A sonic exploration and tonal analysis of contemporary creative music in a myriad of improvisational/composed settings, textures, and expressions.
Welcome to Sound Projections
I'm your host Kofi Natambu. This online magazine features the very best in contemporary creative music in this creative timezone NOW (the one we're living in) as well as that of the historical past. The purpose is to openly explore, examine, investigate, reflect on, studiously critique, and take opulent pleasure in the sonic and aural dimensions of human experience known and identified to us as MUSIC. I'm also interested in critically examining the wide range of ideas and opinions that govern our commodified notions of the production, consumption, marketing, and commercial exchange of organized sound(s) which largely define and thereby (over)determine our present relationships to music in the general political economy and culture.
Thus this magazine will strive to critically question and go beyond the conventional imposed notions
and categories of what constitutes the generic and stylistic definitions of ‘Jazz’, ‘classical music’, ‘Blues.’
'Rhythm and Blues’, ‘Rock and Roll’, ‘Pop’, ‘Funk’, ‘Hip Hop’, etc. in order to search for what individual
artists and ensembles do cretively to challenge and transform our ingrained ideas and attitudes of what
music is and could be.
So please join me in this ongoing visceral, investigative, and cerebral quest to explore, enjoy, and pay
homage to the endlessly creative and uniquely magisterial dimensions of MUSIC in all of its guises and expressive identities.
Saturday, May 11, 2019
De La Soul (1987-Present): Legendary, iconic, and innovative rappers, arrangers, composers, producers, ensemble leaders, producers, and teachers
At the time of its 1989 release, De La Soul's debut album, 3 Feet High and Rising,
was hailed as the future of hip-hop. With its colorful, neo-psychedelic
collage of samples and styles, plus the Long Island trio's low-key,
clever rhymes and goofy humor, the album sounded like nothing else in
hip-hop. Where most of their contemporaries drew directly from
old-school rap, funk, or Public Enemy's dense sonic barrage, De La Soul
were gentler and more eclectic, taking in not only funk and soul, but
also pop, jazz, reggae, and psychedelia. Though their style initially
earned both critical raves and strong sales, De La Soul
found it hard to sustain their commercial momentum in the '90s as their
alternative rap was sidetracked by the popularity of considerably
harder-edged gangsta rap.
De La Soul formed while the trio members -- Posdnuos (born Kelvin Mercer, August 17, 1969), Trugoy the Dove (born David Jude Jolicoeur, September 21, 1968), and Pasemaster Mase (born Vincent Lamont Mason, Jr., March 27, 1970) -- were attending high school in the late '80s. The stage names of all of the members derived from in-jokes: Posdnuos was an inversion of Mercer's DJ name, Sound-Sop; Trugoy was an inversion of Jolicoeur's favorite food, yogurt. De La Soul's demo tape, Plug Tunin', came to the attention of Prince Paul, the leader and producer of the New York rap outfit Stetsasonic. Prince Paul played the tape to several colleagues and helped the trio land a contract with Tommy Boy Records.
Prince Paul produced De La Soul's debut album, 3 Feet High and Rising,
which was released in the spring of 1989. Several critics and observers
labeled the group as a neo-hippie band because the record praised peace
and love as well as proclaiming the dawning of "the D.A.I.S.Y. age" (Da
Inner Sound, Y'all). Though the trio was uncomfortable with the hippie
label, there was no denying that the humor and eclecticism presented an
alternative to the hardcore rap that dominated hip-hop. De La Soul were quickly perceived as the leaders of a contingent of New York-based alternative rappers that also included A Tribe Called Quest, Queen Latifah, the Jungle Brothers, and Monie Love; all of these artists dubbed themselves the Native Tongues posse.
For a while, it looked as if De La Soul and the Native Tongues
posse would eclipse hardcore hip-hop in terms of popularity. "Me,
Myself and I" became a Top 40 pop hit in the U.S. (number one R&B),
while the album reached number 24 (number one R&B) and went gold. At
the end of the year, 3 Feet High and Rising
topped many best-of-the-year lists, including the Village Voice's. With
all of the acclaim came some unwanted attention, most notably in the
form of a lawsuit by the Turtles. De La Soul had sampled the Turtles' "You Showed Me" and layered it with a French lesson on a track on 3 Feet High
called "Transmitting Live from Mars," without getting the permission of
the '60s pop group. The Turtles won the case, and the decision not only
had a substantial impact on De La Soul,
but on rap in general. Following the suit, all samples had to be
legally cleared before an album could be released. Not only did this
have the end result of rap reverting back to instrumentation, thereby
altering how the artists worked, it also meant that several albums in
the pipeline had to be delayed in order for samples to clear. One of
those was De La Soul's second album, De La Soul Is Dead.
When De La Soul Is Dead
was finally released in the spring of 1991, it received decidedly mixed
reviews, and its darker, more introspective tone didn't attract as big
an audience as its lighter predecessor. The album peaked at number 26
pop on the U.S. charts, number 24 R&B, and spawned only one minor
hit, the number 22 R&B single "Ring Ring Ring (Ha Ha Hey)." De La Soul worked hard on their third album, finally releasing the record in late 1993. The result, entitled Buhloone Mindstate,
was harder and funkier than either of its predecessors, yet it didn't
succumb to gangsta rap. Though it received strong reviews, the album
quickly fell off the charts after peaking at number 40, and only
"Breakadawn" broke the R&B Top 40. The same fate greeted the trio's
fourth album, Stakes Is High.
Released in the summer of 1996, the record was well reviewed, yet it
didn't find a large audience and quickly disappeared from the charts.
Four years later, De La Soul initiated what promised to be a three-album series with the release of Art Official Intelligence: Mosaic Thump; though reviews were mixed, it was greeted warmly by record buyers, debuting in the Top Ten. The second title in the series, AOI: Bionix, even featured a video hit with "Baby Phat," but Tommy Boy and the trio decided to end their relationship soon after. De La Soul subsequently signed their AOI label to Sanctuary Urban (run by Beyoncé's father, Mathew Knowles) and released The Grind Date in October 2004. Two years later the group issued Impossible Mission: TV Series, Pt. 1, a collection of new and previously unreleased material.
The group then went on hiatus with only the splinter release De La Soul's Plug 1 & Plug 2 Presents...First Serve
released in 2012. A year later, the group created a free download of
all their early albums and packaged the set as You're Welcome, though it
wasn't available for long thanks to the legal efforts of their former
label, Warner Bros. A crowd-funding campaign for a new album was
launched in 2015, and after successful funding, the LP And the Anonymous Nobody
was self-released in August of 2016. The nearly sample-free album
featured the trio's live band and assorted friends playing live
instruments, along with a guest list that included Usher, David Byrne, 2 Chainz, and Damon Albarn, among many others.
In the summer of 2008 The Smoking Sectionlet me write an extensive oral history of De La Soul’s first four albums. The two-part piece included interviews with authors Ethan Brown and Brian Coleman, V103 DJ and Scratch Atlanta instructor DJ Jaycee, graphic designer and mixtape DJ Scott Williams, and Prince Paul. Jaycee even made an unbelievable De La Soul mixtape
to help promote the article. It was one of the most fun collaborative
efforts I have ever been a part of. Writing the article cemented my love
of all things De La and Prince Paul. It also made me an even more
obsessive student of their work.
On May 13th, 2016, De La Soul is Dead will turn 25 years old. After my Smoking Section
piece I aspired to write a oral history about the making of, reception,
and legacy of the album to coincide with the anniversary. I love 99% of
De La Soul’s output, but for me, De La Soul is Dead
is their Mount Rushmore and my favorite album of all time. During my
various attempts to write the book 7L, 88-Keys, DJ Neil Armstrong, and
Prince Paul were all kind enough to do extensive interviews with me.
While they provided me with some great material, a book would require
many more interviews with artists and admirers of the album.
2016
is here. The anniversary is staring me in the face and there is no way I
will write a worthwhile book about the album in time. That said,
writing a book about the album is still a dream of mine and something I
hope to accomplish. In the meantime I’ve decided to share a snippet of
my interview with Prince Paul where he breaks down the equipment and
creative process that was used to make De La Soul Is Dead.
If nothing else, I hope this interview sparks conversation about De La Soul Is Dead and gives people an inside look at what it was like produce sample-based music during the early 90s.
“Now
you could probably throw it in the computer and slap it together in two
minutes. But at the time we thought we were ahead of the curve in
technology.”
Gino: Everyone I interview about De La Soul is Dead mentionshow
the production stands out, especially for the time. Given the equipment
you guys were using, it’s crazy that the beats are so layered and all
of the samples are perfectly on beat and in key. Prince Paul:
We had the experience of making the first album to give us a better
idea of how to do it on the second album with the equipment we had. It’s
funny, at the time that equipment was considered kind of new. Making
records before those samplers was hard. On De La Soul is Dead,
we were like, “Wow, we can lock things up, we have delays, we can move
samples around, and we have pitch shifters.” Now you could probably
throw it in the computer and slap it together in two minutes. But at the
time we thought we were ahead of the curve in technology.
Gino:
I know in talking to you for an earlier interview that you guys were
using an Akai S-900, an Emu SP-12, and a Casio SK-5 on 3 Feet High and Rising. Did you use the same equipment for De La Soul is Dead?
Prince Paul:
Yeah, we used all of the same stuff. We were at the same studio,
Calliope. I think we mixed the album at Island Media in New York. We
basically used the same format.
Gino: Can you explain the difference between an SP-12 and SP-1200?
Prince Paul:
The SP-12 doesn’t have a disk drive so you can’t save the samples. The
1200 has a floppy disk drive that you can save your music in. So we had
an early one, the very first one.
Gino:
I’m amazed that you guys were utilizing an SK-5. I know that’s a very
limited sampler. Did you just use the external mic device to sample? Prince Paul:
I honestly don’t remember. I still have that sampler, but it’s in my
attic. I think there was a mic input and it also had mic built in on top
of it that you could speak into. I think we just plugged into the mic
input and sped samples up. Obviously the sound was kind of jacked up,
but nobody was concerned about quality back then. We were just impressed
by the novelty of sampling. Everyone was like, “Ooh, I can take a piece
of something and play it on a keyboard.”
“Obviously
the sound was kind of jacked up, but nobody was concerned about quality
back then. We were just impressed by the novelty of sampling.”
Gino: Did you have a favorite sampler that you were using at the time?
Prince Paul:
Probably the S-900. I could navigate that pretty easily. I broke it out
recently because I have a couple in racks in my basement. I plugged
them in and played some old samples through them. Even though it’s big
and bulky, nothing sounds like that. It’s pretty flexible, it’s easy to
work, and it’s easy to truncate your sample and get things tight. You
can trigger certain sounds with different keys on the drum machine.
When
you look at all this new technology, everything sounds very sterile.
Everything is clean and super quiet. It kind of lacks something. When I
plug that in, it’s like, “Wow, this is hip hop.” It makes a big
difference…a way bigger difference than having an MPC or something. It
has its own character. Certain pieces of equipment make you program a
certain way because you are limited. That’s the beauty of those
machines.
“Certain pieces of equipment make you program a certain way because you are limited. That’s the beauty of those machines.”
Gino: I’m curious how Tommy Boy responded to the album. 3 Feet High and Rising was so successful, was there an outcry when you submitted De La Soul is Dead? I would assume some people were worried about how dark and different it was.
Prince Paul: They were pretty supportive, basically because we were tried and tested. The success of 3 Feet High
came as a surprise to everyone. After it came out, we were able to come
in and tell them what we wanted and how we wanted it done because we
were so ahead of the curve on everything. They couldn’t figure out our
thinking, our sensibilities, or how we created. They were like, “You
tell us what to do”, which was nice. It was nice to have a little more
control over your projects. A little more respect, I should say.
Gino:
The way you were getting financially compensated by Tommy Boy might not
have been ideal, but it is cool that you were given that level of
creative freedom.
Prince Paul: On
the first album, there were concerns. They had Dante come in and more
or less be their eyes and ears so that he could report back to them. On
the second album they said, “You guys know what you’re doing. We trust
you. Make those records you make.” It was cool. I think their main
concern for the second record was keeping track of the samples because
they had messed up the first one so bad with clearing them.
“The
success of 3 Feet High came as a surprise to everyone. After it came
out, we were able to come in and tell them what we wanted and how we
wanted it done.
Gino: That seems to always get overlooked when people discuss this album. De La Soul is Dead
was made after a sample lawsuit against you guys that was pretty
historic…and it’s so sample heavy. When I look at the sample list for “A
Roller Skating Jam Named ‘Saturdays’”, you have seven or eight samples
that make up that beat. For a label to clear that many samples seems
unfathomable by today’s standards.
Prince Paul:
It’s just how we made records in those days, so it didn’t seem
uncommon. Once Tommy Boy became so concerned with making sure every
little sound was cleared, it made it a little different than the first
album. The first album, when it came to sampling, they were like “Eh,
whatever, you guys probably won’t sell that much anyway.” But when it
was all eyes on De La they were keeping track of every sound we used.
Even with stuff that wasn’t sampled. They were really anal about a whole
lot of sample stuff, which is understandable. But having the lawsuit
wasn’t our fault to begin with. We were like, “You created this problem.
We’ll always give you all of the sample information, that’s without a
doubt. How you guys retain the information and what you do with it is up
to you.”
“The
first album, when it came to sampling, they were like “Eh, whatever,
you guys probably won’t sell that much anyway.” But when it was all eyes
on De La they were keeping track of every sound we used.”
Gino:
The composition of the samples is incredible. I’m curious if any of the
beats stand out as being particularly difficult to compose. For
instance, on “A Roller Skating Jam Named ‘Saturdays’”, you have the baby
scratching, the drums, the “and roller skates” vocal, and then the main
loop comes in. And I’m only breaking down the beginning of the song.
How difficult was it to get all of that to sound right?
Prince Paul:
It’s all about the arrangement. Pos came up with the main loop and a
lot of the other ideas for that song. I showed De La a lot about how to
navigate through the equipment and how to make everything layer
properly. The key to making it work isn’t necessarily how much you
layer, it’s how you arrange the samples. You have to put samples in key
so everything sounds like it belongs. How you EQ everything…there’s a
science to it.
Early
Public Enemy production used layers upon layers and layers, and their
arrangements were always super duper incredible to me. We were kind of
like students to what they did. To me, our production didn’t even come
close to what they were doing…almost like a fake version of how well
they sampled and meshed stuff together. (Laughs) It makes it easier when
you have a blueprint of what to do or how to make something sound. When
I listened to Public Enemy, my guidelines were for us to always be high
quality. To me, what I was making wasn’t quite at their level, but it
was good enough. (Laughs)
“Early
Public Enemy production used layers upon layers and layers, and their
arrangements were always super duper incredible to me. We were kind of
like students to what they did.
