American record producer DJ Premiere has officially released a new Gang Starr song titled “Glowing Mic.” The new track features an unreleased verse from Guru, who passed in April of 2010. Gang Starr is the hip-hop duo that was made up from DJ Premiere and Guru.
According to Pitchfork, DJ Premiere told Rolling Stone that he had created the instrumental for the song from Guru’s lyrics. He said that he based it off of what he felt would match his lyrics in the most traditional way for the group.
“There are two versions of a song called ‘Mr. Gang Starr,’ one version was released right after Guru passed away. The version I had stored away has totally different and unreleased lyrics. As I was constructing the track, I found a scratch from Torae ‘I Destroy The Mic for My Glow’ and it was an instant decision on what to name the track ‘Glowing Mic,’” said DJ Premier in a press release.
Guru passed away at the age of 43 after a long battle with cancer. The rapper suffered cardiac arrest about a month before he passed, which led to surgery and eventually led to him falling into a coma.
After a 16 year hiatus, Gang Starr had announced they were due to release new album in 2019. One Of The Best Yet dropped on November 1 of that year. With that annoucement came a single titled “Family and Loyalty,” which featured J.Cole. Today, just about a year later, the instrumental version of the album was released, which features new song “Glowing Mic.”
DJ Premiere has recently teamed up with Black Thought, Elvis Costello, Nathaniel Rateliff, Cassandra Wilson and T-Bone Burnett to form new supergroup called Dopamine. DJ Premiere and Black Thought have supposedly been creating together for the last year. Black Thought described the new supergroup as a “really unusual sort of motley crew.”
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