DJ Premier - Back to the Basics

Industry Alias: 
DJ Premier, Primo, Premo, Preem

Government Alias:  
Christopher Edward Martin

Hometown:
Houston, TX

Current Hometown:
BK, NY

Birthdate/Age: 
3/21/66 - 45 years young

How you may know him:
DJ, Producer, Gang Starr

Style + Influences:
sampling jazz, funk, and soul artists
Drum Machine, Keyboard, Sampler, Turntable

Notables he's worked with:
Big L
Jay-Z
Kanye West
KRS-One
M.O.P
Mos Def
Nas
Rakim
Biggie
Snoop Dogg
Royce Da 5'9
Evidence

Labels:

Wild Pitch/EMI (1987–1990)
Chrysalis/EMI (1991–1998)
Virgin/EMI (1998–2003)
Year Round (2003–)

Production Discography*: 267
*songs produced, co-produced or remixed

New Direction - Project Producer

I've decided to give my blog a new direction.  (Why wait for the new year?)  In an effort to become a real student of hip-hop, I'm going to begin with some basics.  I've compiled a list of 12 producers below that I'm going to focus on each month.  The idea is to learn as much as I can about them and become an expert and share that knowledge with my one subscriber (thank you Nikki xoxo) and anyone that happens to stumble across here. 

In between, I'll most definitely post randomness that stays true to my mission statement: Compilation of things that inspire me, motivate me, and make me feel good.

Here is my list:

DJ Premo (Premier)

Pete Rock

Just Blaze

J Dilla

Madlib

Q-Tip

Prince Paul

RZA

Dr. Dre

Large Professor

Neptunes

Kanye

Thanks to my friends who helped me reconcile this list :)

Documentary - Life In a Day

I actually can't say I have watched this documentary yet, but I've been wanting to watch it since I heard about it last year. The documentary was shot on July 24, 2010. The premise: gather footage from everyday people around the world (192 coutnries -- 80,000 submissions), review footage (4,500 hours) and create a 90 minute flick.

I cannot wait to see this film.

Common x Cocaine 80s - Six Ft. Over

De La Soul - Mr. Big Mouth

De La Soul, one of my favorite groups of all-time, is back with another banger. These dudes are 40+ years old and they are straight murdering the boom bap scene. I cannot wait to hear more details about their upcoming album.

Dragon Blues - The Mean

My friend James introduced this song to me and I haven't been able to stop listening to it. The sound is reminiscent of The Black Keys.

iP4 boombox speaker dock

I'd like to set this up right next to my record player. I love this. (via Engadget)

DOOM - Red Bull Music Academy

Lecture: DOOM (Madrid 2011) from Red Bull Music Academy on Vimeo.

Being new to this whole music scene, this is probably one of the best interviews I've heard about how a regular song can be tweaked, turned, and transformed into an entirely new tune. Gaining insight to DOOM's creative process and understanding the reason behind the mask has been really motivating. This interview comes at a pinnacle point in my life.

I've been sitting on an idea for the past 10 months stumped. No clear direction. No clear idea of how I can translate my vision into an actual living breathing idea. No confidence in my ability to actually make this idea work.

But knowing that even DOOM had setbacks, challenges, and hiccups, I'm determined to make it work.

Janet Jackson - That's the Way Love Goes

It's only appropriate to listen the real version of this song at night. So I have provided the instrumental version in the meantime. You are welcome.

Don't mind if I light candles
I like to watch us play and
Baby, I've got on what you like

Nas - Nasty

Nas - "Nasty" Music Video (NasirJones.com) from Nasir Jones on Vimeo.

Finally a music video for Nas' Nasty, which is apparently fully supported by P.Diddy (overkill on the product placement people!). This single, produced by Salaam Remi, is part of Nas' 10th album which was previously titled Life Is Good. I've read that the album is currently being renamed and no release date is set. Regardless of the what the name is, hopefully this album is released soon with more "Nasty" songs like this!

Gil Scott-Heron + Wu-Tang = Gil's Pinky Ring

Gil's Pinky Ring (pt.1) by DJ 2-Tone Jones

What happens when Wu-Tang meets Gil Scott Heron, you say?
You get THIS amazing blend of rap, jazz, and soul. What more would you want?
This 3 track EP can be downloaded here! (via Potholes In My Blog)

Black Star - Fix Up

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

When is this new album coming out? I miss me some Black Star in my life!

Common - Blue Sky

As a follow up to my Steve Jobs post, this new Common song produced by No I.D. seems only fitting. Be sure to check out The Dreamer, The Believer expecting to drop 11.2.11.

RIP Steve Jobs (2.24.1955 – 10.5.2011)

I was pissed off beyond belief when my iPod almost died.
I jumped like a 5 year old when I got my iMac.
I've been refreshing the browser everyday for the past month to see when the iPhone5 was going to be realized.

Today, today I am saddened to hear about the passing of Steve Jobs. Today, a man that created a revolution equal to Woodstock passed at the young age of 56. 56 is how old my father is. 56 means that his kids are roughly my age. That's heavy.

But Steve has changed lives. He created a revolution. He's changed the way we communicate. He's changed our expectations, surpassing our creativity and imagination. Most importantly for me, he's changed my life. I've been motivated by his words, inspired by his story, and obsessed with his technology.

In 2005 Steve Jobs gave a powerful commencement speech at Stanford University. Below is the speech in its entirety (original post).

FIND WHAT YOU LOVE

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

RIP my inspiration.

Florence + The Machine – Shake It Out

Not necessarily "Hip Hop" music, but the soulfulness in Florence's voice is so raw that I can't help but add this to my laundry list of favorites. Like most people, I learned of this band when Dog Days are Over became an international hit. You literally couldn't watch TV without hearing the song in a show, a tv commercial, or an award show. Since then, I've become just as obsessed with this group as I am of Adele.