Gino:
Today’s equipment makes it easy for people to arrange samples so that
everything sounds in key. With the equipment you were using, I would
think that you either had some musical training or you just had an
incredibly good ear for hearing what went well together.
Prince Paul:
A lot of the engineers that we used were also musicians. We wouldn’t
always go by what they would say, ‘cause engineers will make you do some
real stupid stuff, but it’s always good to get another opinion. And a
lot of it was us just listening. If we cringed at something, we’d say,
“That’s wrong” and adjust it until it sounded right. There might be
things you try to put together that don’t mesh well, so you know not to
put them at the same time during the song.
The bulk of it is
feel and the other part is common sense. It’s like putting clothes
together. You’ll say, “Oh my god, I love this hat, this jacket, and
these pants”, but they might not all go together. You have to rock them
in different ways with different shoes, shirts, and whatever else. Even
though in your gut you want to rock them all together, you have to get
that out your mind. Same thing with music. Everything has to fit right;
you can’t force things together just because you like them.
To hear more of Paul’s music, check him out on Soundcloud. To learn more about him follow him on Facebook and Twitter @djprincepaul.
I
am a director of academic support/special education teacher who loves
to write about books, music, records, and samplers. I also love
interviewing people about these things. If you enjoyed this piece,
please consider sharing it on Facebook, Twitter, and recommending it on
Medium.
On Valentine’s Day in 2014, De La Soul did something surprising: The group gave away almost all of its work.
After
gathering fans’ email addresses in an online call-out, this hip-hop
trio from Long Island sent out links to zip files for its first six
albums. Those albums — including its 1989 debut, “3 Feet High and
Rising,” a platinum record in the Library of Congress’s National
Recording Registry — are some of the genre’s most influential and
sonically adventurous, threading samples from obscure, kitschy records
alongside recognizable pop, jazz and funk hooks.
The
links were available for a day, and the group says the response
overloaded the servers hosting the music files. They also attracted the
attention of Warner Music, which has owned those records since 2002,
when it acquired the catalog of Tommy Boy Records, a pioneering indie
hip-hop label.
The attention wasn’t
just because the group was giving its catalog away. It was because those
six albums have never been available to buy digitally or to stream.
In a recent interview, the group explained that it had reached a boiling point.
“We
were frustrated with people not being able to just get it,” Vincent
Mason, 46, the group’s D.J., known as Maseo, said, adding that the
financial impact of digital invisibility was amplified by the fact that
their work with Damon Albarn’s Gorillaz had introduced them to another
audience.
De La Soul’s first album, “3 Feet High and Rising” (1989).
Warner
Music Group, which controls the albums’ distribution, was quick to
reach out. “They did tap on our window,” said David Jolicoeur, 47,
formerly known as Trugoy the Dove (now just Dave), rapping his knuckles
on a table for emphasis. “‘Hey guys, what the [expletive] are you
doing?’”
“We spent years and years
trying to figure this out with Warner,” said Kelvin Mercer, 46, known as
Posdnuos, who added that label personnel kept shifting and allies were
“shuffled out” over time.
But in
gathering a list of dedicated fans, De La Soul may have laid the
foundation for its new record. “And the Anonymous Nobody,” out Aug. 26,
is a largely sample-free affair financed by a Kickstarter campaign that accumulated over $600,000 — more than a third of which was raised in eight hours, the group members say.
Mr.
Mason said they considered how much money they would earn from a record
label and decided owning the album was worth more. “The faith, I would
say, really kicked in when we gave away the music.”
“And
the Anonymous Nobody” is a drastic departure for the group. Rather than
use samples, De La Soul spent three years recording more than 200 hours
of the Rhythm Roots Allstars, a 10-piece funk and soul band it has
toured with. Then the group mined that material for the basis of the 17
tracks (25 musicians ended up playing on the album). From the opening
horn fanfare of “Royalty Capes” to the Queen-esque metal of “Lord
Intended” to the loping cowboy funk of “Unfold” (an exclusive track for
those who contributed to the Kickstarter campaign), the record explores a
number of genres, with extended instrumental passages. And a wild
variety of guests — Usher, Snoop Dogg, David Byrne, Little Dragon — help
shift the moods. The proposed guest list was even more ambitious — Tom
Waits, Jack Black and Axl Rose were also approached. “Willie Nelson
kindly declined,” Mr. Jolicoeur said.
The producer Prince Paul, who worked on De La Soul’s early albums.CreditDonald Hight
The
album’s title, Mr. Jolicoeur said, represented part of the
collaborative process. “This is about a person selflessly giving
everything they could to make something cool or new or fun or better
happen,” he said. “That became the vibe of the record. It wasn’t really
about a concept of the song; it was about, out of nowhere: ‘I play
trumpet. I want to contribute.’”
Mr.
Jolicoeur said he had learned that a similar, freewheeling approach
often led to the kinds of sounds the group had sampled in the past.
“When these guys from the Ohio Players to Parliament-Funkadelic were
just jamming, that’s where the songs came from,” Mr. Jolicoeur said. “It
was allowing something to happen organically.”
In
its third decade as a group, De La Soul is in a special position. Along
with the Bomb Squad’s collaborations with Public Enemy and the Dust
Brothers’ production for the Beastie Boys, its work with the producer
Prince Paul resulted in some of hip-hop’s pioneering sounds,
establishing the melodic and harmonic possibilities of sampling. Now the
group is re-emerging with new music after 12 years, during which the
genre has gone through sonic and aesthetic revolutions: Hip-hop has
become a top-performing genre on streaming music sites,
and the internet has helped coronate a new crop of blockbuster rappers.
But with the exception of “The Grind Date,” released through BMG in
2004, De La Soul has not been able to earn anything off its catalog from
digital services.
“We’re
in the Library of Congress, but we’re not on iTunes,” Mr. Mercer said,
adding that when the group interacts with fans in person or online, they
always ask the same question: “Yo, where’s the old stuff?”
That
old stuff — which also includes “De La Soul Is Dead” (1991), “Buhloone
Mindstate” (1993) and “Stakes Is High” (1996) — may be fraught with
problems, according to people familiar with the group’s recording and
publishing history. In 1989, obtaining the permission of musical
copyright holders for the use of their intellectual property was often
an afterthought. There was little precedent for young artists’ mining
their parents’ record collections for source material and little
regulation or guidelines for that process.
“De La Soul Is Dead” (1991)
Deborah
Mannis-Gardner, a sample-clearance agent who worked with De La Soul on
its new record, said that lack of guidelines could be why Warner Music
is keeping the catalog in digital limbo.
“My
understanding is that due to allegedly uncleared samples, Warners has
been uncomfortable or unwilling to license a lot of the De La Soul
stuff,” Ms. Mannis-Gardner said. “It becomes difficult opening these
cans of worms — were things possibly cleared with a handshake?”
An
added possible complication lies in the language of the agreements
drafted for the use of all those samples. (There are more than 60 on “3
Feet High and Rising” alone — the group was sued by the Turtles in 1991
for the use of their song “You Showed Me” on a skit on that album and
settled out of court for a reported $1.7 million.) If those agreements,
written nearly three decades ago, do not account for formats other than
CDs, vinyl LPs and cassettes, Warner Music would have to renegotiate
terms for every sample on the group’s first four records with their
respective copyright holders to make those available digitally.
In
a statement, a person speaking for Rhino, a subsidiary of Warner Music
Group that deals with the label’s back catalog, said: “De La Soul is one
of hip-hop’s seminal acts, and we’d love for their music to reach
audiences on digital platforms around the world, but we don’t believe it
is possible to clear all of the samples for digital use, and we
wouldn’t want to release the albums other than in their complete,
original forms. We understand this is very frustrating for the artists
and the fans; it is frustrating for us, too.”
A
number of people interviewed say the legal phrase “now known or
hereafter discovered” may determine De La Soul’s digital future. It
ensures that samples cleared in the past are legal for use on streaming
services and for digital music retailers.
De La Soul in 1993. From left: David Jolicoeur, Vincent Mason and Kelvin Mercer.CreditDavid Corio/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty Images
Michelle
Bayer, who handles De La Soul’s publishing administration, said that
phrase’s potential absence on the group’s contracts for samples could
complicate matters for Warner Music. (Warner Music would not provide
details about the sample contracts.)
“It’s
tricky because someone could deny the sample use now, or negotiate high
upfront advances, maybe even higher percentage or royalty than was
originally negotiated, which lessens what the label can earn,” she said.
“Before, people were like, ‘Oh yeah, whatever you want to do, we don’t
even know what you’re talking about, sampling, who cares, whatever.’
Now, it’s like, ‘Wow, that’s a big piece of real estate.’”
Ms. Bayer added that people are still filing copyright claims on samples from De La Soul’s early records.
“Two
songs from the first album just came up that had never come up before,”
Ms. Bayer said. “I think when Warner got the catalog, I think people
started making claims, people were kind of coming out of the woodwork
going, ‘Oh, well now it’s a major label involved, and we can possibly
get more from them than we might have gotten from an independent label
like Tommy Boy.’”
But others,
including Paul Huston, the producer known as Prince Paul, who worked
closely with the group on its first three albums, say they did their due
diligence. “Sampling was obviously new, but we were told, ‘Hey, here’s
some sample-clearance forms — you have to fill these out,’” Mr. Huston
said, adding that Tommy Boy became much more careful after the success
of “3 Feet High and Rising.” “It got to the point where it was like,
‘What is that scratch!?’”
“Stakes Is High” (1996)
“Stakes Is High” (1996)
Tom
Silverman, the founder of Tommy Boy Records — which also put out albums
by Digital Underground and Queen Latifah — said that making the group’s
catalog available digitally would not be difficult, considering that
Warner Music should know the copyright holders who have been receiving
royalties for the physical sales of the records.
Mr.
Silverman said: “Cutting a deal, you would think, to give them more
money, shouldn’t be that hard, especially if you’re fair and logical and
say, ‘Let me pay you the same percentage that we’ve always paid you on
physical on digital, too, so you can make that much money.’ So it
doesn’t really make a lot of sense that they’ve haven’t even tried.”
For
De La Soul, Warner Music and the owners of the copyrighted samples, the
catalog’s absence from digital media can be felt in an absence of
income. That money would have come from downloads (the iTunes Music
Store opened in 2003); streaming; ringtones (Mr. Silverman points out
the group’s 1991 single “Ring Ring (Ha Ha Hey)” as a potential ringtone
windfall); and deals with television, movies and advertisers.
The cultural loss, said Ahmir Thompson, the Roots drummer known as Questlove, is just as significant.
“Unless
Warner’s illustrious history is so disposable that they can let one or
two classics just fall by the wayside,” Mr. Thompson said, “and live in
this sort of storied folklore — I mean, ‘3 Feet High and Rising’ is very
much in danger of being the classic tree that fell in the forest that
was once given high praise and now is just a stump.”
“Buhloone Mindstate” (1993)
Lonnie
Lynn, the rapper known as Common who has appeared on De La Soul albums,
said the lack of a digital presence is a blow to available hip-hop
history. “It’s obviously disappointing, because I feel like De La is
timeless music, and I feel like there’s a 16-year-old that would find De
La and be like, ‘Aw, man, that’s cool.’”
The
group says it volunteered to bear the administrative burden of making
the catalog available but that Warner Music was not interested.
Mr.
Jolicoeur acknowledges the potential task Warner faces is “a lot of
work,” but Mr. Mason argues the time to do that work is now. “When I try
my best to tap into the psyche of record execs and how they think, they
know there’s some value — that’s why they’re not letting go,” he said.
“But on this side of the fence, you’re like, ‘I’d appreciate you don’t
wait until one of us die to do this.’ Can I enjoy some of the fruits of
my own labor, while I’m alive? Obviously, we’re in the music industry —
more people are more valuable dead than alive, you know? Can we change
that landscape?”
“It
really financially hurts these guys,” Ms. Mannis-Gardner said. “If
Warners won’t license it, perhaps they could sell it back to the band
members.”
Mr. Huston said that
several independent labels had approached him about releasing these
records but that interest fizzles when he directs them to Warner Music.
“It’s
like almost when you’re a kid and somebody says, ‘Hey, can I borrow
your bike?’” he said, laughing. “And it’s like, ‘I don’t know, my mom
won’t let me; you can ask my mom,’ and they go: ‘Ohhh, that’s all right.
I don’t need to borrow it.’”
Mr.
Silverman, who still runs Tommy Boy, hopes to obtain his label’s entire
back catalog from Warner Music, and making De La Soul’s disputed albums
available digitally is the first thing he said he would do. “They’ll be
making a lot more money when that stuff becomes available,” he said.
“Not the download part, the streaming part. It’s like they missed the
entire era of downloads.”
Given the success of its Kickstarter campaign, De La Soul hasn’t ruled out turning to crowdfunding to free its catalog.
“Maybe that’s what’s next,” Mr. Jolicoeur said. “This music has to be addressed and released. It has to. When? We’ll see. But somewhere it’s going to happen.”
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR14 of the New York edition with the headline: A Hip-Hop Legacy Stuck in Digital Limbo. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
This weekend, the beloved rap group De La Soul will be performing in New York City as part of the Governors Ball festival. The highly influential '90s act also just released"Pain," a new single featuring Snoop Dogg, in advance of their first album in over a decade, And the Anonymous Nobody. My colleagues tell me that "Pain" is "mad good" and "so dope" and, "Seriously, David, listen to this song." Now, all of that is cool and awesome, but personally I found it hard to form an opinion on "Pain," since I have never heard a complete De La Soul album. Nothing personal — I just never got around to it. To fix this problem, my editors kindly suggested — or, I guess, technically, told me, since I work for them — that I should spend today listening to De La Soul's classic Tommy Boy Records debut, 3 Feet High and Rising, and cataloguing my thoughts below. Please be warned: I talk a lot about yoga, bagels, and A Tribe Called Quest. Sorry!
0:45 — Game shows are chill, but I'm not sure how cool it is to make one the opening skit to a rap album. I’m not exactly clear on the setup of the show, and that’s making me nervous about how much I’m already missing about this album. I also just ate a bagel with cream cheese and my stomach feels weird.
3:46 — I’m growing increasingly stressed. No one’s announced their name, nor have there been any distinctive ad libs to tell these dudes apart. I know 1989 didn’t have emojis, but it would be nice if there was some marker of who's who — like if one had a real nasally voice or something? "The Magic Number" is fun, but it's also super-super-sample-based, which I know is real hip-hop, but feels so distant to what I enjoy about the genre in 2016. The stuff I like is all about instrumentals and ad libs that come closer to contemporary EDM than old-school rap.
