DJ Premier

Bio

DJ Premier is, by general critical consensus, the most influential producer of New York rap. His signature sound — chopped jazz or soul samples, scratchy DJ hooks, hard but jazz-leaning drums, very Brooklyn — is essentially the platonic ideal of what East Coast rap sounded like from 1989 to 1999.

He was born Christopher Edward Martin in Houston in 1966 and moved to Brooklyn in his twenties. He met Keith Elam, who would soon be Guru, in the late 1980s. They formed Gang Starr. Their debut, No More Mr. Nice Guy, came out on Wild Pitch in 1989. By the time they put out Step in the Arena (1991), Premier had figured out the formula that would define the next decade of his work. He would chop a jazz or soul record into small pieces, place them over crisp drums, and cut a scratched-up vocal hook in the chorus made of lines lifted from other rap records. The hook is the Premier signature. You can identify a Premier record from the hook alone.

The Gang Starr discography is in any reasonable canon: Daily Operation (1992), Hard to Earn (1994), Moment of Truth (1998). Then the outside production. He produced "N.Y. State of Mind" and three other tracks on Nas's Illmatic (1994). He produced "Unbelievable" on Biggie's Ready to Die (1994). He produced "D'Evils" and "Friend or Foe" and "Bring It On" on Jay-Z's Reasonable Doubt (1996). He produced for KRS-One, M.O.P., Mos Def, Common, and basically every important East Coast MC of the 1990s. There are entire albums (Group Home's Livin' Proof, 1995) that exist mostly as showcases for Premier beats.

What Premier did that nobody else did at scale was treat the chorus as a DJ performance. He would lift a vocal line from an old rap record ("Strictly business" from EPMD, "This is the truth" from Group Home, etc.) and scratch it into a hook. The hook makes the song a Premier song. You hear the cuts and you know.

Guru, his Gang Starr partner, died in 2010 of cancer. The Gang Starr discography essentially closed at that point (Premier put out one posthumous Gang Starr album, One of the Best Yet, in 2019). Premier kept producing. He has his HeadQCourterz studio in Brooklyn. He has the Live from HeadQCourterz radio show. He has a steady stream of one-off production credits for younger MCs.

He is, in 2026, sixty years old. He is still scratching hooks. He is still making the kind of New York rap record that the genre learned how to make from him. If you want to make somebody understand what East Coast rap sounded like in 1996, you play them a Premier track. He is one of the four or five most important producers in the history of the form.