‘Step In The Arena’: Gang Starr’s Powerful Second Album
An 18-track song/vignette-cycle that ebbs and flows with remarkable pace, the album represented a significant step forward not just lyrically and musically, but conceptually.
Gang Starr’s legacy is widely celebrated as an enduring partnership between two longtime friends and collaborators, Guru and DJ Premier. But the duo’s origin story was also a marriage of convenience. After founding the group in Boston in the mid-’80s, cycling through various members and releasing a handful of singles, Guru serendipitously stumbled upon a demo tape sent to his then indie label in New York produced by a talented Houston-based DJ/producer who happened to be in need of a rhyme partner. Recognizing a kindred hip-hop orphan whose abilities and commitment to the craft matched his own, Guru invited his newfound Texas counterpart, DJ Premier, to join him in Gang Starr in NYC.
Their chemistry was immediate, yielding a single, “Words I Manifest,” that ingeniously paired Guru’s nimble wordplay with Premier’s dizzying convergence of jazz and James Brown samples and signature scratch cuts. Recorded in just two weeks, the accompanying album, No More Mr. Nice Guy (1989), showed promise but lacked the gravitas of a definitive opening creative statement. For that the duo needed a proper incubation period to allow their musically matchmade friendship to solidify and complementary skills to coalesce – a vision realized with their superb sophomore effort, 1991’s Step In the Arena.
An 18-track song/vignette-cycle that ebbs and flows with remarkable pace, it represents a significant step forward not just lyrically and musically, but conceptually. Morehouse educated and a few years senior many of his rapping peers, Guru’s verses were always fueled by ambitions beyond mere boasts. And as well as Step In the Arena excels in that lane (e.g. the Roman Colosseum battle-themed title track; the relentless verbiage of “Check the Technique”), it’s those compositions that speak to the group’s topical north stars of street knowledge, intellect, and spirituality that are most distinctly their own. Chief amongst these is “Just to Get a Rep” – a cinematic stick-up kid yarn that chronicles cycles of violence with devastating detachment. Employing a near stream-of-consciousness flow, “Who’s Gonna Take the Weight” sees Guru pondering reparations, guidance through faith, and the threat of nuclear annihilation en route to an ultimate query, “Can we be the sole controllers of our fate?” Similarly straddling confidence and contemplation, “Beyond Comprehension” references cosmic realms and life cycles before Guru lands on solace through art: “Poetry, it comes from within, and will always win.”
Vocally agile and hungry for recognition, Guru’s performances throughout are things of beauty. Credit for which may also be chalked up to Premier’s production, audibly coming into its own here as the creative tide via which all boats rise. The initial success of “Manifest” and the pre-Arena “Jazz Thing” single (for Spike Lee’s Mo’ Betta Blues soundtrack) briefly pigeonholed Gang Starr with an unfortunate “jazz-rap” tag. That label is vanquished by Preem here through any number of triumphs – whether pulling a perfectly moody moog-rock loop, precisely scratch dissecting the syllables of “intellect” (as uttered by Brooklyn emcee Sir Ibu), bending the notes of a Maceo Parker sax squeal, or conjoining fragments of Soul II Soul and The Band(!) from their disparate universes. By the time Guru declares, “Gang Starr, it means a lot to me,” on “The Meaning of the Name,” the de facto manifesto that closes the album, you’re right there with them.