6:15 — Holy shit, I regret eating this bagel.
9:10 — I’ve def heard "Can U Keep a Secret," and I don’t like it. I can be pretty hard to please with certain musical aesthetics, and rap music prior to ‘92 — the year I was born, of course — is something I’ve struggled with a lot in my life. Too often, going that far back can feel like a chore. Even classics from 2 Live Crew can sound too dated for me, and that’s just a drum machine and offensive lyrics, which in theory I should be all about.
16:26 - Not to stay fixated on the samples on the record, but I cannot get out of my head just how not rap this album sounds. Obviously there is a lot of rapping, and it’s pretty fine ("Ghetto Thang"), but all the samples and references give a real vibe of a sound collage. Maybe it’s the bagel I ate that is upsetting my stomach, but the duct-tape-and-glue nature of the album is distracting.
23:48 — Now we're in a skit where they just yell about taking different clothes, shoes, and hairstyles off, for some reason?
26:58 — There are so many more songs to go. :upside-down smiley face emoji:
35:00 — "Say No Go" is fun, I guess. I’m about halfway through with this album and I cannot wait for it to end. De La Soul is no Major Lazer.
Yesterday after yoga class, the teacher, who is new to the studio, asked if there was anything he might do to help with the class. I mentioned that the music was loud and could’ve been a bit softer. He replied back that it didn’t seem too loud to him, and that it was even soft compared to other classes. What I said back at that point was something that had been running through my head through the whole class — I spend all day sitting at a desk listening to music, and the last thing I want at the end of the day is to be stuck in a small room focusing on my breathing as more music blasts into my ears. This electric tour of 3 Feet High and Rising is offering a quick reminder of how much music I’ve never heard, and how much music I’ve just accepted that I probably won’t let into my life. I have a professional obligation to be familiar with music both new and old, so listening to De La Soul is worthwhile for sure. Still, forced music listening always places me in an awkward position, where I feel less like I'm engaging with an artist's creative work and more like I'm doing a homework assignment. I can complete the task, but isn't music also supposed to elicit an emotional response?
Meanwhile, back in De La World ...
38:42 — There is a bunch of yelling happening and, like, nah. I’m gonna listen to "Real Love" by Mary J. Blige for a little bit.
This song is one part house anthem and another part sad new jack swing. I cannot even pretend to think of a better combination of genres. The keyboard riff, the chunky drums and that hook are all so so so so sweet. But sadly I must return back to De La World.
39:16 — This album makes Views sound like a Ramones album. Jesus Christ, there is another skit.
41:46 — The bagel I ate earlier was a mistake. Also: Maybe it's strange that I’ve never really given much time to De La Soul, because I looooove A Tribe Called Quest, and I certainly hear a lot of them here. But Tribe songs are so much tighter. They don’t meander in the same way these tracks do ("Plug Tunin’ (Last Chance to Comprehend)"). "De La Orgee" was stupid in the way all rap sex skits are garbage, which is assuming that sex sounds and jokes are going to be funny in the middle of an album rather than best left on the recording room floor. Then again, I might just be a prude. Please let me know at @_davidturner_ on Twitter dot com.
45:50 — Q-Tip! Wow, his voice is so calming in this nonsense. "Buddy" is the first song that I can say I enjoy. It also sounds exactly like it could just be a lesser Tribe song. I made a vegan hot dog for lunch — just thought that y'all should know.
52:38 — "Me, Myself and I" is back to the bullshit of too many obvious samples, a thin hook, and accenting too many moments with little vocal effects that could be novel if they weren’t already used over the last 50 minutes of retreading the same ideas.
1:02:54 — Holy shit, the game show is still happening. The announcer says to mail the record label’s address, which is fucking insane, but kind of cool. Remember physical mail? Records? Postal addresses? Flesh? Corporeal bodies? Any of that stuff?
Perhaps I’ll give De La Soul another listen someday. I can feel the roots of music I should enjoy, but it just didn’t connect today. Right now, I’m gonna go listen to ATC’s eurodance classic "Around the World" and keep praying for the weekend.
De La Soul Talks the Group's Bold New Album and Legendary Past
by Tom Barnes
De La Soul has always been at hip-hop's vanguard, ever since they helped establish the genre in the '80s. They've been hippies, streetwise sages and cybernetic R&B
crooners, proving hip-hop can encompass a kaleidoscope of styles and
sounds. Now, 11 years since their last full-group studio LP, they're
gearing up to revolutionize their sound once again. Two weeks ago, De La
Soul launched a Kickstarter campaign to announce a new album, And the Anonymous Nobody. They met their $110,000 goal in a single day.
On Wednesday, Posdnuos, aka Kelvin Mercer, aka the group's Plug One, spoke with Mic about
the group's new undertaking. He talked about how their creative process
evolved over time and nodded to some of today's rappers he feels share
that same perspective decades later.
Mic: Congratulations on your Kickstarter. One day. That's incredible. How much of that did you guys anticipate?
Pos: I
mean, you know, you wanna be the person that's saying, "Hey, we're De
La Soul, of course we did that." You say you wanna do it and you're
gonna do it because you think positive. But I guess those butterflies in
anticipation — you never know what's going to happen. And for that to
happen in one day? In like nine hours or so? That was just amazing.
Mic: You
mention in the Kickstarter video that you're doing this in response to
the sampling lawsuits you went through. You guys were involved in those
first few big lawsuits shaping the standards the industry has. The first
was with theTurtles in 1991. What was that like for you?
Pos: It
was definitely a shock in the negative sense. I just feel bygones is
bygones, but we had handed in all that information to the correct people
at Tommy Boy Records, which is what we were on at the time.
I
believe that there was a crowd of people internally who loved the album.
But since there wasn't a group before us that tested the waters, to
show our label that what we were doing could be successful, we were
pretty much the first of our kind. So I guess they didn't clear certain
samples because they didn't think the album would sell. They looked at
it like, "It's a skit on their album. Why clear the song with the Turtles?" And that's what happened.
We
had their legal people reach out and place a suit upon us. The funny
thing that I always tell people about this story is that in meeting
their lawyer, he was a fan of our music. He even asked that — while
handling the legal process — he wanted an autograph.
Mic: Last year, you guys released all your music as a free digital download. What was the thinking behind that?
Pos: It
was an organic response to years of people wanting our music and not
being able to get it — seeing new listeners interested in learning about
us because they found out or learned about us through a record or a
feature with the Gorillaz.
New fans were coming along like, "Hey man, love the song you did, but
I've been trying to find your other stuff, because I hear so many great
things about you. I could only see this random video on YouTube, etc."
So it was a response like, "You know what? That would be an amazing
statement on Valentine's Day to show our appreciation to the people who
love us and give them our music." And that's what we did.
Mic: Was there any backlash? How did the label respond?
Pos: So
far there hasn't been any major backlash. I'm sure that the label
wasn't happy about it. But I would hope they did think, "Wow, look how
many millions of people attached themselves to this situation because
they love the music." And that maybe helped ignite a dollar-and-cents
reading for them, like, "Hey man, we gotta take care of this situation,
because we don't gotta be De La Soul fans to realize the money we could
be making."
Source: Simone Joyner/Getty Images
Mic: Let's go back to the beginning — 3 Feet High. That first record earned you the label of the "hippie" group — the way that you guys preached peace and love. Did that reputation feel appropriate?
Pos: It
was cool at first. But it isn't all of who we are. We purposefully
named ourselves "De La Soul" because we came from the soul, and whatever
we learned, that is where we were gonna be. That's why De La Soul Is Dead
was completely different. People thought that was a bad move for our
career, but that's also why I think we can still stand here. We
continued to change as we grew up — as young boys becoming men — and
that's what we wanted to do.
Mic: You, Q-Tip
and Jay Z are the first class of hip-hop elder statesmen. How do you
feel the genre is going to change as more of the original founders age
and their perspectives on life and music change? Pos: Something
is dead if it isn't changing. It may not necessarily benefit you to
where it's changing, but you have to respectfully understand that and
not be upset about it. And I think some of the people you name alongside
us — like A Tribe Called Quest — that's what they did: They continued
to evolve. They weren't the same as the group as on their first album by
their second album. That's why I feel blessed, standing here
now, to do this new album. [Fans] as well look to be a part of what's
been missing in the music, which is a balance in the genre. A lot of
what's going on is cool, but there's not a balance on each side. You
don't have 80 Kendricks, amongst 80 Drakes, amongst 90 Young Thugs.
There has to be a balance of music and you don't hear that.
The 25 albums were chosen by Librarian of Congress James H.
Billington with the help of the Library’s National Recording
Preservation Board. The records are chosen based on their cultural,
aesthetical, or historical impact.
“America’s recorded-sound heritage has in many ways transformed the
soundscape of the modern world, resonating and flowing through our
cultural memory,” said Billington in a statement. “Audio recordings have
documented our lives and allowed us to share artistic expressions and
entertainment. Songs, words and the natural sounds of the world that we
live in have been captured on one of the most perishable of all of our
art media. The salient question is not whether we should preserve these
artifacts, but how best collectively to save this indispensable part of
our history.” Other notable additions to the registry included Al Green’sLet’s Stay Together and New Orleans, blues artist Professor Longhair’s Tipitina album.
3 Feet High And Rising served as the debut album from De La
Soul and remains one of Hip Hop’s most recognized albums. Released by
Tommy Boy Records the album featured several well-known tracks including
“Me Myself And I” and “Buddy.”
On Thursday (Feb. 28), Varietyreported that Tommy Boy Music would postpone the streaming release of Da La Soul's
catalog, which includes the group's first six albums. In what has been a
"bittersweet" week for the rap trio, which will also be celebrating the
30th anniversary of its debut 3 Feet High and Rising this Sunday, the decision to halt the release of the catalog serves as a huge win for the group. "It's a victory," Pos, of De La Soul, tells Billboard.
"It's great that people who supported and understood what we mean to
the culture, whether it's someone who's so dear and close to us like a
Q-Tip, or someone who could admire the moves we've made creatively, but
we ain't necessarily been in the room with each other nothing but maybe
three times together, like a Jay-Z. You can have people just feel like, 'Culturally, I support and understand where they are coming from.'"
After
the group members vocalized their displeasure with what they deemed
"unbalanced, unjust terms" regarding Tommy Boy's proposed deal earlier
this week, Jay-Z declared his allegiance to the trio by barring the
catalog from release on his TIDAL streaming service.
"I spoke to [TIDAL's culture and content editorial
director] Elliott [Wilson] and Elliott was like, 'Jay said, 'What y'all
trying to do?,'" Maseo explains to Billboard. "I ain't gonna
lie to you, I was torn because I would want them to win with the
catalog, just based on where things is at for powerful black men. Jay
could have been the one [to buy the catalog]. As far as the competitors
and what people are making on streaming everyday, I would want him to be
the one to succeed with the catalog and really go up against his
competitors. He's TIDAL, dog. That's an amazing achievement, especially
with where we come from and being a part of this culture. So, for it not
to be on TIDAL, it speaks volumes." Currently, De La Soul's
catalog remains in the hands of Tommy Boy founder and CEO,
Tom Silverman. Silverman signed the group during the late 1980s, and
they then released their first two albums 3 Feet High and Rising and De La Soul Is Dead.
Marred by sample clearance issues, the trio explained how they never
benefited from the fruits of their labors, despite their projects seeing
commercial success. "There's an asterik next to our name when it comes
to sampling. We have been deemed copyright criminals," says Maseo. After
a bevy of stars, including Nas, Questlove and more, shared their
support for De La, Silverman reached out to the group that signed with
his label in the late '80s in an effort to reach a resolution. According
to the group, little progress has been made.
"We've been bringing this to his attention," says Maseo.
"He's been ignoring us for some time, it just got to the final hour
where he expected to us to be on-board and make things smooth and dandy.
When he finally addressed it, there were no changes in how he felt
things needed to be. He used words like, 'what's customary" and 'what's
standard.'" He adds: "He can legally do what he wants, but the
issues that I raised [was that] in all that you're doing with what
you're able to do, did you clear it? Did you clear those samples? When
he got the catalog back, is it cleared? What he said on the phone was,
'If anything comes up, we will deal with it the way we've dealt with it
in the past.' And what I know that to be is that if a lawsuit comes up,
we're gonna settle because we're in the wrong. I say we because we do
suffer from that." This year, De La Soul will be releasing their 10th album through Mass Appeal with production by DJ Premier and Pete Rock.
It's a frigid Thursday night in New York City and the W Hotel serves as a refuge for one of hip-hop's most esteemed groups, De La Soul.
After a contentious week -- which included a verbal tussle with their
former label Tommy Boy over "unjust" contract terms regarding their back
catalog -- De La's Maseo and Pos plop themselves on the fifth-floor
studio couch to regain their strength. What was supposed
to be a celebratory week for the trio became a weary seven days consumed
by drama. On Sunday (March 3), their 1989 debut album, 3 Feet High and Rising, reached its 30th anniversary. Equipped with sharp wordplay, diverse samples and lush production by Prince Paul, 3 Feet High and Rising
became an instant classic and in 2010, was added to the National
Recording Registry by the Library of Congress. Along with platinum
sales, the album's funky single "Me, Myself and I" rocketed to No. 1 on
the Billboard R&B Charts three decades ago. "3 Feet High and Rising was the first baby, and it gave birth to so many other things," Maseo tells Billboard.
"I’m very appreciative and thankful for that — the ups and downs. I’m
truly thankful for the opportunity, especially when you think back at
those times and how life was just going in general with your dream being
this, and mind you for us it was platooning. It led up to 3 Feet High and Rising, and we were pretty content with that."
Not only did 3 Feet High and Rising
place the group in a rarefied space musically, it also paved the way
for more diverse and much deeper sampling: for better and for worse.
Months after the album went gold, lawyers for 1960s classic rock group The Turtles
filed a lawsuit against De La for using the first four bars of their
1968 song “You Showed Me” on the song "Transmitting Live From Mars."
Though Da La managed to settle with the band, going forward, their
discography was thrown into digital limbo due to worries about simliar
legal action over samples.
