DJ Premier’s favourite Guru verse on ‘Hard to Earn’
After three albums, DJ Premier and Guru were beginning to face criticisms that their Gang Starr sound was going stale.
There was a growing feeling that Preemo’s production had become far too reliant on jazz samples, and that, after three records, it just wasn’t sounding very fresh anymore. He took that to heart, so, for album four, he got creative with his beats. His new approach was a success.
In took a little time, but, gradually, Gang Starr’s fourth album, Hard to Earn, came to be seen as one of the duo’s best. Released in March 1994, the response was initially fairly tepid, but, eventually, the quality of the record’s sound began to become evident to listeners.
Hard to Earn is something of a hip-hop classic now, so much so that, in 2019, Billboard felt sufficiently moved to speak with Preemo to mark the album’s 25-year anniversary. Among other topics, the interviewer asked him what his favourite verse from Guru, who died in 2010, is on the album.
Preemo had an answer ready. “The entire fucking verses for ‘Brainstorm,’” he replied.
Guru was in a braggadious mood on ‘Brainstorm.’ “I get down and dirty and my sounds are worthy of respect,” he begins the first verse. “So I’ma flex my text just like a major takeover.”
“I love that jam,” Preemo said. “Just the whole way he was flowing. And I told him, ‘I don’t want no music in it. I just want some weird alien sounds.’ And I always wanted to do a record where you fade it while he’s still rapping.”
DJ Premier really wanted to avoid the jazzy tropes of previous Gang Starr albums as much as posisble, so, on ‘Brainstorm,’ he got a little bit strange with it. The beat he provided for Guru is quite sparse, and a little bit unsettling.
“A lot of people were saying, ‘I never hear Premier use other sounds,’ and stuff like that,” Preemo said of his decision to experiment on Hard to Earn. “So I was like, ‘You know what? I’m gonna start getting a little weird on this one’—and that’s why you started hearing the little space sounds in the background, the little alien things and swirly noises, like on ‘Brainstorm.’”