I was trying to remember the first time I heard Guru. Obviously it was a GangStarr record, but if I’m being honest, I’m about ninety percent positive that the first time I heard Guru’s signature monotone flow was on “Jazz Thing” from the Mo’ Better Blues soundtrack.
Clearly, the only reason why I’m writing about Guru is because he passed away this week; it’s the only reason why he’d be in the news. Despite his elder statesman status in hip-hop, he hadn’t really done anything noteworthy since he split from Premier almost five years ago.
And to further tarnish his memory, some of the posthumous revelations have been unsavory. Apart from hiding his battle with cancer, the infamous Solar released a statement reportedly from Guru on his deathbed. The letter attacked DJ Premier, cast Solar as a hero and looked all around shady. Needless to say, its veracity has been called into question.
What’s really sad is how it tarnishes a legacy that’s debatable at best. Guru wasn’t the most influential member of GangStarr. Guru didn’t have a flow that was mimicked. Guru didn’t revolutionize the game. Guru just happened to have the good fortune of linking up with one of hip-hop’s greatest producers.
Most of my Guru memories are really “Gangstarr” memories, and they mostly involve how the beat hit me. The chorus to “Ex Girl to the Next Girl” was the part that slayed me the most. And “DWYCK” had such a dope beat with ill cuts that we wore out that cassette single for “Take it Personal”.
Guru had a no-nonsense flow. He was sort of a hip-hop Hemingway in that way. He didn’t try to impress with internal rhymes or sophisticated flows. He just rhymed on-beat in a clear, concise manner, and he never tried to go over the audience’s head. He just took a straight aim and hit the target in the bulls-eye—nothing fancy about it.
Guru was like a character actor: he played his role, never asked for the acclaim and never complained about not getting it. His problem was that he was an elder statesman in a musical genre that has little regard or use for elder statesmen. And that’s why his death, as his lapse into coma before it, was met with a relative shrug. There was the typical outpour of faux grief and mourning on the various social networks, but relatively few were crestfallen.
As much as GangStarr helped define my “Golden Age” of hip-hop, the direction of the genre for the last decade completely neutered the impact of his passing. It’s just another reason to hate the current state of hip-hop.