After Warner Music acquired the catalog of Tommy Boy
Records in 2002, fans were unable to buy or stream the group’s first six
albums due to uncleared samples. To remedy the situation, on
Valentine’s Day 2014, De La offered fans an opportunity to download
their first seven albums for free. "That’s how bad we wanted it
out there,” says Maseo. “We even went to Warner to get the thing up. You
guys do it first. By them feeling there were too many infractures
around it, and rightfully so, I get their point. This was a mess." Now,
Tommy Boy founder and CEO, Tom Silverman, is back in possession of De
La's catalog and according to the group, allegedly offered them a 90/10
split of the profits if he were to take their music to streaming
services. Outraged by the rumored imbalanced percentages, De La issued a
boycott on social media, which caught the eyes of Nas, Questlove, and
Jay-Z, among many others. "We’ve always been very respectful," Pos
explains. "There have been times in the past where we straight up had
an issue with how Tommy Boy was doing things. We’ve never, even at a
young age, have tried to physically harm anyone up at the office. We’ve
never had people try to run up there and do anything. That has been an
issue sometimes in our career where we’re the nice guys." So far,
the boycott has worked in their favor. Not only did Jay-Z offer to not
post their catalog on his streaming service TIDAL, but Tommy Boy opted
to not post their music on Friday (March 1) after the backlash they
received on social media. On the cusp of their 30th anniversary of 3 Feet High and Rising, Billboard
spoke to De La Soul about their classic debut album, their favorite
studio moments, their ongoing battle with Tommy Boy, Jay-Z's co-sign and
more. Check out the interview below. 3 Feet High and Rising is 30 years old. Describe what that number means for you guys. Maseo: 30 years and to still be here. 3 Feet High and Rising was
the first baby and it gave birth to so many other things. I’m very
appreciative and thankful for that. The ups and downs. I’m truly
thankful for the opportunity, especially when you think back at those
times and how life was just going in general with your dream being this,
and mind you for us it was platooning. It led up to 3 Feet High and Rising and we were pretty content with that. [Pos]
was getting ready to head off to college, Dave was [heading to]
architecture school, and I was getting ready to graduate and go to the
military. But the opportunity kept coming back. Even with the idea of
the second single, which was “Jenifa Taught Me” and “Potholes In My
Lawn,” and doing the video behind that, we felt like we was in the game
when it was on the radio with [DJ] Red Alert. That was good and that we
could even have a relationship with Red, that was pretty much enough
especially knowing what hip-hop was at that time. I was cool and content
with how that transpired. The opportunity kept coming back all within
that one and a half year span of when I was supposed to graduate and
when I actually graduated. I wouldn’t change them times for nothing. It
all led up to where we celebrate today and we can have this
conversation.
Looking back, there’s a ton of classic records
like “Jenifa” and “Me, Myself, and I.” What were some of your favorite
studio sessions individually? Pos: It’s
hard to say, man. Any session while recording that album, it was truly a
lot of fun. Like Mase was saying, we were really living our dream. The
studio we were using to record that album was called Calliope Studios.
It was a loft. It didn’t feel like a studio. Out the window you could
see the Empire State Building. It felt like a home. It just was a real
comfortable vibe and Prince Paul did a great job setting our mind up to
just have fun. Outside of making sure we set up assignments of, “Today
we’re going to work on this. Tomorrow, make sure you have some rhymes
ready,” it was almost always spontaneity and having a good time. It was a
great way to just walk up into the studio, so for me, it’s hard to pick
a favorite day because they were all amazing. Maseo: You
never knew what was going to happen or who was going to show up. It
would be moments where we’re working and Daddy O’s coming through or
Keith Sweat is in the next room figuring out what he’s going to do. Milk
and Giz. [MC] Lyte would come through. Pos: She
would come through on a day we’re doing a skit and she would wind up in
the crowd yelling and doing something silly. The day Jungle came
through, they just happen to come through on the day we were forming
what would become “Buddy.” We didn’t plan for them to be one that
record. That was just the day they came by and chilled. In the spirit of
what Paul had placed in our minds, we were like, “Hey, you wanna get on
this record?” If they had came the day before, they would have been on
"Ghetto Thang.” It was just always a lot of fun. Since you guys were 17-18 at the time, this all must have felt like a candy shop. Maseo:
A music candy shop. Definitely. Going from 4-track, to W cassettes, to
playing with radio whites and putting samples up against speakers, to
going to a 24-track studio, that was like, amazing. That was it. Do you guys miss that? I know y’all have been in the studio with Pete Rock and DJ Premier, but do you miss that nostalgia? Maseo:
You could never recreate those innocent moments, but the reality of
knowing you love to create, and you season that creating and now you get
with others that have acquired as much success [feels beautiful.] I
guess there’s somewhat of an innocence with marking a new territory with
someone you admire. We couldn’t recreate those times because they were
brand new. Pos: We could always make new times. Maseo: Absolutely, and that’s the beauty of always wanting to make music. I heard you guys were in the studio with Premier the other night. How did that go? Maseo:
I always heard about Preme’s creative process. I’ve been in the studio
with him, but after that process. This time, I got to see him directly
in that process. Preme’s process reminds me of an old jazz musician. He
gotta be in the moment. He’s not the one to sit in his own scientifical
world and then send you a batch. It has to be a relationship, it has to
be a conversation, it has to be an overall development and
collaboration. We’d be in the room together and feeling the energy of us
as people. Preme banged out another classic, in my opinion. We’re
waiting to hear what gets laid to it lyrically, but the music speaks for
itself. Pos: It’s dope because he’s literally
one of those artists who are literally encoding the true moment into
what now he’s doing. Me talking, Mase in there laughing, and he’s
sitting there in the corner. He sees I’m nodding my head so he keeps
going. It was really dope. It was magical.
Though this month is the 30th anniversary of 3 Feet High and Rising, the word "bittersweet" has been floating around lately. Why bittersweet? Pos: We’re
blessed to still be here. We’re blessed to be able to be one of those
groups where we’re celebrating the 30-year anniversary of an incredible
piece of work and we’re a group that is actually still together. It’s
not like we came back together and dusted off our hate for each other.
We as a group have been together for more than 30 years and we have this
piece of work that has been loved by the world. Maseo:
It shifted culture and it gave inspiration and gave a template for what
a lot of other rappers were doing, especially the skits. I haven’t said
this, they said this, the artists themselves. It’s in the library of
Congress. It’s a part of American history. It’s one of the records that
opened up a new business for lawyers in the world of sampling. It’s a
historical piece. It has missed the relevant wave of the digital era.
Moments and times where I look at people like Missy Elliott when she
performed “Work It” maybe 15 years after it was out at a football game
and it had a million plus downloads after she did that one performance.
We have had more performances like that over the course of our career
and we never had the opportunity to benefit from that media. I
actually want to jump into that. You guys made it known that in the
download era, you weren’t able to thrive. Now that we’re in the
streaming era with the new album coming, how do you guys look to prevent
those previous missteps? Maseo: Here’s
the overall concern: due to the fact that it wasn’t able to come out
then, how is it able to come out now and those infractures could still
potentially come up? The samples and people coming out the woodworks.
There’s someone who just came out recently. This is what continued to
happen. We don’t know what Tommy Boy has cleared and not cleared and
they’re looking to release this record recklessly on the administrative
side, which would still be at a demise to us because based on how it’s
been dealt with in the past, we paid 50 percent of whatever they choose
to settle for. I was listening to the Sway In the Morning interview and Mase, you said for the first three albums, y’all got “pennies” for royalties. Maseo: Absolutely. Pos:
It was definitely a deal not in our favor. We’re young, we don’t know.
The majority of this group, we didn’t have super hard lives growing up.
Speaking for myself, coming from a middle class/working class household,
if you have a label shoving $12,000 in front of myself at 17-18 year
old kid... Maseo: ... $13,000 advance. Pos: There’s
people who’d do one song for $13,000 and we did an entire album with 20
cuts. So you’re talking about, look, a bad deal that we accepted due to
our lawyer saying this is the best it could be and we didn’t have a
problem with it. But then I also say on our end, creatively where we
were, we didn’t think to not put 12 songs on one record. We have a
part to play in that, too. Maseo: Being kids, though. Fuck all of that. We’re kids, man. Would y’all blame youth and inexperience for taking such a bad deal at the time? Maseo: We’re
kids. People want to blame just like when you look at sports and they
want to blame a player for losing their cool, but these are kids getting
money. But let me take the line off that and put it back on this. We
were kids, man. Someone was willing to invest in our dream. $13,000, or
$2,000, at the end of the day, creatively, we’re allowed to do whatever
the hell we want musically. What happens from what they do with it to
when we’re making it, we don’t know this part. Pos: We
could turn around and be the ones who someone could say you’re sharing
this little bit of seven drops of water Tommy Boy gave you to now have
to come and split with the people you sampled. At least from the
administrative aspect of this, we did share the information with Tommy
Boy to clear this stuff. They chose not to clear it. At the time, there
was no litmus test, there was no way to know if an album sounded like
this, people don’t look like the average rappers that it was going to
sell like this. There were people in front of us that were considered
what hip-hop is and what was the standard that would sell records in the
tri-state area. This record not only attached itself to black
and brown youth, it attached itself to white, it attached itself to
poor, higher class, middle class, people who didn’t even like hip-hop.
It sold a lot of records and got a lot of people looking and listening.
If you’re talking about in today’s world of streaming, well no. We’re
older gentlemen and we’ve been through this enough times. With this Pete
and Preme record for example, we went into it as a partnership with
Mass Appeal and Nas, and we set things straight on how it’s supposed to
be. Of course they can turn around as a company and be like, “watch
sampling” and we can listen or not listen. But we are still partners in
things as opposed to someone saying not saying nothing and giving you a
fuckin’ nickel. Maseo: Here’s the deal.
Regardless of what he wants to give us, the type of business since Tommy
Boy’s demise has been nothing but partnerships and better. Why would I
do anything less? I know my value. And now, with the slap in the face of
not even trying to come to the table, I think I deserve a lot more than
that now. I was being more than fair then. What’s really fair now is
ownership. That’s what’s really fair. The focus of this discussion is
splits. Now we’re talking about ownership and splits. Besides
getting the wrong end of the deal, y’all had creative freedom. Looking
back, would you guys have traded some of that creative freedom for a
better percentage off those royalties? Pos: I
would say no because there was nowhere someone told us that that was
the difference. Tommy Boy never stood in the way of our creative
freedom. Maseo: Made a few suggestions. Even down to when we delivered 3 Feet,
they were loving this record. They said, “We don’t hear anything we
could go to radio with.” And that was understandable from their
standpoint. “We don’t really hear anything that the DJ could spin.” We
all got their point, but the thing about that period of time, every
artist struggled with not selling out. Understanding this, how could we
make a radio record our way? It has to be genuine and honest. A
lot of the records that went on radio were organic and radio picked up
on it coming out of the club and the street. It wasn’t the other way
around, hence “Me, Myself and I,” which is still a torn feeling because
Paul genuinely loved “Funkadelic” and I was always a stickler to use
“Knee Deep.” Fellas wasn’t too keen about it. But in having that meeting
with Tommy Boy, going to a Zulu Nation party at Hotel Amazon, Jazzy J
throwing on “Knee Deep” in the club and everybody going crazy in there,
and it’s one of my favorite records, I hit Dave and said, "That’s the
one.” I got a call out of nowhere from Paul and he said, “Bring those
records to the studio.” We just started putting things together and I
could see them in the back not too happy about this, but just letting it
go how we normally let things go. Let the creative process happen. Pos: I
was a big fan of that record and even in my mind at that period of
time, there were just certain things you shouldn’t touch. That’s such a
masterpiece and you’re going to touch that? I just didn’t think taking
“Knee Deep” was dope to me, but at the same time, me and Dave said we
just wanna fuck off on the rhymes, we’re going to take Jungle Brothers’
cadence “Black Is Black” how they were rhyming, and fuck it off. God was
having too much fun with us and said, “I’m going to make this your
biggest record.”
In an interview with HipHopDX, Mase, you said that if it weren’t for Quest coming out and talking how
he’s been talking, you guys probably would have remained mum regarding
your current situation with Tommy Boy. Pos: A
lot of these people were hitting us directly because they were
disappointed and concerned. You have one person who’s like, “Fuck that.
I’m setting it off.” Maseo: The trick is they
want us to think we won’t ever make money in this. Let’s call it for
what it is. The economic side of this is really unfair. Pos: We’re
saying this from a passion standpoint. It’s just being appalled from
this bullshit. We’re not some 18-year-old weary guys who transformed
into some broke ass middle class middle-aged dudes. We’ve been blessed
to be out here making our money without the benefit of benefitting from
our catalogue. We’ve been touring, merch, partnerships, sneakers,
features, doing all types of stuff. Whether it’s the first to make an
album with Nike. We’ve done so many things and keeping ourselves more
than afloat. Maseo: Grammy nomination without
Tommy Boy. Let’s talk business here. My value next to his is much
stronger. [Tom Silverman] folded. He’s just coming back. He has other
businesses going on via sampling companies. That baffles me,too. Why do
you wanna go into a business recklessly when you have another business
that’s about sampling? Why repeat a behavior that we know has been
damaging in the past? That’s the most underlying thing right now. There
are still people who would potentially come out the woodworks, paying
attention to what’s happening. There’s an asterisk next to our name when
it comes to sampling. We have been deemed copyright criminals.
For argument’s sake, let’s say we accept the split. Why are we doing
this with potential infractures? It’s not quite clear. His words
exactly, “If somebody comes, we’ll deal with it exactly as we dealt with
in the past.” And how was that? We settled with whatever we settled
with out of court, whether it be a million dollars, $100,00, $50,000. Pos: And
that comes out of the ten percent given to us. I’m just personally
trying to make sure you understand that I’m making this clear. I don’t
necessarily know what Tommy Boy means in the scheme of things. I don’t
give a fuck if they were Def Jam. What is wrong is wrong. If we were on
Universal right now and they were talking the same shit, it would be the
same energy and same argument. It’s just unfortunately they would have
to understand, you just offered us a drip of water out of a money
faucet. Hear me out. He literally offered us a drip, but what
you have to understand sir is that it may baffle you “Why didn’t the
n---er take the drip if water?” is because we’ve been surviving without
the faucet on. We literally, by the grace of our own wit, our own
creativity, our own treating people fairly, where we can treat a
gentleman like [Warner Music's senior vice president/head of urban
marketing], Chris Atlas fairly when he was working at Tommy Boy to where
years later he can make sure we get 2 Chainz on our album because he’s
the head honcho at Def Jam. We’ve always treated people fairly, so those
people always root for us. That’s why I’m not surprised people came out
on our behalf. People are like, “Yo, this is De La. These are decent
guys.” Thirty years in the game and you have six albums
under Tommy Boy, you’d think especially with what’s been going on the
last few days that a sense of morality has to come in where Tom reaches
out to have a conversation. Have there been any talks? Pos: Like
I said, man, personally I don’t want to make it seem like I’m attacking
this dude. I don’t care about his morality. I’m concerned from a
business standpoint trying to understand that in negotiating things,
there’s a level of fairness and respect. Maseo: Especially
if you claim the relationship you claim to have with us. It’s clear to
us we never had a relationship and he’s always going to do business
that’s favorable to him. I did speak to him. I spoke to him a few hours
before we did the first interview. Pos: I didn’t
want to talk to him. If he wanted to talk, I wanted him to step up and
not be the person that [he] always seems to [be], because I felt he is
the person who feels he can talk to us on a more personal standpoint
without involving the legal. Maseo: I was on the
phone with legal when that happened, and when he realized that was going
on, he got on the phone with his team, which was necessary. I wanted
that. What I didn’t want was him being able to say he never spoke to us,
because once it hits this and we hadn’t really spoken, based on the
relationship he claims he has, he’s a good manipulator. He’s been doing
this a long time. He gets you to believe he tried to reach out and try
to come to some resolution or we never brought this to his attention.
