Hard To Earn Gang Starr Rar Series Of Observations

It sounds at once exactly like Gang Starr, yet totally different - the hooks, scratched-up portions of A Tribe Called Quests Check The Rhime, helping set out the albums key theme as Gurus lyrical jewels bedazzle as he speaks about the counterfeitunlegit type of peoplethe cellophane ones, the ones that you can see through, and how his writing is so precise my insight will take flight in the night.

At yet other times - perhaps most of the time - the Gang Starr saga is both at once.

And Hard To Earn, the duos fourth LP, is both its pivotal moment and just another typical chapter in a history that oscillates wildly between those two poles.

The cerebral, college-educated wordsmith and the taciturn beat-maker supreme werent boyhood friends whod run the same streets and turned lifes lessons into art: they were introduced by staff at a record label and their initial collaborations were conducted, in those pre-internet days, by sending cassettes to each other through the post.

Unusually among the classic-rap fraternity, their debut album, No More Mr Nice Guy, remains widely and understandably overlooked.

There are moments of transcendence, particularly the declarative mission statement Words I Manifest, where Gurus rhymes and Primos looping of Charlie Parkers Night In Tunisia end up setting out a stall for what was to follow.

Premier had arrived at what was to become his signature sound - chopped-up drums, melodic samples often drawn from early 70s jazz funk, and choruses usually created by taking someone elses rap record and scratching a phrase into a new context.

Guru more than played his part, his slurry baritone a unique instrument, his lyrics inspired by and investigative of the key themes the pairs records would return to again and again: street life, hip hop and its codes of honour, wordplay for its own sake, and respect - in particular, the acquisition, retention and protection thereof.

The second LPs sound and the palette of samples Premier painted with were much admired, and brought the album plenty of attention from outside the still small hip hop world; but they were tagged as jazz-rap, the implication and inference being that this was a group somehow more concerned with making music to be appreciated by an intellectual elite (rightly or wrongly, this is what any invocation of jazz in the early 90s routinely stood for) than in making hip hop music that the genres core fan base would be interested in.

The intelligentsia claimed Gang Starr for itself, some of the praise unconsciously fostering the condescending notion that intelligent rappers interested in jazz couldnt possibly be the sort of thing the genres usual fans would take notice of.

On No More Mr Nice Guy theyd offered a hymn to jazz in the shape of Jazz Music, a freeform and idiosyncratic weave through the genres history based around samples of Ramsey Lewiss version of the Minnie Riperton classic Les Fleurs.

Things didnt quite work out so simply - Guru took elements of Elies poem and added new lyrics hed written himself - but the resulting Jazz Thing got Gang Starr noticed.

Premier has credited the track with earning them the deal with ChrysalisEMI that funded the rest of their career.

It also indelibly inked the duo with the jazz-rap label, even though, after the opening montage of jazz clips, and despite the involvement of Branford Marsalis and Terence Blanchard, the main riff that pulses throughout the song came from a Kool and the Gang sample.

For the next decade, the record industry and the music media managed to fail to get their heads around what Gang Starr were about, the former appearing to push the group towards making music that sounded more like whatever was selling at that time, the latter seeming to get upset that the pedestal theyd erected for the band wasnt one Guru and Premier ever sought to alight on, nor felt comfortable enough atop to sit there for very long in the first place.

After the superb Daily Operation - arguably (very arguably; all their records are pretty great) their best LP - was released to widespread indifference in 1992, the parts of Hard to Earn that remain somewhat hard to like do at least make some kind of sense.

So too the depressing litany of female characters who make brief cameos in Gurus lyrics, all of whom - with the exception of the aunt who rents him a room in the first verse of The Planet - are skeezers, hos, scheming money-grabbers or just plain bitches.

Ironically, for a group who, perhaps more than any other in hip hops history, remain synonymous with staying true to the musics core values, this is the point in the narrative where they started to allow themselves to be influenced by what was going on elsewhere.

The music remained singular, the style and approach distinctive: but theyd been around a while and hadnt had hits, had seen other far-less-talented rappers streak past out of nowhere to platinum sales and international stardom, and theres a sense here of Gang Starr wanting to get themselves a bit of that.

Hard To Earn Gang Starr Rar Series Of Observations

You dont glean that this was a series of observations drawn from a life where women played this almost sub-human role; it feels like Guru talks this shit because he thinks its what people want to hear from a hip hop artist in the nine-fo.

Especially given the failure of the gambit, if such it was: he dumbed down for his audience but the group, once again, failed to double its dollars.

Premier had reached the absolute top of his game after spending the time since the last Gang Starr album quietly building a reputation as perhaps the quintessential hip-hop producer.

And Guru, who had inaugurated his Jazzmatazz side-project franchise the year before (some press ads for this album included the line You thought theyd broken up, so prolific had the pair been individually over the preceding 18 months), never sounded better vocally than he does here.