On top of her voice, the creativity from this group is unimaginable to me. I was literally blown away from their performance at the 2010 MTV VMA award show.


Florence & The Machine - Dog Days Are Over (Live... by Henrietta-Aime-Fumer_Tv



Florence + The Machine's sophomore album titled Ceremonials is expected to drop November 8th. From this single, it doesn't look like it will disappoint.

Duke Ellington & John Coltrane - In a Sentimental Mood

How can a song make you feel so lonely yet be so beautiful that you want to hear it over and over again?

PS: I'm looking for this in vinyl. If anyone comes across it, I will forever be grateful.

J Boogie featuring Lateef the Truth Speaker - It's On Fire

J Boogie featuring Lateef the Truth Speaker - It's On Fire by INgroovesmarketing

I'm a fan of the instrumental, but I absolutely hate the lyrics. I'm searching for the instrumental....stay tuned!

Hindi Zahra - Set Me Free

Can a break-up song really sound this beautiful?

I came across Hindi Zahra recently via Giant Step. She's a Moroccan-born, Paris-based, and has the gift of blending both East & West sounds to create eclectic music. This song has the ability to remove me from the present and transport me to a (unwanted) place in my past. It elicits memories that I have buried and allows me to actually deal with them, ultimately, setting me free.

J-Live featuring Homeboy Sandman - Fitness

Lyrical Fitness is the best way to describe this song. Check out Undivided Attention if you dig this.

Jay Electronica - Act II (Rough Demo)

My love for this man is indescribable. I've missed 3 performances of his since I've been in NY. The day I get to see him live, I may scream like a little girl at a Bieber concert.

Cannot wait for him to drop this album.

Falcons - Indian Summer

My Recommended Tracks:
- Track 1: MustBeLuv
- Track 3: Falcon Eye (How Can I)
- Track 7: Vindaloop

Which ones do you like?

BADBADNOTGOOD – “Fall in Love” (J Dilla Cover)

via Potholes In My Blog

R. Kelly - Love Letter

Looking past the scandals that have tarnished R. Kelly's career, I have a new found respect for this "grown and sexy" artist. Thanks to Spotify, I've been listening to his newest album on repeat. I'll be honest, there are a few tracks I can live without and tend to skip over (i.e. Taxi Cab), but for the most part this album is perfect to put any lady to bed.

WARNING: This album may cause unplanned pregnancies. Please listen at your discretion.

Here are two of my favorites:


R. Kelly - Just Can't Get Enough



R. Kelly - Number One Hit

Evidence - You (prod. DJ Premier)

Talk about dope videos. This is one of the illest videos I've seen. Shout out to those artists (especially, those trying to make a bigger name for themselves) spending time thinking outside of the box to make some cool ass videos.

Respect.

Goapele - Play

From the song Closer to First Love, this underrated artist is the epitome of beauty. From her songs, to her looks, to her soft spoken personality, she's the type of lady I inspire to be. After being MIA for about 5 solid years, she's back with this amazing song, "Play" (amazing video as well!!).

I hope EVERYONE picks up Break of Dawn October 24th!

BlackRoc 2.0

Be.Still.My.<3

Highly anticipated.

Quadron

Let me set the scene for you - I'm standing in line (hype as shit) to see Adrian Younge + Erykah Badu at a venue in West Village. A dude behind me is annoyed that he was forced to leave from a sweet spot in the front of the line to the back of a "mega-line" because he didn't have a stamp on his hand. He starts talking to the chick next to him and I subtly lend my ear to hear what they are talking about. He drops the word "Quadron". I hear Quantronic . He goes on, in a zealous tone, to say it's one of the best groups he's seen live. Unaware of the group he's talking about, I tweet "This dude is talking about a group called (quantronic??). The way he's talking, got me wanting to listen to them." A friend promptly tweets back "prolly quadron." It turns out that Quadron is a duo from Denmark.

9th Wonder - Band Practice pt.2 (ft. Median & Phonte)

9th Wonder + Phonte deliver on this joint. I'm not too familiar with Median but he holds his own (although compared to Phonte, his delivery verse is below par). 9th Wonder is dropping his 4th album Sept. 27, titled "The Wonder Years'". I'll be PURCHASING this fo sho.

Pete Rock - Soul Brother #1

Pete Rock.
One of my favorites to ever do it.
Seeing this man perform live is always incredible.
Can't wait for the Pete Rock and Primo collabo.

Common ft. Nas - Ghetto Dreams

"Cinderella fancy, but she still look hood...
...Early in the morn’ getting stoned
Pretty with her eyes low"

Homeboy Sandman - Calm Tornado

the first 16 bars....

Small Pro - Morgan Freeman Swag

Small Professor - Morgan Freeman Swag by beattapeco_op_blog


December 26th 2009, met one of my closest friends in life who just happens to be the producer behind this awesome composition. If you don't know about Small Pro then it's time for you to be educated. You can find his music here: http://smallprofessor.bandcamp.com/

My recommendation: purchase his albums, upload them to your ipod, be one with nature, and let the music take to you that special place.

Last Donut of the Night

Last Donut of the Night from Tuomas Vauhkonen on Vimeo.

TDK presents: Chronicles - Nas

I'm pretty blown by this right now for several reasons:

1) Just learned about Highsnobiety.com and if you are a dude, you should be checking this website DAILY! The name is dope. The style is even more dope!

2) Nas is dropping some 80's knowledge. How to make a mixtape: a dead concept to today's youth. To be real, I didn't even know how mixtapes were made.

3) TDK is relevant again.