We’ve brought this to his attention. He’s been ignoring us for some time
until it got to the final hour where he expected us to be on-board to
make things smooth and dandy, and it’s just not. We’ve been asking
him to address these issues for a minute. It’s been up to the final
hour when he really addressed this. When he finally addressed it, there
were no changes on how he felt things needed to be. He used words like
what’s “customary” and what’s “standard”? He can legally do what he
wants. The issue that I raise is, in all of doing what you’re able to
do, did you clear it? Did you clear the samples when you bought the
catalogue back? Is it cleared? And what he said on the phone that if
anything comes up, we will deal with it the way we’ve dealt with it in
the past. And I know if that happens, we’re going to settle because
we’re in the wrong. You notice I’m saying “we.” Why am I saying “we”?
Because we suffer from that.
What if by chance somebody just came in and tried to buy the catalog back? Maseo:
I hope that’s an option. I hope that’s possible. At this point, we
don’t got nothing to lose. Like Pos said, we’ve been surviving without
the faucet. Pos: It’s just about us trying to
stay on course. We’ve always been very respectful. There have been times
in the past where we straight up had an issue with how Tommy Boy was
doing things. We’ve never, even at a young age, have tried to physically
harm anyone up at the office. We’ve never had people try to run up
there and do anything. That has been an issue sometimes in our career
where we’re the nice guys. Loyalty is a motherfucker. Pos: We’ve always tried to treat their company like it was our own. Maseo: All
in all, man, we’ve done things with integrity. Even as children. We’ve
apologized for our mistakes and we own our mistakes if there have been
any tantrums along the way but there’s never been anything threatening.
We deserve better than this, much better than this. There’s nothing to
really say anymore. Let the story be told. We don’t mint this being the
litmus test for things to come. Maybe this can change legislation. Who
knows? This can’t happen to any other artist. It’s totally bigger than
us. Let this be a lesson to any artist that’s out there if there’s any
other artist that’s going through this, come out and speak out. We’re
setting the tone. Let us know what’s up. Let’s figure out how to stop
these culture vultures. I'm going to stop calling names, but it hurts
that rich powerful dudes still get down like this greedy manner and
think this is OK. With Jay-Z helping out on the Tidal
front, he's someone that has the money to buy the catalog back for you
guys, right? Wouldn't that be an option? Maseo: If
someone’s willing to sell. The person has to be willing to sell at the
same time. At this point, we see how it goes from here. All I could say
is, our story is finally being told. Pos: Our story is told, but it definitely ain’t over. Maseo:
If the fans want to help out from here on out, don’t press play until
this thing is resolved. It’s gonna go up. Just don’t press play.
UPDATE Feb. 28 3:45pm ET: In a pair of Instagram posts Thursday, De La Soul said that Tidal has told the group that it will not stream the catalog until the issues outlined in this article are resolved: “Thank you Tidal, thank you Jay [Z, Tidal’s primary owner]”; the group also said that Tommy Boy “want to negotiate,
but only if we sign a confidentiality agreement first,” to which the
group replied, “How about we close a deal first, and then we agree to
keep the deal confidential.”
De La Soul’s
1989 debut “3 Feet High and Rising” is widely acknowledged as one of
hip-hop’s all-time classic albums, yet it and several other releases
from the group’s catalog have not been legally available on streaming
services due to longstanding complications over sample clearances (or
the lack thereof). And even 30 years later, as De La Soul’s longtime
label, Tommy Boy Records,
prepares to finally release the group’s catalog on streaming services,
the problems remain — and this week, the group spoke out about them.
Indeed, “3 Feet High and Rising,” produced by Prince Paul of
Stetsasonic, was a pioneering event not just in hip-hop history but in
the art of sample technology — and it suffered accordingly, as copyright
laws were rewritten as a result of it. The group was the first to be
sued by the now-famously litigious musicians Howard Kaylan and Mark
Volman of the Turtles, who went after De La over the unlicensed use of a
snippet of the Turtles’ song “You Showed Me” in “Transmitting Live From
Mars” (the suit was ultimately settled for a reported $1.7 million).
Similar problems have bedeviled several of the group’s other releases.
Over the years, the catalog has moved from Tommy Boy to Warner Bros. and
recently back to Tommy Boy, yet the complications have remained
unresolved.
On Tuesday, the group — Posdnuous (Kelvin Mercer), Trugoy (David
Jolicoeur) and Maseo (Vincent Mason Jr.) — put its collective feet down
and posted messages on Instagram claiming that due to the unsettled
business around the albums, the royalties they receive from the releases
will be miniscule, and on Wednesday they sat down for a 45-minute
interview with Sway Calloway on SiriusXM’s “Sway in the Morning.”
The first Instagram message reads: “Dear Fans … just got off the
phone with Tommy Boy Records … negotiations (or lack therof) to release
our catalog on all streaming platforms.. Uh oh.” The next message reads:
“Just got wind that Tommy Boy was not happy about our last post.
Touche. We are not happy about releasing our catalog under such
unbalanced, unfair terms. #RespectTheArtist.” A caption next to that
post reads, “For our fans to finally be able to stream and/or download
our music will be a dream come true! The reality for De La… what an ugly
greedy nightmare.”
The next post reads, “The music WILL be released digitally. After 30
years of good music and paying their debt to Hip Hop, De L Soul
unfortunately will not taste the fruit of their labor. Your purchases
will roughly go 90% Tommy Boy, 10% De La. Thank you. Sincerely yours,
#thephantom2milliondollardebt.”
A final post reads, “Monday, when confronted and questioned whether
or not all samples had been cleared for our catalgoe’s streaming
release, Tommy Boy felt that it would be better the move forward with
thte lresase and deal with all cleams/lawsuits later on… really? That’s
just not smart business. We don’t want to be sued. “ A caption next to
that one reads, “We are being placed in the line of fire. We understand
respect and appreciate your support and business. We regret that you and
fans have been place in the middle of this mess. De La Soul cannot
afford negligent hurried business. We are fighting for our livelihood.
Imagine trying to settle a #phantom2millionddollardebt and now possible lawsuits lurking???
Speaking with Sway on Wednesday, the group’s Maseo, explained, “For
some years, the catalog had been held up because … of the issues that
existed behind the projects, with samples not being cleared.” He then
acknowledges that few could have foreseen the forthcoming legal problems
around sampling in 1989.
“I don’t know what [Tommy Boy’s] deals were with clearing samples,
but back then a lot was probably done on a handshake, especially when
you’re an independent” label like Tommy Boy, he says. “Nothing comes to
the surface until it actually turns into something. If I was the record
company at that time, I would have probably thought it was a small thing
and not cleared it: ‘This little 30-second thing, who would come after
that?’ And it happened! I think by the time [the catalog] got to Warner
Bros., people started come out of the woodwork, and I think for the most
part [those] people are the ones whose business didn’t get dealt with.
“Now it’s 2019,” he continues, “Tommy Boy has been able to acquire
the catalog back, but there are still some infractions around the
catalog, things we’re sure aren’t cleared, that might have new potential
issues. Also, what’s on the table [contractually] for De La Soul is
unfavorable, especially based on the infractions that have taken place,
the bills that exist over time. And we have continued to pay the price,
and that’s one of our big concerns with [the streaming releases of their
albums].
The group says that it has never earned more than “peanuts” or
“pennies” on their recorded music, and instead has earned a living from
touring and merchandise.
“Because the catalog [hasn’t been available], it has [earned]
nothing,” Mase says, with Dave adding, “So we’ve been somewhat aimlessly
performing the music but we’re not getting any [income from it].”
Sway asks whether the group is not with the fact that these long-lost
albums are finally being made available on streaming services, which
has become the primary format for hundreds of millions of music fans.
“I can’t say I’m not with it,” Mase says, “I’m just not with the
administrative structure behind it. Let’s be straight up: We don’t
really financially benefit — there’s so many infractions around this
whole thing that we’ll probably never see no money from it or any
project that has these infractions.” Asked whether they’ve ever received any royalties from the albums,
Dave says, “Pennies, compared to what Tommy Boy was receiving.”
Yet De La Soul remained with Tommy Boy for six albums and 12 years.
“We never felt like any label was really good,” Mase explains, “but the
music ended up really doing well so no one could try to tell us how to
make music — we had our creative freedom the whole time. That was the
best thing,” he adds, “the only thing that was great [about remaining with Tommy Boy].”
The group gets into greater detail about these, and happier matters in the 45-minute interview below.
Photo: Jason Merritt/FilmMagic via Getty Images. Graphic: Rebecca Fassola.
by Alex McLevy 9/19/18 AVClub Power HourPower Hour creates one tight 60-minute set from a musician’s discography or a genre, picking both big hits and deeper cuts.De
La Soul is one of the most culturally significant and musically
influential hip-hop groups from the late ’80s and ’90s, but you wouldn’t
know it from looking at the current digital realm of music that
actually gets listened to. That’s because, by and large, De La Soul
isn’t there. Thanks to a messy thicket of legal entanglements involving
sample rights and intellectual property clearance questions, nothing
before the band’s 2004 release The Grind Date and the 2016 Kickstarter-funded ...And The Anonymous Nobody
are available on Spotify or other streaming sites. It’s not for lack of
trying; the group has been fighting lawyers, lawsuits, and former label
Warner Bros. for years to try and clear the way to post its music on
digital platforms, to no avail. It’s supremely frustrating—mostly
for the band, but also to the group’s legacy as rap pioneers and the
legions of kids who can’t easily access this key element of the genre’s
history, thereby threatening it. “We’re in the Library Of Congress, but
we’re not on iTunes,” De La’s Kelvin Mercer, a.k.a. Posdnuos, vented to the New York Times two years ago, referencing the landmark record 3 Feet High And Rising—the
first of their three-album collaboration with iconic producer Prince
Paul that resulted in some of the greatest music of the era—which was
entered into the historic Library Of Congress National Recording
Registry in 2010. If one of the greatest rap albums of all time is
limited to being purchased in hard copy when music’s digital existence
looks like the future, will it endure? Formed in 1987 in Long
Island, New York, De La Soul’s trio of Mercer, David Jude Jolicoeur, and
Vincent Mason (a.k.a. Posdnuos, Trugoy, and Maceo; a.k.a. Plug One,
Plug Two, Plug Three; a.k.a. a variety of other nicknames) were still in
high school when they began laying down rhymes over beats. It was a
demo tape of theirs which caught the attention of producer Prince Paul,
and led to the creation of an album so influential that the group spent a
good portion of its early years trying to outrun the shadow of its
massive debut success. 3 Feet High And Rising not only entered
the Library Of Congress and remains on many “best albums of the 20th
century” lists, but it also helped create and define the increasingly
diverse world of alternative hip-hop, standing in stark contrast to both
the gangsta rap boom and commercial stylings of forbears like Run DMC.
(The Village Voicereferred to it as “The only album that could rival Dr. Dre’s The Chronic in terms of the most influential rap album of all time.”) Follow-up De La Soul Is Dead was a very conscious attempt to escape the “hippie rap” pigeonholing the group earned with 3 Feet High’s
“D.A.I.S.Y. Age” vibe and erudite, playful lyrics espousing positivity.
From then on, the restless creative muse of De La Soul never let up, as
the eclectic yet still-signature sound of the Prince Paul
collaborations evolved into the darker musings of Stakes Is High, the party-time production vibes and mature ruminations on Art Official Intelligence Vols. 1 and 2 (Mosaic Thump and Bionix), and the masterful brevity of The Grind Date. Despite a 12-year gap between albums, the Kickstarter-funded ...And The Anonymous Nobody,
released in 2016, proved the group had lost none of its restless
creative muse. The members have guested on any number of other projects,
from Handsome Boy Modeling School to De La’s best-known collaboration with Gorillaz for the Grammy-winning “Feel Good Inc.” In
short, De La Soul’s place in the pantheon of hip-hop greats should be a
lot more assured than it is. Thanks to forces beyond its control
steering the future of its discography’s digital availability, the act’s
creative legacy is in danger of fading from view. (It’s one of the
reasons De La Soul gave away all its music for free
one day in 2014.) Luckily, YouTube and its many-headed hydra of
licensing avoidance exists (we’re unable to create a Spotify playlist
for you as a result of said legal issues). Consider this a primer on the
group’s greatness: Take a listen, see what catches your ear, and go buy
that album. De La Soul has more than earned it. “Whatever happened to the MC?” It’s the question that kicks off Stakes Is High,
an album that not only began De La Soul’s first musical output without
Prince Paul in the producer’s chair, but also redefined the group’s
creative voice into something harder-edged, more willing to go to dark
places lyrically and musically. There had always been mature themes and
blunt poetry in De La’s arsenal (“I am Posdnuos / I be the new
generation of slaves here to make paper to buy a record exec rakes,”
they rapped on Buhloone Mindstate), but this was something new:
a full-length meditation on the state of the hip-hop union, a concern
for the commercialized decline of the art, and an indictment of the
worrying elements of gangster rap. Plus, it all starts with this banger
of a track.
“The Magic Number” (1989)
In a just world, we wouldn’t have to include this obvious of a track
because it would be far too well-known, but since there’s a whole
generation of younger folks who have likely never heard it (and those of
us who have will never get tired of it), the first real song on 3 Feet High And Rising
is also a great way to demonstrate just how fresh and original the
group sounded in its debut. Funny, inventive, with inspired rhymes and
innovative sampling to match anything on Paul’s Boutique, “The Magic Number” lit the fuse on the album and the artists who made it.
“The Grind Date” (2004)
Some slick spoken-word elements by writer and actor Bönz Malone
aside, this is pure De La Soul at its catchiest. The title track from
the group’s seventh record, it manages the feat of being an absolute
banger while still making some salient points about the thorny
connections between art and commercialization, one of the group’s most
common recurring themes. Also, bonus points for managing to run a Yes
sample through almost the entire song and have it never get old.
“Eye Patch” (1993)
With its third record, De La Soul was ready to press forward
artistically to someplace more jazzy, more soulful, more experimental.
