MUSIC INTERVIEW: DJ PREMIER

Legendary Hip-Hop Icon Goes Back to School to Learn, to Grow, to Rock & to Re:Generate

By: Stefan Goldby

February 16, 2012

Many emerging music producers simply aspire to establish themselves as a fresh talent in a crowded world. Many established producers dream of defining a sound and growing their influence as its icon. But what then? What if you actually do become an icon, a living legend, in short: The Man?

One such icon is Christopher Edward Martin, AKA DJ Premier (or Preem or Primo) -- one-half of Gang Starr and producer of countless hits for hip-hop heavyweights including Nas, Mos Def, Jay-Z, Kanye West, Snoop, and The Game. Buzzine’s Stefan Goldby got the chance to sit down and ask The Man himself about his latest challenge: Taking an assignment from the Re:Generation Music Project to head back to college at the Berklee School of Music in Boston, Massachusetts and create a track with the 58-piece Berklee Symphony Orchestra. Oh yeah, and his old pal Nas might just have dropped by as well…

Stefan Goldby: Let’s begin at the beginning: How was the idea for your part of The Re:Generation Music Project first presented to you?

DJ Premier: My manager, Phat Gary gave me a call and told me about Red Light [Management] and GreenLight [Media & Marketing]– two different companies getting together with The Grammys and Hyundai to promote not only a new whip, but to do a project called Re:Generation. It takes five DJs from different sections and mixes our style into the world of the basic genres – Country, Rock, Jazz, R&B (which I call Soul, ‘cause that’s what it was in the record store when I was a kid) and Classical. I guess they picked us and what we were gonna study… they told me classical.

They told me I would recreate a track from scratch from any samples I wanted within this domain of what’s clearable through the Re:Generation project. They gave me that site; I went through everything from Bach to Vivaldi to Mozart to Beethoven – things of that nature. And the other DJ’s, Skrillex, Crystal Method, Mark Ronson, and Pretty Lights went into country, rock, jazz, soul, R&B, and…er… did I leave out any? No! And mine – classical.

So basically, long story short, when they told me what I was gonna do and recreate it, I didn’t know there was gonna be Nas on it or any rapper yet. It’s just recreating something from taking samples, doing my hip hop thing the way I do my conversion and sampling and making it sound hip hop, and let an orchestra play over that and add flavors to it, then give me that music back and I recreate it as a whole piece. And that’s exactly what I did.

The Berklee College of Music really, really looked out and taught me so much. My man Bruce Adolphe, who was my tutor from the Brooklyn Conservatory School of Music – he’s outta Juilliard, got Stephen Webber from the Berklee College of Music to teach me how to conduct. I ain’t even know I was gonna do all that stuff. I just knew I was gonna make the beat and get it recreated and make it. Then they built it into, “Hey, let’s get Nas: You’re on tour on Rock the Bells, why don’t we get Nas?” And I said, “Hey, if he’s down to do it, he’s down to do it.”

He came to the studio, we filmed the whole creation of it, and it was just an ill experience, because… I already know what I know in hip hop; there’s nothing I need to learn. But as far as respecting classical music – even though I’ve sampled many a classical sample – but to now study it… now I want to go to an opera. I’m gonna still stay hip hop and be who I am, but there’s nothing wrong with checking out other vibes of music to expand what you already do and make it bigger.

I would do it again. If it was a whole new genre of music, I’m down.

SG: You’ve made so much music over the years: Even with all that experience, what was still the biggest surprise for you in this process?

DJP: Just to know that I don’t know everything about music, you know? I know rock, I know new wave, I know punk – I’m from the era of that. Born in ’66, so I marched through so many types of music before hip hop… So to now be a high-level icon in hip hop culture and still appreciate the music that got me there before hip hop even existed in the form that it’s in now, this right here lets me know there’s so much more to learn about music. It’s almost like I’ve got a whole new hundred more years of learning to do, but it’s exciting to go through the journey. And that’s what Re:Generation did for me.

SG: What are you proudest of about your finished track?

DJP: The acceptance of Bruce, my tutor, because he was listening to it and I’m watching his facial expression, and he’s like [squints] and doing all this, and I’m like, “Damn. He don’t like it.” And then he was like, “Yo. I love it. You went to this one spot where I was like, “aw that’s cool, but that’s not how it should end,” and then right when he thought it shouldn’t end that way, boom – a big giant ending that comes in to close it out, but he thought it was gonna end where it was because of my placement of it.

Maybe if I placed it five minutes earlier, he would have been like, “Yo, that’s dope.” But when he was all into it and he froze, I’m just looking at him like, “Damn, he’s not feeling it.” And then when he said he loved it from the way I took it back to a big ending, that let me know that he knows that I understood what he taught me.

And then the whole crew came to my radio show to see how grimey and gutter we get it, because we’re dirty, and they got to see our world and then see why it ended up being what it is. And shout out to Nas too for jumping on. That was their suggestion, even though we were on tour together for Rock the Bells. We were on tour rocking that. I didn’t even want to bother him: “Hey, on top of that, can you do this song for me?” But he loved the idea. He even texted me and said, “Yo, we should do a whole album like this,” which I would do, definitely…

SG: Beyond your track and how it fits into the bigger project – what do you think is the number-one reason people should go and see this film?

DJP: Even if you’re not a big head in classical music, rock music, jazz, whatever, it’s just the fact that it’s that educational to where even the dumbest motherf***er would be like, “Yo, I actually am feeling this,” because everything was sincere on every level.

The artists that are way generations ahead of us, we were wondering, what are all these electronic and drum machines? What are they gonna do when they see that we respect music on every level – instrumentation, all the way up to programming. We’re just of a different generation and we kind of got caught in their era but we continued on into our era even if they stopped, but we appreciate them so much, that it’s like, yo, whatever you want to do, let’s get it...

You want to take it back to soul? I can do that. You want to take it back to a little hip hop and soul? I can do that. You want to go a little rock/rap, whatever… I can do that… whatever, because we appreciate and respect the past.

Most generations now don’t respect the past. They’re like, “Aw, you’re old.” That’s the only ball they could throw – the “old” ball. There’s nothing else. No “you’re wack, you can’t make music,” nothin’: just “you’re old.” Come on, man! You’re gonna be old and somebody’s gonna say that about you and you’re not gonna wanna stay in the “old” box… Rock until you just don’t feel the urge to rock no more. I still feel the urge to rock, so I’m gonna keep rockin’. It’s just that simple.

Greenlight Media’s ‘Re:Generation' Music Project is in select theaters from February 16, 2012

The entire 'Re:Generation' Soundtrack (featuring those new tracks produced by Skrillex, DJ Premier, The Crystal Method, Mark Ronson, and Pretty Lights) is available now as a free download. Read the Buzzine review, then follow our link to download... Did you hear that?  It's FREE!