Producers Guild is a series celebrating the creators behind the boards of your favorite songs. Listen to today's episode and leave your comments, suggestions, questions, criticisms, and/or whatever you have for me below so we can continue the conversation.
Chris "DJ Premier" Martin is a producer that truly needs no introduction, but that would make for a terrible introduction for today's episode, so I'm forced to give a bit more information. A Brooklyn-based artist by way of Houston, Texas, Martin is an institution within our chosen genre at this point: when you read his name in song credits, you know that you're going to hear hard drums, influences drawn from jazz, soul, and funk records, and multiple vocal samples creatively thrown together into a gumbo we refer to as "boom bap". DJ Premier may actually be the godfather of boom bap, his very existence embodying the sound that laid a foundation for not just New York street shit during the 1990's and early 2000's, but for the way that our chosen genre sounds even today. Premier has influenced a lot of people with his template, and while imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, you'd be hard-pressed to find a producer who would admit to ripping the man off, given just how much he's contributed to the culture as a whole.