In practice, this meant including tracks like the instrumental “I Be Blowin’”
(with horn by Maceo Parker), guest appearances by Japanese rappers Scha
Dara Parr and Takagi Kan (on “Long Island Wildin’”), and an ever more
refined sense of groove that permeates the record, creating a greater
cohesion than that found on the sprawling first two records. “Eye Patch”
announces this new focus by getting in, delivering incredible verses
and hooks (along with one of the best and shortest mid-song breakdowns
ever at 1:29), a smooth outro, and getting out, all in two and a half
minutes.
“Held Down” (2001)
One of the most thoughtful and evocative tracks from De La’s Art Official Intelligence
records, “Held Down” takes a spiritual melody by CeeLo as its refrain
and weds it to some profound thoughts on aging, fatherhood, and the
difficulty of finding oneself in the modern world. Posdnuos has always
been underappreciated as an unpredictable and inventive rapper, and here
he delivers a genuinely affecting series of verses, culminating in an
interaction with his child: “When I’m watchin’ the news, and my daughter
walks in / And chooses to ask, ‘Why were all those people on the floor
sleeping, covered in red?’ / I told her that they were looking for God,
but found religion instead.” Heartfelt and moving, it’s an album
highlight.
“A Roller Skating Jam Named Saturdays” (1991)
And on the other end of the spectrum, we’ve got a party. An
impressively arranged series of old-school samples of disco, Tower Of
Power, and rock band Chicago come together to create a straight-up dance
track that doubles as an ode to the roller-skating grooves of
yesteryear. With appearances by Q-Tip and singer Vinia Mojica, this
showcase for De La Soul’s ability to get a crowd moving is one of the
rare moments of pure joy on the otherwise bleaker De La Soul Is Dead, as the group tried to shed its “hip-hop flower children” image.
“Whoodeeni” (2016)
Mired in the nightmare of copyright-issue purgatory, when De La Soul
turned to Kickstarter in early 2015 to raise money for a new album, it
was determined to avoid the fate of its early records. Instead, the trio
turned to the Rhythm Roots Allstars, recording hundreds of hours of
improvised music that it then whittled down to craft the backing tracks
for ...And The Anonymous Nobody, released the following year to
critical acclaim, De La Soul’s best Billboard chart debut ever (at #1,
no less), and a Grammy nomination for Best Rap Album. With a seriously
great guest verse from 2 Chainz, “Whoodeeni” operates on the level of
sci-fi paranoia, its jittery beat and sonar-level bloops creating a
sense of dread under a hypnotic groove.
“My Writes” (1999)
Sometimes, you just want to remind everyone of your lyrical skills. Art Official Intelligence: Mosaic Thump
is more of a party record than anything, an “everything and the kitchen
sink” release overflowing with guest appearances, oddball skits, and
high-concept structure, but in its best moments it does little more than
get down to the business of spitting rhymes over crisply conceived
beats. “My Writes” includes some great verses from Tha Alkaholiks and
Xzibit, but reserves its best moments for the De La crew, boasting on
another level of slickness. “So pass the mic so I can put in my share / I
rip it from home to L.A. / With connecting flights to rip it
elsewhere,” Pos rhymes, and he’s barely begun.
“Me, Myself & I” (1989)
The song that really introduced the wider world to the Plugs, the first single from 3 Feet High And Rising
to get an accompanying video with a decent budget was also the first
(and only) track to hit number one on the U.S. R&B charts, as well
as topping the Billboard Club Play chart. An infectious set of samples
matches the wry, insightful lyrics about the group’s image, specifically
targeting the erroneous “hippie rap” label affixed to them early on.
But really, it’s just a great song, endlessly catchy and a classic
example of Prince Paul’s influence on the trio’s sound.
“Game Show Skits” (1989)
It
wouldn’t be an accurate assessment of De La Soul if we didn’t include a
skit. The properly maligned “comedy skit interlude” that has largely
(and happily) died out in the rap genre was basically invented by the
trio, which, along with Prince Paul, layered the between-song moments on
its earlier records with a thick helping of its carefree sense of
humor, cracked sensibilities, and sly cultural commentary. It may be an
ignominious accolade in retrospect, but there’s a reason skits took hold. They were cheap, easy, and for the teenage market that obsessed over these records, they were like auditory crack cocaine. On 3 Feet High And Rising,
they make for some silly and charming interludes between tracks,
nowhere near the wheezy, exhausting bloat-monsters they would become.
“Breakadawn” (1993)
Part of what makes Buhloone Mindstate
such an exhilarating listen is the way it manages to blend styles and
techniques into a cohesive whole. Take “Breakadawn”: On first listen,
it’s one of the most Tribe Called Quest-like tracks De La Soul ever
recorded. Even Pos and Dave’s verses hearken back to the collective
Native Tongues Posse sounds that spawned the respective groups (along
with Black Sheep, Queen Latifah, and more), always friendly and ready
with a guest verse for one another. But the alternating samples and
third-verse reduction of the song to its barest boom-bap elements reveal
a restless creative muse lurking behind the groove, and an artistic
impulse to shake up even the most seemingly straightforward track.
“Oooh.” (2000)
It’s got a very silly accompanying video (that repeatedly stops the
music for comic interludes), but “Oooh.” is a straight-up party jam, one
of De La’s best. With guest Redman acting as a warped master of
ceremonies, exhorting the crowd to ever-increasing levels of
participation, the bouncy and effervescent beat is bubblegum-simple,
leaving the De La crew to dole out some of its more light-hearted lyrics
in this ode to party time. It’s no coincidence this is one of the only
times Prince Paul has resurfaced behind the producer’s seat,
co-producing with De la Soul.
“Forever” (2009)
It’s not a proper album per se, but in 2009 Nike approached De La Soul
to create one of the sneaker company’s much-lauded workout mixes. The
trio responded with an inspired burst of creativity, Are You In?—44
minutes of sonic exploration that largely eschew the jazzy grooves of
the act’s earlier work, instead focusing on thumping beats and
undulating electronic rhythms. The final segment of the single track,
“Forever,” is an excellent example of where De La was at creatively,
bringing in producer Young RJ to give it a free-floating, spacey tone,
perfect for the closing minutes of a sweat-filled odyssey.
“Stakes Is High” (1996)
The
title track off the band’s blistering fourth album serves as a
blueprint for where the art form of rap was in 1996. With production by
the great J Dilla, one of De La’s finest collaborators, the group
excoriates its small-minded contemporaries, with Dave’s scornful verse
attacking Puffy-style excess (“I’m sick of talkin’ ’bout blunts, sick of
Versace glasses”) feeling more like a call to arms than a verse on a
thundering hip-hop track. It’s a rousing indictment of the flashy
hollowness of mainstream hip-hop, and De La makes you feel every word.
“Rock Co.Kane Flow” (2004)
A magnificent, malevolent end to the group’s tightest record, “Rock Co.Kane
Flow” features one of the most brilliant beat syncopations in the
history of the form. Each verse slowly builds to a climax, as the beat
builds behind the Plugs, slowly escalating and spiraling into a glitchy
pummeling before dropping back into the groove. (And sometimes, just to
mix it up, they slow down instead.) It’s fitting that MF Doom pops in
for a guest appearance, as it’s an apocalyptic-sounding track, unlike
anything they’ve done before or since. Once you hear it, you can’t
forget it, and it makes for a fitting conclusion to this Power Hour.
It's Grammy Night, and Posdnuos is bugging. His two partners in De La Soul,
Trugoy the Dove and Baby Huey Maseo, are nowhere to be found. He had
planned to work tonight, to master “Ring Ring Ring (Ha Ha Hey),” the
first single from the forthcoming album De La Soul Is Dead, but somebody brought the wrong tape to the studio. He didn’t want to go to the awards show – “We went last year when we were nominated [for Best Rap Performance] and saw what it was,” he says –
and he would much rather go home to Amityville, out on Long Island,
than go to any of the post-Grammy parties. Finally, Posdnuos gives up. “I hate hip-hop!” he cries. “I’m gonna start making jazz records.” Considering De La Soul’s mercurial past, it’s hard to tell how much Posdnuos is joking. The group’s celebrated 1989 debut, 3 Feet High and Rising– full of goofy humor, poppy melodic hme mooks and stunningly original samples from the likes of Steely Dan and Johnny Cash – represented the triumphant coming of age of middle-class, black suburban children of the Seventies. De La Soul Is Dead is a sprawling, ambitious challenge to the immediate gratification of 3 Feet High.
Slower and often more serious, it explodes the expectations created by
the first album, just as that record destroyed all definitions of rap
that had preceded it. The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time: De La Soul, ‘3 Feet High and Rising’
Eventually, Mase finds his way to Manhattan’s Calliope Studios. It’s a
party night for Mase, nominally De La’s DJ, and he, his brother and
members of a new group called the Black Sheep burst in and start
freestyling, trading rhymes nonstop for the next few hours. Dove, true
to his name and his reputation, proves more elusive – he won’t surface for an interview until a full week later. The contrast between the Serious One, the Playful One and the Spacey
One is so striking it almost seems like a cartoon. But bringing out
these different temperaments was part of De La Soul’s plan for the new
album. “The way we came off on the first album was a lot of bugging out,
a lot of fun,” says Pos. “It was all about these three kids just coming
into the business, trying to do something different. This time around,
we’re in the business, we’ve been around the world and learned more
things. More things to write about.”
With its Day-Glo cover, peace signs and flowers and its rhymes about
the coming of the “D.A.I.S.Y. Age” (which stands not for a new form of
flower power but for “Da Inner Sound, Y’all”), 3 Feet High and Rising
earned the members of De La Soul an image as the hippies of hip-hop, a
description the group has never accepted. Dove thinks that “100 percent
of the people listening to De La Soul were really attached to the image
and not to what we were trying to say.” Pos says that when he and his
partners returned to the studio for the new album, they were determined
to shake the familiar De La image. “We didn’t want to be pinned down to a
visual look,” he says, “and so we thought, ‘This whole daisy thing has
to just die.”’ Indeed, the stylish black-and-white video for “Ring Ring Ring”
includes a slow-motion shot of a pot of daisies falling off a table and
shattering to bits. It’s a neat summary of De La Soul Is Dead‘s
achievement; from the unblinking anticrack narrative “My Brother’s a
Basehead” to the elaborate tale of sexual abuse and revenge in “Millie
Pulled a Pistol on Santa,” this is the work of an older, wiser De La
Soul. Not that the group’s lighter touch is gone – its repartee with a
Burger King waitress in “Bitties in the BK Lounge,” for instance, is at
least as silly as anything on the first album. “I feel like we’re showing something else to the people we introduced
to a whole new sound on the first album,” says Pos. “Like a lot of the
white kids – we’re bringing them to more of a street level this time.”
Mase says: “We wanted to show the one side that, yo, it ain’t gotta be a
rough beat all the time. And let the other side know there is a rough
side.” This expanded scope makes for a demanding, often bewildering brew.
The beats are slow for a hip-hop album, and the grooves are often
interrupted by spoken-word segments or careening tempo changes. The
three rappers are sometimes too clever for their own good. But they’ve
anticipated some of the criticism they’ll undoubtedly provoke: The
game-show theme that ran through 3 Feet High has been replaced
by a “read-along” story of three knucklehead hoods who bully a
schoolmate into giving them a De La Soul tape he’s found in the garbage.
They’re not impressed. “These rhymes are so corny,” our narrators
complain. “Sounds like Vanilla Ice wrote ’em.” The
hip-hop world has been waiting so long for this album that it’s easy to
forget just how young the members of De La Soul are. At twenty-two,
Trugoy is the oldest, but the trio has been together for almost six
years. Kelvin Mercer (Posdnuos, 21), David Jolicoeur (Trugoy) and
Vincent Mason Jr. (Maseo, 21, formerly Pase Master Mase) first met in
high school in Amityville, a quiet suburb about an hour’s drive from
Manhattan but one that has not been untouched by the city’s problems.
After kicking around in assorted local groups, the three recorded a home
demo of their own “Plug Tunin’,” which sampled Liberace and utilized
large doses of their private, whacked-out slang. Mase played the song for his neighbor, Prince Paul (Paul Houston) of
Stetsasonic, who started circulating the tape among local DJs. Soon, De
La Soul was the talk of the New York rap world and the subject of a
bidding war. The trio signed with the rap-specialty label Tommy Boy
Records in 1988. Mase was still in high school. Prince Paul, who Pos calls “the fourth member of De La Soul,” produced 3 Feet High,
an astonishing contrast to rap’s tired bass pumping and chest thumping.
Soon, the press was running lengthy explanations of the group’s in
jokes, expressions and names (Trugoy is yogurt, Jolicoeur’s favorite
food, spelled backward; Posdnuos is an inversion of Sop Sound, Mercer’s
old DJ tag). De La’s impact was even more visible on the street. Even as
the three admonished listeners to stop wearing trendy clothing on “Take
It Off” and preached nonconformity on the album’s first track
(“Casually see but don’t do like the Soul/’Cause seeing and doing are
actions for monkeys”), their bright, baggy shirts and short dreadlocks
became the year’s most copied styles. But late in 1989, De La Soul’s creative process came under fire; the
group became the subject of the biggest antisampling lawsuit ever.
“Transmitting Live From Mars” is a minute-long gag made up of a
French-language instruction record played over an eerie organ loop. Flo
and Eddie of the Turtles (and now New York radio DJs) recognized the
snatch of keyboards from one of their old records and, alleging that
they had never been approached for permission to use it, filed a $1.7
million suit. (The parties settled out of court last August for an
undisclosed amount.) The implications of the lawsuit, more than anything else, slowed the release of De La Soul Is Dead.
The album was essentially completed last fall, but it has taken almost
four months to process the paperwork necessary to clear all of the
samples. “Now everybody is looking for De La Soul to sample them,” says
Mase. And indeed, just before the album was mastered, Herb Alpert
refused permission to use the Dating Game theme on a new comic bit,
which had to be pulled. This time, though, there are virtually no samples as instantly
recognizable as the Hall and Oates or Parliament-Funkadelic riffs on the
debut. “Before, I just sampled things that I grew up on and loved, the
music our parents listened to,” says Mase. “I still do that, but now
I’ll sample anything – I’ll sample knocking on the wall, I’ll sample Tony! Toni! Tone! – anything that sounds good.” Such wildly imaginative sampling, a refreshing departure from the usual, overfamiliar James Brown breaks,
has extended De La Soul’s appeal far beyond traditional hip-hop fans,
most notably to white college kids. But will that crowd be able to
follow the twists and turns of De La Soul Is Dead? Dove says: “It’s not the same feeling as 3 Feet,
where as soon as you put the needle on the record, you jumped to it.
