Guru is dead.
Guru is dead. For real this time. A month after reports surfaced of his severe health problems, a false report that he died, and many puzzled looks and angered temperaments about what exactly was going on and who exactly was speaking for him, Guru is dead. Rest In Peace to a Hip Hop icon who was at the forefront of the two-man wrecking crew, the innovative marriage of Hip Hop and Jazz, and a physical manifestation that Hip Hop was not one dimensional nor a bastard child of other genres. Guru was a champion of the intelligent cool and the responsible gangster(starr). He served as an ambassador for culture, and stood alongside a short list of rappers that you could play for your parents as well as your friends. He will be missed, and he will be remembered… But how?
It’s something that I’m sure many will struggle with. I’ve been staring at blank screen for a minute. I wasn’t sure how to start to his article, or what exactly I wanted to write. I usually start each article with an image, and the first one that came to mind for Guru was one of how I like to remember him best, alongside DJ Premier. But… According to a letter that he wrote prior to his death, which was to be read after his death, he expressed his wishes to not be linked to Preemo in any way.
“I do not wish my ex-DJ to have anything to do with my name likeness, events, tributes etc. connected in anyway to my situation including any use of my name or circumstance for any reason and I have instructed my lawyers to enforce this.”
Many believe that Guru didn’t write that letter. They believe it was penned by Solar, the super-producer who took creative place of DJ Premier and the personal space of, well, I don’t even know. But, if that is true and it is Guru’s dying wish to be forever erased from DJ Premier’s side, to be white-spaced out of photos, photoshopped out of posters, black markered out of CD booklets and 12-inches, I must ask: “How do you make such a request? How do you expect your thousands of fans to honor it?” Do we take our Gangstarr CD’s to the streets and burn them? It’s an impossible request, and one that I’m sure many fans, artists, critics etc… can’t and won’t honor.
For me, it is about the music and while I have The Street Scriptures, and “Step In The Arena 2”, “Heaven’s Door”, and some other joints are head-nodders, they don’t compare to “Ex-Girl to The Next Girl”, “You Know My Steez”, “DWYCK”, “Rite Where U Stand” and to ask us to forget those is like cutting off your nose to spite your face. This situation almost reminds of what happened when Ted Williams died and all the attention went to his f**ked up family situation, and the conflicting reports about his desire to be frozen. Instead of being the last baseball player to hit .400, many know Ted Williams from the weirdness surrounding his death.
The reports say that Guru was battling cancer for over a year. It brings up another question, one of privacy as well as mourning. Directly one must ask, ‘do public figures have a responsibility to share a terminal illness with their fans?’ If you live in the public eye and have people throughout the world who listen to your words, buy your records, and live to your teachings, must you share with them news of your own personal troubles in order to give them time as well to grieve and to deal with your illness? I don’t mean to dump all this on Guru, or say that he’s the only example of all this, but he is the most recent, and perhaps a prototype for Hip Hop.
In the end one fact remains whether you remember Guru from Gangstarr, Jazzmatazz, Bald Head Slick or whatever… Guru is dead.
Rest In Power Guru, you will be missed and you’ve left us all a lot to remember you by. I hope it’s what you wanted.
Read MTV’s story here.