The one Gang Starr song that was recorded as a joke
‘Mass Appeal’ is vintage Gang Starr. One of the singles from their 1994 album Hard to Earn, the track showcased the duo at their very best: Guru’s clever, catchy rapping over DJ Premier’s simple, tight beat. It’s an archetypal Gang Starr song, but, remarkably, it was initially recorded as a joke. They were using it to mock all the sellouts that had begun to emerge around them.
Speaking to Complex about the song in 2011, DJ Premier explained, “We just wanted to make fun of the radio on what it sounded like to get airplay. That’s why I made the background melody real simplistic. I was making fun of the radio, but I’m going to make a funky version of making fun of it.”
The specific impetus for the track was that the duo’s label, around 1993, started to pressure them to finish up work on Hard to Earn and to get it ready for release. But, during that period, hip-hop had started trying to appeal to more mainstream sensibilities, which Gang Starr found kind of distasteful. The implication was that they’d need to conform to this trend, but they weren’t having that. “What the radio played, when it came to hip-hop, it sounded too watered down,” Preemo noted. ‘Mass Appeal’ was their tongue-in-cheek response to this unfortunate development.
Preemo specifically tried to evoke the experience of boring, watered-down music when putting together ‘Mass Appeal’. “I was looking for a sample that mimicked elevator music,” he explained in another interview with Passion of the Weiss in 2019. But, weirdly, in doing so, he actually created an incredibly catchy loop, which, in a further twist of irony, really did appeal to the mainstream. It wasn’t exactly a pop sensation, but it did chart and served the duo well.
Guru immediately recognised that the song was a winner. “Guru always used to print out track listings and paste them on the wall,” Preemo recalled to Passion of the Weiss. “It’d be pieces of paper with all the song names that were going to be on the album, and stuff he was working [on] or whatever. My job would be to fill in all the blanks with music. Well, next to the song names would be little descriptions, and I remember next to ‘Mass Appeal’ Guru wrote, ‘Our First Single’.”
Several decades after the song’s completion, DJ Premier himself could see that ‘Mass Appeal’ represented a major step forward in his development as a producer. Even when he was just trying to make a joke, his skills had evolved to the extent that he couldn’t help but make a hit.
“I really feel like at this point I was taking my production to the next level,” he concluded. “At the time we were just moving along, but looking back I can now see why this track took off. I mean, it was meant to be a statement in the form of a joke.”