The new Gang Starr album is a risk-free homage to greatness

In my favourite Spike Lee movie, He Got Game, an electrifying basketball prospect named Jesus Shuttlesworth navigates numerous challenges before going pro - highly specific to the experience of growing up black, gifted and poor. The most daunting of these is a reunion he avoids and postpones throughout the movie with his deadbeat dad, played by Denzel Washington. The older Shuttlesworth wants to reconnect with his son, in a reformation effort Jesus considers disingenuous. An emotional shoving match finally culminates in a beautiful sequence of basketball, right at the end of the movie, in which Lee decorates a one-on-one battle with gorgeous aerial shots and also somber symphony. Lee is a fan of 19th Century American composers - who led orchestras that tried to narrate the scale of founding those United States. 

When he uses their sound to score movies, you get the sense that Lee’s trying to get at the irony of the American condition; designing an identity from your skin colour and what comforts your city will allow you. You also feel the different elements of black culture converge: sneaker culture, the reckless abandon of rising up for a dunk, the divine tongue of getting caught up in a loose freestyle. This was a thing Gang Starr did for kids that didn’t quite experience Public Enemy or even the Sugar Hill Gang first-hand. They kept hip-hop simple and they gave it purpose.

There is a time and place in the history of the genre where if you got a room, a rapper and a DJ to scratch the rapper a beat, you could maybe fashion some magic. (Do NOT, under any circumstances, try to Google what the difference is between a rapper and an MC - whether or not I declare that we are currently hereabouts…) With Gang Starr, DJ Premier cooked a beat and Guru kicked raps whose endless braggadocio seems quaint and old-fashioned today. There was soul to it, and not just on the Jazzmatazz volumes, because both men seemed to constantly enter the booth with the conviction that they were either about to make or preserve history. 

There’s no snarl like Guru’s, a lyrical uncle who takes your lunch money then tells you how to protect your neck from the next guy. There’s no beat like a Premier beat: that scratch across a sampled chorus, that symphonic cue for you to stand taller than society allows you to be. 

A righteous Gang Starr fan is probably the last person who should be tasked with writing an honest review of ‘One of the Best’: a record that contains posthumous bars by Guru, cameos by some of modern hip-hop’s elite lyricists, and Premier beats you can hear from a mile off. I don’t know if I’m more disappointed Guru’s gone or that Premier has dabbled and discarded with all sorts of ideas for the Gang Starr initiative - the most exciting of which teased Nas in the Guru microphone position. 

J. Cole makes a commendable effort to align his style with Gang Starr’s on ‘Family & Loyalty’, but gets a little too lost in his thoughts to stay in character. Q-Tip fits the chorus for ‘Hit Man’ like a fresh pair of Jordans, for sharing an era with these gentlemen. Royce da 5’9’’ sits so perfectly on a Premier beat, its soaring strings, its surging piano keys, you wonder what’s missing from the PRhyme records they occasionally mix together. “So underground,” he raps, “I might as well record in a sewer/ Notorious lord of the war/Tourin’ Aruba.” But even though the spell takes, it never quite holds. I don’t want to hear a commemorative montage of all the Gang Starr standards on the intro, and I certainly don’t want to hear Royce remind me Guru’s not actually in the studio. I’m okay with the notion of one last masquerade, before I revisit the anthology. 

I’ll just go ahead, then, and take comfort in the little things. That Premier still cooks a hell of a beat on demand, and that no rapper dead or alive can hop on a track quite like Guru can.

“I’ve got soldiers that’ll turn shit out/Burn shit out/ Do I come correctly? When it’s my turn, no doubt…”

Rest in peace, legend.