While still just a Long Island high school student, Prince Paul Huston began his recording career in 1986 when he joined rap music's original hip hop band, Stetsasonic, as its resident "surgeon on the mix." In addition to DJing for the six-man group, Paul seized his internship with Stet to flex his fledgling production skills on cuts like the driving title song to 1988's much-heralded In Full Gear LP. However, it wasn't until a trio of eccentric and hugely talented hip hop-bred teens from Paul's Amityville, L.I. neighborhood enlisted his production guidance that Paul would emerge as the eclectic visionary that he remains known as today. De La Soul's platinum-certified 1989 masterpiece, 3 Feet High And Rising, established Prince Paul's signature sound; a collage of funky soul loops, old school club tracks and breakbeats, samples from childrens' records and virtually anything else in reach all woven together by ingeniously choreographed audio skits. Having risen to hip hop's upper echelon of console controllers, Paul's wizardry left its mark on 3rd Bass' "The Gas Face" and "Brooklyn-Queens" (both from the gold-certified The Cactus Album), Cypress Hill's "Latin Lingo"-remix and the title cut from Big Daddy Kane's gold-certified 1989 LP, It's A Big Daddy Thing among many others. Paul and De La Soul would also refine 3 Feet's creative peaks with 1991's equally outstanding, gold-certified De La Soul Is Dead and 1993's superb, but commercially neglected Buhloone Mindstate.
Around this time, De La's commercial struggles, coupled with the dissolution of Stetasonic and Paul's aborted deal for his own label, Dew Dew Man Records, sent the musical brainiac into a period of introspection that would greatly shape his future recordings. Teaming with Wu-Tang Clan's sound architect, RZA, former Stet bandmate, Fruitkwan, and former Tommy Boy soloist, Too Poetic, in 1994, Paul blazed another trail for hip hop when he formed one of the music's first supergroups -- the faux "horror-core" quartet, Gravediggaz. If the group's image played up the campy side of ghostly games, its debut LP, 6 Feet Deep, reflected a smart-aleck intelligence that reveled in the mockery of the music industry and all its trappings. In his most recent work, Paul's disillusionment with the record industry has driven him to sagely seek collaborations and projects that are compatible with his own creative visions. 1996's Psychoanalysis LP rejuvenated Paul by providing him an unbound forum with which to express his mental musings. His remix to the Kool Keith-helmed Dr. Octagon project's "Blue Flowers" of the same year drew kudos from hip hop's critical cognoscenti. And his contributions to Chris Rock's Roll With The New spawned the hilarious Puff Daddy hit single spoof, "Champagne," and received a Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album of 1997. His latest project, "A Prince Among Thieves," synergizes the varied talents at Prince Paul's hands for a cinematic and musical opus of unprecedented scope for hip hop music. - Press Kit (Tommy Boy Records, 1999).
