Review Summary: Madeleine de Proust
Recreating past events that cannot happen anymore is a dangerous move. The one major factor causing such hazardousness is expectation. You can't help but
hope a posthumous release will fondly remind you of the greatness of a past era, even though the end result turns out to be yet another cash-grabbing move - hello latest Tupac releases. There are nonetheless occurrences when such albums come from the exact right place, and that's where Gang Starr step in the arena. Countless articles already tackled the record's premise, so we'll go for a short summary for those unfamiliar with the situation. Gang Starr had split for five years when Guru died in 2010, and it's only in 2019 that DJ Premier received thirty unreleased recordings.
Now that's when the story becomes interesting. During Gang Starr's apex, Preemo would craft beats for Guru to write his vocal parts over. This time the reverse process happened: the beatmaker had to adapt to the few vocal lines he had to work with. By retro-engineering his approach, Preemo unconsciously wanted to leave the spotlight to his passed bro. It's particularly evident on tracks like "Take Flight", where the beat is adapting itself to Guru's flow by adding layers of violins right on top of the rapper's lines to accentuate his lit bars. The beats resemble - as one would expect - what the band used to offer back in the '90s. On the face of it, this might sound like a point of criticism. Thing is, that's where DJ Premier is the best. While "What's Real" or "From a Distance" are indeed typical 90s East Coast boom bap with their heavy use of looped piano and violin and hard-hitting snares, these tracks nevertheless reminisce what the genre's best sounded like almost thirty years ago. They do naturally work as a reminder, the opener being the theatre of a mash-up of the band's past catalog, “DYWCK”, “Mass Appeal,” “Work,” “Code of the Streets,” and “Full Clip” all being called in a reminder of all Gang Starr had accomplished. Although Premier's production is a clear highlight, Guru's the real star. Novices might not even notice they are listening to a rapper who passed ten years ago and whose prime was long behind him even before his death. Still sounding slick and proficient, his lines abnormally find a certain resonance in 2020, when the rat race for streams and media attention is stronger than ever. Guru brazenly tackles all wack MCs lacking any artistic consistency in "So Many Rappers", and addresses media voyeurism during "Bad Name". Sure, these matters already were relevant ten years ago, but the amplification of their impact makes Guru sound like a street prophet.
While these descriptions might sound awesome, many will nevertheless ask themselves: "
where's the catch?". The catch is that this is a posthumous record, its main issues thus being inherently inevitable as per the recording process. First and foremost, there isn't as much Guru as one would love. A Gang Starr album always was about how Guru weaved through Premier's sample work. Guru's intuitional rapping was irremediably lost because Preemo had to work backward from the bars. On top of that, while most features pull their weight, some do sound out of place: Q-Tip's chorus is anything but laughable ("with the doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo"), and past greats like Talib Kweli's don't manage to sound anything more than underwhelming. Newer artists are to blame too: Ne-Yo and J. Cole's post-Gang Starr flows sound out of place within the resolutely old-school aesthetic.
Although these are all valid points to vehemently criticize the album on, the focus of
One of the Best Yet lies elsewhere. Let's be real: these flaws are almost impossible to avoid on a posthumous album. Not all old-school rappers sound as good as they did at their peak and the newer ones will inevitably sound anachronistic. What should however be analyzed is how, given the circumstances, the record actually manages to pay enough respect to Guru without the whole lot sounding like a dirty cash grab operation. Safe to say, Premier did a stellar job. Knowing these verses were leftovers Guru left behind puts his dexterity as a rapper into perspective. Many posthumous releases tend to diminish the grandeur of the artist they are referencing, but on here Guru still sounds as sharp and smooth as twenty years ago.
One of the Best Ye’s purpose is to bring back a dead person and a dead sound to life. Because not only is Guru not part of this world anymore, the genre he represented is long gone, both the rap landscape and the listeners' expectations having changed in the meantime. We can't expect a 2019 boom bap record to perfectly grasp the special feeling the genre evoked back then, but it nonetheless captures sonorities we haven't heard in a modern record in a long time. So, does the record work solely because of pure nostalgia? Maybe. Nevertheless, many hip hop heads would say Guru rapping over a DJ Premier beat constitutes the peak of the genre. Together they bring the best dope.
