The wild story behind Gang Starr’s final album
Gang Starr’s legacy is a colourful yet sad one. The duo comprised of rapper Guru and East Coast legend DJ Premier, were at the forefront of New York hip-hop in the 1990s and with incredible sample-chopping, socially-conscious rap, they garnered a lot of attention on the underground.
The pair created incredible music, and lyrical masterpieces like ‘You Know My Steez’ were produced effortlessly. As such, Guru and DJ Premier seemed to be a match made in heaven. However, the duo’s last album, One of the Best Yet, was born out of a toxic predicament.
The crew’s frontman, Guru, passed away in 2010 from a rare form of cancer. However, after his death, a letter insisting that he did not want DJ Premier to be involved in handling his music came to the fore. The letter read, “I do not wish my ex-DJ to have anything to do with my name likeness, events [or] tributes. I had nothing to do with him in life for over seven years and want nothing to do with him in death.”
In the note, he instead named his DJ, DJ Solar, as the person he wanted to handle his posthumous projects with, despite having only met Solar in 2001 while recording his project, The Ownerz.
The letter’s validity came into question immediately after it surfaced, as Premier had been at Guru’s side musically since 1989. Furthermore, the emcee had a son. In an interview with BBC News, DJ Premier recalled, “Solar claimed that everything was willed to him, and it’s like, ‘Why wouldn’t it be willed to his son?’ Guru loved his son, and he was only nine years old. It was just the weirdest situation we’ve ever seen.”
Guru’s family agreed with Premier, who they had known for years, and, with many of their questions unanswered, took DJ Solar to court. Here, Guru’s oncologist testified the rapper would have been incapable of writing such a letter. Consequentially, in 2014, a New York judge ruled in the family’s favour, expressing that Solar had no claim over “any writings, drawings, designs, lyrics, or notes created by [Guru] and/or any recordings embodying [his] voice”.
DJ Premier was determined to see what unreleased material Guru had in the vault as he often recorded almost daily. However, he knew getting his hands on those recordings would take years, and he would have to face more legal challenges along the way.
When DJ Solar spitefully decided to appeal the decision made by the New York judge, it stopped “everything from being handed over.” For three years, DJ Premier and Guru’s family fought Solar out of court and in 2017, with the help of his lawyer, the DJ was allowed to purchase 30 of Guru’s unreleased recordings for an undisclosed sum.
In his interview with BBC News, Premier explained how he looked at Solar as someone who was taking Guru’s music hostage and saw the settlement as a payment, revealing, “I looked at it as a ransom, and it was worth the ransom. t was like, ‘That’s our child, and we want our child back.'”
Although the friendship between Guru and DJ Premier had broken down over the years largely due to money, ego and Guru’s alcoholism, when the East Coast legend heard the Guru’s vocals, he was excited. “I just knew this was a big thing,” he told BBC News, “He was doing what he was greatest at.”
For Gang Starr’s final album, One Of The Best Yet, Premier crafted beats and structured samples around the vocals. Not the other way around as it was when Guru was alive. Recalling the project’s creation, Premier recounted, “I’d listen to what he was saying, and I could immediately hear where I wanted to go with it.” Premier also admitted that cried a lot during the album’s making, reflecting, “It was more out of anger that he’s not here than feeling sad. But at the same time, you’re crying because you’re happy, like, ‘Aw man, wait until the world gets this.'”
One of The Best Yet hit streaming platforms in 2019 and featured appearances from the likes of MOP, Q-Tip and Royce da 5’9″ but the a lot of pain and anguish went into making the album.