Wherein DJ Premier, his nose still white with Aguilerean snow, attempts, with a modicum of success, to illustrate to Just Blaze that “Breathe” needed to be exactly one sample large. Primo’s minimalism isn’t an artistic tendency, it’s a fucking fact, inherent in the man, and so what took Just Blaze a double-tiered stack of ProTools and nine Supertramp samples to create, Primo replicates in spirit with some tinkling pianos and synthesized horn blasts; it’s all kick drum after that, syncopating and stuttering and waiting and riding and, well, kicking. If this beat lacks some of the thirteenth-hour intensity of “Breathe,” if Primo’s kicks don’t rattle spines like Blaze’s bass pulses, take as one of the drawbacks to a minimalist aesthetic that “bombastic” will not be an adjective frequently used to describe the resulting music.

To be fair, though, Kool G Rap, who must now be almost seventy, kinda kills it, in that if this track had come out in 1993 it’d be jam-of-the-year material. His lisping hype track and hyperactive cadence haven’t aged (at all, really), and so they possess all the bluster of G Rap’s youth but no flavor of today, which means in strictly hip hop terms that this record is not gonna sell that many copies. Played after, say, T.I.’s rap in “My Love,” G Rap’s claims (“I let the dogs out the kennel / Watch’em form and assemble”) sound hopelessly, delightfully antiquated. But let’s not sell these two short: if Half a Klip, G Rap’s forthcoming full-length with Premier, sustains this nostalgic glow, it will be hot shit. For senior citizens.

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