Background
Method Man had heard about Limp Bizkit and wanted to record with them because he had never worked with a rock band. The band allowed Fred Durst and DJ Lethal to explore their hip hop origins by recording a song with the rapper. DJ Premier of Gang Starr produced the song even though he was hesitant to do so at first. [3] According to Borland,the band wanted to record "a track that was straight hip-hop". [1]
The beginnings of the backing beat started with a demo that DJ Lethal created. Patrick Moxey,who was managing DJ Premier at the time,was contacted by Limp Bizkit,who were interested in having Premier update the existing beat. Premier had previously been aware of Limp Bizkit through their cover of "Faith" by George Michael and DJ Lethal's previous work in House of Pain,which led to him eventually agreeing to work with the band,but not without declining first. [4]
DJ Premier had hesitations around lead singer Fred Durst's rapping ability,believing it to not be at the same level as previous artists Premier had worked with. Because of this,Premier initially rejected the offer to work on the track. [5]
"To me Fred [Durst] was dope with what they did. But when it came to the emceeing aspect of what I was used to,I was very,very hesitant to do it. I was like,‘yo man,I’m just not feeling the way he raps.'" [6]
After a face-to-face meeting with Durst and learning that Method Man would be featured on the track,Premier became more interested. Durst impressed Premier by offering to work closely with him in order to improve his performance,and revealing he owned the entire DJ Premier Tape Kingz mixtape collection. [4]
Premier's biggest contributions to the track ended up being a re-recording of Durst's vocals,a complete change of the drum sounds and bass line,and the addition of samples recorded by Durst that he provided on a 10" dubplate. [4]
This page is based on this
Wikipedia article Text is available under the
CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
