As 2Pac has demonstrated time and again, the end of your life doesn’t mean the end of your rap career. While former Gang Starr member DJ Premier has plenty of other business to attend to, his mind is still very much occupied on Gang Starr after Guru’s death.
Per Rolling Stone, Guru has left behind some unfinished and/or unreleased work, about an album’s worth in total, and, coincidentally, Premier told XXLMag.com he is working on the posthumous album, as well as an accompanying live DVD. While Premier is only in possession of five songs, he says he will have access to “seven or eight” vocal tracks with which he can work his magic. “There are guys in Europe who say that they have seven or eight,” Primo told the magazine. “It’s songs he did with them and they never finished it and they said I can have them. I listened to them and I’ll make them shits sound like we were together…we will be together because spiritually, he’s with me for the rest of my life.”
If this all comes to fruition, we’re talking the first new Gang Starr album in (presumably) eight years, the last being 2003’s The Ownerz.
Premier is going all out with this release, dipping into an archive of Gang Starr footage for a DVD to complement the album. Apparently, the producer has “thousands of hours” to choose from, including video of the duo’s “very first show” in 1989, along with “Ice-T, Queen Latifah and Monie Love.”
“I’m putting together a Gang Starr DVD because I’ve been filming since 1989,” Primo continued. “I did all the filming until 1993. Then I started bringing guys with me. I have hundreds and hundreds of tapes of me and Guru arguing in the airport. Him and Shug fighting. Guru tried fighting everyone. Now, you look at it and it’s like, ‘Damn, I miss that.’”
It’s always too bad when it takes a death to revive what once was, but we’ll all be lucky to have this. DJ Premier didn’t give a timetable for the release, but XXLMag.com says it will have the full interview up next week.