But I think people will have faith in us and say, ‘Let’s listen to it
for a little while, let’s see what’s really happening.”’ Mase says: “We
see this album as directed more to our peers, but it also gives our
alternative audience a chance to hear what our peers listen to. Really,
instead of being a step ahead, it’s a step back to where our roots are.” Some of the subject matter, though, is a decisive step forward. “My
Brother’s a Basehead,” a bonus cut on the CD, is the most hard-hitting
rap the group has recorded yet. Posdnuos says the song’s powerful story
is no accident and no joke; he wrote it from personal experience. “One
of my older brothers was fucked up on crack,” he says. “I wrote that
song basically straight from the anger that I had inside.” Happily, one
detail is changed from real life: Unlike the song’s subject, Pos’s
brother is currently in rehab. Similarly, “Millie Pulled a Pistol on Santa,” an almost surreal and
technically breathtaking rap about a friendly social worker who sexually
abuses his daughter, is based on a story related to Posdnuos by a
friend. “Whatever we see,” says Pos, “whether it’s from within us or
what we learn or see in the streets, that’s what we write about.” Mase
says that the new album is “more self-explanatory” than 3 Feet High:
“It’s like looking into a mirror. We even wanted to have a mirror as the
inner sleeve. Because looking to the album, you see yourself.” The members of De La Soul are trying to do something no rap group
has ever really done: They’re trying to grow up. It would have been easy
to return to the D.A.I.S.Y. path; 3 Feet High, Part 2 probably
would have flown off the shelves. “The record company was very into the
ingredients that went into the first album,” says Posdnuos, “but we
told them we were gonna try something new, and it could either fail or
work. If it fails, we don’t feel like it’s gonna kill our careers.” Dove
says: “The whole D.A.I.S.Y. Age thing worked, so we went along with it.
We wanted to take that ladder, and then when we got to the top, we
could do our own thing from that point on.” De La Soul cultivated one of the strongest, freshest and most
identifiable images in hip-hop, but having to stay in character outside
the studio very quickly proved too limiting for these bright, shy
rappers. “Every minute you’re on guard,” Pos says. “I can’t put the
Posdnuos thing down for a second.” He cites an unlikely star as
inspiration: “If you look at David Bowie and compare how he changed all through the years, that’s how De La Soul would like to come across.” Some things, of course, don’t change overnight. The members of De La
Soul are still three Long Island kids, the kind who drink Hawaiian Punch
and who still joke that their real ambition is to open a doughnut shop.
But Posdnuos says: “People ask, ‘Has success changed you?’ Obviously,
it has – it changes everything from eating habits to thinking habits.
It’s hectic, I’m losing hair, but it’s cool.” And do people still ask if
the guys in De La Soul are hippies? “When we go to photo shoots,
everyone wants to mess with flowers,” says Posdnuos, “but all that is
starting to be cleared up. Now everyone wants us to be with caskets.” De La Soul is dead. Long live De La Soul. This story is from the April 18th, 1991 issue of Rolling Stone. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/sasha-frere-jones/free-de-la-soul-day
De La Soul in Los Angeles, 2013. Photograph by David Livingston/Getty.
If you go to the band De La Soul’s Web site,
you can download its entire catalogue for free. You should do this—I
own most of it, somewhere, but I’m downloading it anyway, because who
the hell knows where anything is now. There was a moment when De La Soul
was it. The Long Island group’s début, “3 Feet High and Rising,” topped the Village Voice’s1989 Pazz & Jop Critic’s Poll and laid the ground for a cohort that eventually called itself the Native Tongues crew, which included De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, Black Sheep, and The Jungle Brothers.
Prince
Paul’s production on “3 Feet High and Rising” incorporated children’s
records, Led Zeppelin samples, and a Turtles sample, which set off one of the earliest high-profile copyright lawsuits.
De La Soul’s music was unorthodox not only because it was unconcerned
with normative ideas of hip-hop or with the tough-guy persona that was
creeping into a genre originally built for dancing and storytelling—De
La and Prince Paul opened the field by simply letting the weird in. This
may be why so many musicians cite them as an inspiration, even though
there is very little to bind their descendants,
aesthetically. The “Beatles of rap” tag hung around for a while, as did
a “hippie” reputation, though it was more likely a catholic, rootless
approach that made De La Soul valuable. De La Soul’s Posdnuos,
eclipsed by a pissing match between the East and West Coasts, is still
one of the greatest m.c.s of all time. His rhymes, built from gnomic,
chopped-up references and chained together into cockeyed rhythmic
packets, are in the DNA of rappers, from Raekwon and Cam’ron, who favor
the few and the weird over the many and the linear. And there’s
so-called conscious, or positive, rap scene, which claims De La Soul,
but I doubt that any members of the trio particularly want credit for
that. De La Soul were never as programmatic as they seemed, which is why
they are only several degrees of hostility away from a collective like Odd Future, who have a similar dedication to disorientation and fluorescence. You’ve got one day. Use it well.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Sasha Frere-Jones worked at The New Yorker as a staff writer and pop-music critic for ten years, beginning in 2004.
“For the first time, we’re going to sample ourselves.” That is how De La Soulinitially
described its eighth album and first in 12 years, when announced last
March. The legacy hip-hop trio would offer a few more specifics. The
basis of these samples were over 200 hours of jam sessions from over the
past three years. De La Soul then
mined those recordings for sounds to chop, loop and layer. But somehow,
even that explanation makes that creative process seem simple. That is, compared to how its chief architects describe it after
the fact. There were 25 session musicians, 16 days where they recorded
near around the clock. There was the Kickstarter campaign,
which De La Soul launched after courting several major labels. Sampling
attorneys remain the bane of the group’s existence. Only one member of
De La Soul even bought up You’re Welcome. That would be the whole other album that the group would surely have finished by now, had the central conceit behind And the Anonymous Nobody not sounded so damn intriguing. For emcees Kelvin “Posdnuos” Mercer and David “Dave” Jolicoceur,
plus DJ Vincent “Maseo” Mason, the pursuit of such independence is well
worth the effort. De La Soul
are no longer the quasi-hippie children of their 1989 debut, 3 Feet High and Rising. But the legal drama surrounding its James Brown, Smokey Robinson and Johnny Cash samples
have threatened to overtake the group’s legacy. In 1991, the Turtles
sued for a reported seven figures over a 12-second snippet. De La Soul’s
early record contracts also only cleared samples for “vinyl and
cassette.” The fate of its discography has been in the hands of Warner
Bros., who acquired De La’s first label Tommy Boy’s catalog in 2002. But
even as album anniversaries passed, Warner still “don’t want to deal”
with the legal trouble, says the group.
To call De La Soul sentimental would be a stretch. De La Soul Is Dead, which just turned 25, did away with 3 Feet High’s freewheeling approach a mere two years later. But the ambitious And the Anonymous Nobody shows how far the group will go to prove that it isn’t dead. The point of sampling, De La Soul once
argued, was to reenact how rappers used to lay down verses to DJs
spinning records at the neighborhood park. Beastie Boys were also
pushing this collage-like technique to new levels of sophistication. Now
25 years after the Turtles’ lawsuit, though, sampling is either
reserved for free releases or major releases by marquee names like Kanye
West. Tim Latham, who engineered parts of De La Soul is Dead and the entirety of 1993’s Buhloone Mindstate and 1996’s Stakes Is High, saw how other artists reacted firsthand.
“Not particularly with De La, but other artists, we would recreate
samples and make them sound as close as possible, which would bring me
back to my karaoke-studio days,” he told Frank151 in 2009. “My
well-honed skills of making records sound like other records came into
play.” The one memory from its past that De La Soul holds dearest is the making of 3 Feet High and Rising.
The group was working with Prince Paul, who was part of pioneering
hip-hop bands Stetsasonic. But Posdnuos (“soundsop” backwards), Dave
(then Trugoy, or “yogurt” backwards) and Maseo worked without knowing—or
caring—how music “should” be done. That isn’t to say De La haven’t
reached similar creative heights since. Buhloone Mindstate featured Maceo Parker and Pee Wee Ellis of James Brown’s
horn section, a decade after, via sampling, their brass stabs became
part of hip-hop’s blueprint. But even today, De La Soul must consider
the music industry’s constraints as much, if not more so than when they
were teens. And the Anonymous Nobody is no exception. “For me, definitely it was all based on our stamp on history, and
the issues that we have with our back catalog, then moving into the
future of making music and still being who we are creatively, and still
pulling from sampling,” Maseo says. The record’s source material came courtesy of Rhythm Roots
Allstars, who has recorded with Rakim and Ghostface Killah while backing
De La Soul on
tour for the past decade. On day one at LA’s Vox Studios, De La asked
the collective to channel their chief influences: Otis Redding, Lee
Dorsey, Johnny Cash, Barry White. But by day two, Rhythm Roots Allstars
played whatever came to mind, which was even more wide-ranging than what
De La initially had in mind. Up to 25 musicians came in bringing
tambourines, cowbells, triangles, flugelhorns, harps. The Beatles’ 1968 left turn Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band came up in discussions. Posdnuos thought back to those 3 Feet High and Rising sessions. Maseo remembered when Gorillaz featured De La Soul in “Feel Good Inc.” That 2005 single was Damon Albarn sidestepping into Rick James punk-funk, without any regard to his past with bratty Brit rock band Blur.
“At first we were doing certain styles,” says Rhythm Roots
Allstars percussionist and founder Davey Chegwidden. “Then as we got
more comfortable, we started taking more changes and playing styles that
wouldn’t be thought of as a hip-hop record. Anytime we played something
that would sound like a typical De La track, they’d be like, ‘Oh no.’
When we’d go into more orchestral or more rock or more country, they’d
go, ‘Oh, that’s cool.’” “Lord Intended” featuring Justin Hawkins, the flamboyant vocalist
from the Darkness, sounds recorded straight out a dingy dive. At first
De La Soul envisioned Axl Rose, Lenny Kravitz and
Dave Navarro on lead vocals. Jack Black recorded a take but wasn’t
happy with it. But when someone on De La’s team suggested Hawkins, who
also happened to be a fan, the group’s Dave was all in. “He’s not only
got that classic rock star sensibility, but he’s got a sense of humor
going on as well,” he says. And the Anonymous Nobody makes heel turns from a medieval
procession (“Royalty Capes”) to backyard funk (“Pain”), eerie post-punk
(“Snoopies”) to an impassioned Usher hook (“Greyhounds”). “Drawn,”
featuring Little Dragon, is anchored only by a Posdnuos verse tucked in
its last 30 seconds. “Whoodeeni” features what may be 2 Chainz’s
knottiest verse ever—a display in lyricism that may surprise De La fans. “Honestly we were like, ‘We should get Raekwon from Wu-Tang
[Clan] to rhyme on it,’” Posdnuos says. “Rae was busy doing whatever it
was he was doing. But in putting it together, I wrote a rhyme
immediately, and Dave from the group started putting together his verse.
Then he was like, ‘You know what, Merc. I hear this chant going on. I
don’t think it’s necessarily like Fatman Scoop, but I hear 2 Chainz.’ I
didn’t know what he heard, but I was just immediately intrigued by it.
‘Shit, yeah. Let’s do it.’ When I reached out to his people, we were
like, ‘hey, we would like maybe 2 Chainz to try to do a chorus to this.’
His people immediately hit us back and was like, ‘Chainz, he doesn’t
want to do a chorus. He would want to rhyme on it.’ I was like, holy
shit.” De La Soul
could make a few more records of tight-knit,
densely-layered collages from the leftover sounds of those sessions.
That has been the group’s specialty. But for The Anonymous Nobody, the group reveled in the freewheeling nature of those jam sessions. Songs become portals into completely different worlds. “Of course there are records that people were writing,” Dave
says. “The Stevie Wonders, the Isaac Hayes, the Barry Whites, they were
producers and writers. But there’s stuff like Funkadelic, Ohio Players
and Earth Wind and Fire, and so many other groups that were just
jamming. When someone happened, it became special. For us coming from a
hip-hop point of view, this album was a big learning process. We didn’t
realize how records and live musicians and bands were making songs. It
was a revelation for us.” And the Anonymous Nobody features 11 guests total, also
including Jill Scott, Snoop Dogg, Estelle and Pete Rock. Several of
these guests were already confirmed by last March, when De La Soul
launched a Kickstarter campaign
to fund the album. The group asked for $110,000, or the lower echelon
of what major labels offered for a recording budget.
“They were coming up between $110,000 and $150,000, but with all
these stipulations to give up a significant amount of control,” Maseo
says. “That’s where the idea of crowd-funding came more into play.”
“We were out our 10th year already, so we were realistic,” he
adds. “We’d been away for a while. ‘Okay, we’ll go for the lowest
number.’ And we also don’t want to look like we begging, either.” The Kickstarter campaign
ended two months later with $600,829 in contributions. But De La Soul’s
reach could still stand to grow. Less than 12,000 people backed And the Anonymous Nobody, which isn’t an Adele-sized audience, but a dedicated cult following, albeit one that could stand to be much bigger, given De La Soul’s influence looms over hip-hop today. “It wasn’t like 200,000 people involved with the $600,000,” Maseo
says. “It was just 11,000 people. So I’m like, yeah, there’s people out
there who really care about what we did.” More than anything, the money raised from the Kickstarter campaign allowed for total control of all aspects of And the Anonymous Nobody.
De La Soul is releasing the album via its own AOI Records, which
entailed handling the financial particulars as well. And this time
around, the biggest setback wasn’t the samples. (“We got a couple of James Brown hits
here,” Maseo says, “but I figure it was five things that needed to be
cleared for this album. Five [samples] versus 5,000 is a major
difference.”) Originally scheduled for a September 2015 release, De La
Soul pushed And the Anonymous Nobody back because the group was getting permission itself to feature every artist from their respective labels. Last February, De La Soul also inked a new distribution deal with Kobalt (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, The Pet Shop Boys, Prince). “Getting the creative side of [And the Anonymous Nobody] done was one thing,” Posdnuos says. “That actually turned out to be easy.”
De La Soul
is tempted to go though similar lengths—a petition,
if not a crowd-funding campaign—for the rest of its catalog. The group
hopes to see fans reach out to music providers like iTunes, if not
Warner Bros. directly. “We’ve been beating down on these doors for years now,” Dave
says. “It’s obviously an issue about spending money to do it, compared
to making money after it’s done, and I think they just don’t see that
it’s worth it. But if the fans were to say that they want it, I’m sure
that would make a difference.” But first, The Anonymous Nobody: Nothing about De La
Soul—its music, or relationship to the music industry—has been simple.
