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NAS TRACES HIS ROOTS AND FINDS OUT WHO ENSLAVED HIS FAMILY

Nas appeared on PBS’ “Finding Your Roots” with Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and had the opportunity to trace his family origins back to the 1800s. Watch what happens when he finds out who purchased his great, great, great, grandmother Pocahantas Little.

“We introduced Nas to five generations – we’ve never been able to do this before for any African American – five generations of his enslaved ancestors,” host Henry Louis Gates told the TCA in July. “And we showed him an extremely rare document, something we’d never seen before, an actual 1859 bill of sale for his 3rd great grandmother whose name was Pocahontas Little.”

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DJ PREMIER PROVIDES ORIGINAL TRACK FOR ZOO YORK’S GAVIN NOLAN

It ain’t official unless Preemo’s hands are all over it. Check out the visual and enjoy the new instrumental.

ZOO YORK officially welcomes Gavin Nolan to the family with this ultra smooth, high tech clip featuring an original track by DJ Premier. Born and raised in Boston, now living in Brooklyn, Gavin furthers ZOO YORK’s long legacy of East Coast rippers.

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PRHYME WAS ORIGINALLY SUPPOSED TO BE A DJ PREMIER PRODUCED SLAUGHTERHOUSE ALBUM

In an interview with XXL, Royce Da 5’9″ reveals that PRhyme was originally intended to be a collaborative album between DJ Premier and Slaughterhouse.

How did the group with DJ Premier start?

We originally were supposed to do it with Slaughterhouse, and it didn’t pan out for a number of reasons. So I ended up getting on the phone with Preem and just asking him how he felt about just me and him doing it based off of our schedules.

Being sober, you have to find things that inspire you in order to truly do it. You lose interest in things, man. Like, you’ve been going to the studio for 20 years, rapping. [Laughs] Now it’s like, okay, you have to find something that drives you to the studio. So this was that thing. Any opportunity that I get to be able to work with Premo, I try to take it. I’ve been working with him on every single album, no matter what the situation is. So once we got three or four songs in, it was starting to feel like the stars were lining up. Everything started falling into place, and I’m into that. So I was like, alright, cool. And by the time we got to nine [songs], that was it. It was like, if we’re gonna do this, let’s do it.

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PRHYME REVEALS WHAT LEGENDARY EMCEE DIDN’T MAKE THE ALBUM

In part two of WatchLoud‘s interview with Nickel and Preemo, the duo reveal what legendary emcee couldn’t make the album and how sample clearances helped the creation of the album.

“The concept was to have somebody who was a wizard with the samples, sample somebody who creates his own music so we won’t have to clear anything,” Royce tells WatchLOUD.com. “And we’ll just have a project that we could put out for the fans. Somewhere along the line it just ended up being an album. I kept having to push Preeme for ‘1 more or 2 more.’ Every time we got to a point that felt like we were somewhere I felt like we needed one more thing to round it out. I started to get more of a vision as we were doing it. The Adriane Young thing was a way for me to work with him and do this project with Premier that I’ve been wanting to do since ’99.”