothly virtuosic rhymes-- and spent 15 years trying to recreate that sound. At their start, they identified themselves with a late-1980s/early-90s jazz-rap vanguard; witness the obsessively namedroppy early single "Jazz Thing", not included on this best-of. Before long, though, their jazz influence faded into the background, returning to front-and-center only on Guru's Jazzmatazz side project. Instead, Premier internalized that jazz influence, filing it alongside funk and film soundtracks for use in his sonic template, a warm but choppy classicist boom-bap that's barely changed in the past 18 years. Gang Starr's 1989 single "Manifest", with its itchy bongos and guitar ripples, might be slightly busier and less assured than their 2003 single "Skills", but the two songs could've still come out a week apart. Gang Starr arrived so fully formed that they never needed to evolve; fittingly, Mass Appeal ignores chronology, hitting shuffle on a blissfully consistent body of work.
Mass Appeal is Gang Starr's second best-of, following the excellent 1999 2xCD Full Clip, which is still in print. The new collection includes some lukewarm rarities and rescues a couple of tracks from the spotty 2003 album The Ownerz, but all of Mass Appeal's best tracks were already on Full Clip, and Mass Appeal's single-disc constraints make for a couple of puzzling exclusions: no "You Know My Steez"? There's also a DVD that collects the music videos, which would be awesome if YouTube didn't exist. Still, Mass Appeal makes for a deeply satisfying end-to-end listen, an hour-long submersion into the group's dusty warmth.
A huge part of Mass Appeal's listenablility is the thick, intuitive chemistry between Guru and Premier, two artists who always highlighted each other's strengths. Premier is one of rap's great producers, a staunch fundamentalist who stayed within his genre's self-imposed constraints and used them to test his own inventiveness, transforming his looped breakbeats and mutilated samples into intricately layered symphonies of rhythm.
Premier has done great work with half of the greatest figures in rap history, but titans like Biggie and Jay-Z have always tended to fight against his float, going for booming dominance instead of crackly lilt. With Guru, he had a partner who knew how to step into the background and let his calm monotone blend in with the beats. Guru's voice is smooth and natural enough to bring an easy authority to even his most awkward and convoluted lines ("like Tom Hanks I earn long bank and cast you away"). The two of them worked up a formula with plenty of room for subtle variations. When Guru rapped about relationships, as on the breakup lament "Ex-Girl to the Next Girl", Premier let a little more melody creep into his basslines, giving a certain pathos to Guru's conversational candor: "Her thoughts were erratic, sporadic, crazy in nature/ I told her, 'Hey look, yo, I can no longer date ya.'" And when Guru rapped about violence, as on the nightclub-shooting story "Soliloquy of Chaos", Premier's loops took on a frantic, claustrophobic edge.
Another great thing about the Gang Starr formula: Guru's voice was so flat and relaxed that it highlighted the peculiarities of every guest rapper who ever appeared on a Gang Starr track, making for some amazing collaborations. On the party-jam "DWYCK", Nice and Smooth take their cartoonish goofiness to insane highs. On "Militia", Guru's unflappability beautifully offsets the terrifying bluster of an on-fire Freddie Foxxx. And on "Above the Clouds", even Wu-Tang journeyman Inspectah Deck pulses with adrenaline. Those guest spots poke quick, ecstatic holes in the lush, controlled spell that Guru and Premier cast, but they can't break it: When those two guys were locked in together, everything complemented everything else.