That doesn’t change with this album, coming nearly 30 years after De
La’s first. Yet in the years that have passed since, the group’s demands
have become clearer to understand. All that De La Soul has
ever wanted was to be another viable option for a hip-hop fan. That is
what the group was when it toured with N.W.A., LL Cool J and MC Hammer.
And that is what the group could be, in an age where Kendrick Lamar and
J. Cole are the default examples of hip-hop outside the norm, adding to
what is already available. “We’re of the youngest genre—so do we not
have room to grow like any other genre?” Maseo says. “Can we grow to be
80 years old? Because we just turned 40.” The answers to his questions could well be answered starting Aug. 26, when And the Anonymous Nobody
will be released on iTunes, Spotify and TIDAL. Most music fans take
this accessibility for granted. But for De La Soul, its latest album
could mean freedom.
De
La Soul, the rap group that played at the Ritz on Saturday night, was,
in many ways, the perfect group for the mostly college-age audience. The
three musicians were witty, they avoided the sexism and
self-aggrandizement that filters through much of hip-hop, and they
looked solidly middle class, eschewing brand-name clothing and gold that
other rap acts work with.
On
record, De La Soul is occasionally political, but not enough to get in
the way of the fun. Above all, the guys are characters: the ones at a
frat party who thrive on mania.
They
also have a hugely successful hit in their album ''Three Feet High and
Rising,'' which has been at the top of the black album charts in
Billboard for the last six weeks. With their media-drenched set of
references, quick-cut sampling style, psychedelic imagery and elevation
of personal banter to the symbolic, they've already offered much-needed
options in the rap world.
But
there are major problems in translating their carefully crafted
personalities to live stage performance. For one thing, in both their
appearances at the Ritz, on Saturday and opening recently for the group
Living Colour, the ingenuity of their sampling and song construction
were buried in a muddy mix. The time frames they've used on their album,
where short scraps of pieces flow quickly, are hard to reproduce on
stage.
Instead,
the band went through a series of its hits - ''Plug Tunin','' ''Jenifa
Taught Me (Derwin's Revenge)'' - in which the two rappers, Posdnous and
Truegoy the Dove, would rap in unison, occasionally breaking off to
confront each other.
At
their best they seemed on the verge of inventing a new type of concert -
part talk show, part rap concert - where their funny conversations and
routines were as important as their raps, even if the funniest lines
were accusations about Truegoy's status as a virgin.
On
Aug. 26, De La Soul released their new album and the Anonymous Nobody…
Their first studio LP in 12 years, and ninth full-length in total,
Posdnous, Maseo, and Dave are continuing their sampling legacy, but with
an unheard of twist that will ensure no million-plus lawsuits follow
its release: sampling themselves.
Over
the course of three years, De La Soul recorded somewhere between 200
and 300 hours of original material by the Rhythm Roots Allstars, their
touring 10-piece funk and soul band. From that material, the trio
chopped, pasted, and looped together the foundation of their 17-track
album. De La Soul then employed another 25 musicians to play on the
album, and queued up a mixed bag of A-listers for features that
includes, among others, Snoop Dogg, Jill Scott, Damon Albarn, Little
Dragon, 2 Chainz, Usher, and David Byrne.
Unlike
any other album in their catalogue, and the Anonymous Nobody… could
represent a new era for sampling, much like De La Soul’s 1989 debut
album, 3 Feet High and Rising, revolutionized sampling in hip hop.
Instead of hinging on James Brown loops and breakbeats, De La Soul and
producer Prince Paul dipped their hands into crates sooty and neglected,
pairing artists like Jefferson Starship and Vaughan Mason & Crew on
the same track.
While
De La Soul pulled from a variety of popular artists — Tom Waits, Bob
Marley & The Wailers, Lenny Kravitz, Johnny Cash — and songs that
just about anyone would recognize today — I Can’t Go for That (No Can
Do)” by Hall & Oates, “(Sittin’ On) the Dock of the Bay” by Otis Redding, “Best of My Love” by The Emotions
— their first three albums (De La Soul Is Dead and Buhloone Mindstate
being the second and third, respectively) are filled with gems out of
left field. Here are 20 of our favorite more obscure tracks sampled.
3 Feet High and Rising
“Written on the Wall” – The Invitations [“Plug Tunin’”]
A
quick Google search on The Invitations will reveal almost no
information on the group. Dig a little deeper and you will see that the
ensemble was originally comprised of Roy Jolly, Gary Grant, Bill Morris,
and Bobby Rivers, and that “Written on the Wall” was released in 1965.
Not every artist gets the attention they deserve during their time in
action, and while it is unlikely that we will know much more about The
Invitations moving forward, at least De La Soul and Prince Paul brought
attention to this record.
“Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll” – Vaughan Mason & Crew [“Cool Breeze on the Rocks”]
This
record is exactly the kind of tune you would expect to hear at a roller
disco. “Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll” reached the fifth spot on the USBillboardHot Soul Singleschart in 1980 and was also sampled by Daft Punk on the tracks “Da Funk” and “Daftendirekt” from the duo’s album Homework.
Written
and produced by James Brown, “Think (About It)” is one of the most
classic funk records. The song has been sampled over 1,500 times since
its creation in 1972, making it the third most sampled track ever and
Collins the fifth most sampled artist. This track is responsible for the
“Woo! Yeah!” break and the vocal line “It takes two to make a thing go
right / It takes two to make it outta sight,” both most recognizable on
MC Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock’s “It Takes Two.”
“Dreaming About You” – The Blackbyrds [“Ghetto Thang”]
The
Blackbyrds were formed in Washington D.C. in 1973 by renowned jazz
trumpeter Donald Byrd. “Ghetto Thang” also samples the band’s song “Rock
Creek Park,” which has been sampled numerous times by hip hop artists —
Nas, MF DOOM, Eric B. & Rakim, N.W.A., Ice Cube, etc. — and
provided the fabulous line, “Doing it in the park / Doing it after dark,
oh, yeah.” “Dreaming About You,” while less popular, is easily one of
the smoothest tracks on this list.
“Magic Mountain” – Eric Burdon & War [“Potholes In My Lawn”]
Since
their formation in 1969, War’s roster has constantly changed. In the
beginning, the band was known as Eric Burdon and War. Burdon, former
lead vocalist of The Animals and one of Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Singers of All Time,
only released two records with War in 1970 before splitting with the
band after he collapsed on stage during a performance due to an asthma
attack. While “Magic Mountain” wasn’t featured on either album, it did
appear as a b-side to the single “Spill the Wine,” as well as on 1976’s
Love Is All Around, which featured a number of other leftover tracks
from their brief time together.
“I’m Gonna Love You Just A Little Bit More” – Barry White [“Potholes In My Lawn”]
Barry
White is best known for tracks like “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love,
Babe,” but his debut album concludes with “I’m Gonna Love You Just A
Little Bit More,” one of his sexiest records ever crafted. Funnily, this
track is the other song sampled on Daft Punk’s “Da Funk” along with
“Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll.”
“Crossword Puzzle” – Sly Stone [“Say No Go”]
Taken
from Stone’s 1975 album “High On You,” his first separate from Sly
& the Family Stone. Several years prior to the album’s release,
Stone and his bandmates started heavily using drugs like cocaine and PCP
— Stone carried a violin case full of drugs with him at all times —
leading to their ultimate dissolution. Stone’s popularity significantly
decreased during this time, and so great funk hits like “Crossword
Puzzle” passed by without much attention, failing to even chart within
the R&B Top 40.
“That’s the Joint” – Funky 4+1 [“Say No Go”]
We all know DJ Jazzy Jeff, but what about MC Jazzy Jeff?
One of the five members of the Funky 4+1, the Bronx collective was the
first hip-hop group to receive a record deal, perform live on national
TV, and to feature a female MC, Sha Rock. In 2008, VH1 selected “That’s
the Joint” for the 41st spot on its list of 100 Greatest Hip-Hop Songs.
Interestingly enough, MC Jazzy Jeff and DJ Jazzy Jeff, along with Will
Smith aka the Fresh Prince, were both signed to Jive Records at the same
time, leading to a lawsuit over the rights of the name.
“Take Me to the Mardi Gras” – Bob James [“Buddy”]
Bob
James is considered one of the leaders of smooth jazz. While he may not
seem like the most likely candidate for one of hip hop’s most sampled
artists, his music is scattered across the genre, and he even received a
shoutout from Andre 3000 in Goodie Mob’s “Black Ice.” “Take Me to the Mardi Gras” has been sampled in 370 songs itself, most notably in Run-DMC’s “Peter Piper.”
“School Boy Crush” – Average White Band [“D.A.I.S.Y. Age”]
“Scottish
funk and R&B outfit” isn’t a common phrase, but it’s true for the
amazingly named Average White Band. While the recording of their third
album, Cut The Cake, was shadowed by the heroin overdose and death of
their original drummer, Robbie McIntosh, and creative differences among
the band’s members, it still performed well. Forty years after their
formation, the blue-eyed soulists continue to prove their groove, and
“School Boy Crush” is a perfect example.
De La Soul Is Dead
“Good Times” – Chic [“A Roller Skating Jam Named Saturdays”]
While
“Good Times” is one of the more well-known songs sampled on De La
Soul’s first three albums, the Nile Rodgers and co. cut is one of the
greatest disco songs ever written — the 229th greatest song of all time,
according to Rolling Stone — and therefore could not be excluded from this list.
“Tramp” – Lowell Fulson [“Let, Let Me In”]
On
hearing the first chord of “Tramp,” LL Cool J’s “EPMD” or, more
recently, Action Bronson’s “Strictly 4 My Jeeps” comes to mind. There’s
also House of Pain, Cypress Hill, Wu-Tang Clan, Ice Cube, Prince,
Redman, Funkmaster Flex, and, of course, De La Soul.
“Beat” – Lou Johnson [“Ring Ring Ring (Ha Ha Hey)”]
When
a song’s opening words are: “In the beginning was the beat, and the
beat was strong,” you know you are in for a treat. For whatever reason,
Johnson has only been sampled twice, making it one of the sweeter treats
of De La Soul’s catalogue. Also, Naked Eyes’ “Always Something There to
Remind Me” is really just a cover of a Lou Johnson original.
“Help Is On The Way” – The Whatnauts [“Ring Ring Ring (Ha Ha Hey)”]
This
Baltimore soul trio was composed of Billy Herndon, Garrett Jones, and
Gerard ‘Chunky’ Pickney. One of the groups more sampled tracks, “Help Is
on the Way” demonstrates the Whatnauts’ uplifting spirit. Whether life
has been down on you lately or you’re just feeling the daily stress of
living in the 21st century, this song is guaranteed to provide at least
seven minutes of relief.
Buhloone Mindstate
“I Like Funky Music” – Uncle Louie [“En Focus”]
The
undeniable party starter of this list, this track has been sampled
around 120 times. While “En Focus” is a solid cut, the most important
sample goes to T La Rock and Jazzy Jay’s “It’s Yours,” the very first release from Def Jam and the first time the term “boom bap” was used.
“Intimate Connection” – Kleeer [“En Focus”]
Performing
under a number of different names, the first being Kleeer, and even
switching from disco to hard rock for a short period of time, they
reformed as Kleeer in 1978, producing seven albums of electronic-driven
funk. This song is your new anthem for whenever you link up to a new
WiFi.
“Don’t Change Your Love” – Five Stairsteps [“3 Days Later”]
This
Chicago quintet was composed of five of Betty and Clarence Burke Sr.’s
six children and was known as the “First Family of Soul” before that
title was transferred to the Jackson 5. While “Don’t Change Your Love”
isn’t the hit that is “O-o-h Child,” it’s a strong reminder of what made
the Five Stairsteps so great.
“Come Dancing” – Jeff Beck [“Area”]
The
debate surrounding Yardbirds’ guitarists Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, and
Eric Clapton is simply unsolvable. While Beck didn’t achieve the same
commercial success as the other two, his discography cannot be denied.
You won’t find much more righteous guitar like that on his solo track
“Come Dancing.”
“Yes We Can Can” – The Pointer Sisters [“Breakadawn”]
Written
by the late great Allen Toussaint, “Yes We Can Can” delivers six
minutes of powerful harmonies led by Anita Pointer and a message that
resonates just as loudly today as it did in 1973.
“Sang and Dance” – Bar-Kays [“Breakadawn”]
Starting
off as a studio session band, the Memphis collective was even selected
by Otis Redding to perform as his backing band. However, the Bar-Keys
eventually pushed out their own records, and without songs like “Sang
and Dance” we wouldn’t have bangers like Big Willie’s “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit
It.”
De La Soul (/ˌdeɪlɑːˈ-/) is an American hip hoptrio formed in 1987 in the Amityville area of Long Island, New York. They are best known for their eclectic sampling, quirky lyrics, and their contributions to the evolution of the jazz rap and alternative hip hop subgenres. The members are Posdnuos, Trugoy and Maseo. The three formed the group in high school and caught the attention of producerPrince Paul with a demo tape of the song "Plug Tunin'". With its playful wordplay, innovative sampling, and witty skits, the band's debut album, 3 Feet High and Rising, has been called "a hip hop masterpiece."[1] The album was the band's biggest commercial success to date, with
subsequent ones selling progressively less, despite receiving high
praise from critics. They were influential in the early stages of
rapper/actor Mos Def's career, and are a core part of the Spitkicker collective. They are the second longest standing Native Tongues group, after the Jungle Brothers. In 2006, the group won a Grammy for their collaboration with Gorillaz on the single "Feel Good Inc."[2] In early 2015, they announced plans to release a Kickstarter-funded upcoming 9th studio album And the Anonymous Nobody
in September 2015; it was released on August 26, 2016. The album tracks
are said to be the result of multiple improvised jam sessions. The
album also features guest appearances from artists such as Damon Albarn, Little Dragon, David Byrne, 2 Chainz and Snoop Dogg.[3][4]
History
Early period
De La Soul's debut album, 3 Feet High and Rising, released in 1989, was a critical smash hit in the hip hop genre. They quickly became prominent members of the Native Tongues Posse along with A Tribe Called Quest, Black Sheep, Queen Latifah, the Jungle Brothers and others. The single "Me Myself and I" became a huge hit, further cementing the group's popularity. However, the sixties pop group The Turtles sued De La Soul for using a sample from their 1969 hit "You Showed Me"
for the interlude track "Transmitting Live from Mars", despite the fact
that The Turtles did not actually write the original song.[5][not in citation given] Lyrically, much of 3 Feet High and Rising focused on striving for peace and harmony. 3 Feet High and Rising
also introduced De La Soul's concept of the "D.A.I.S.Y. Age" (an
acronym standing for "da inner sound, y'all"). As a result, audiences
were quick to peg the members of De La Soul as hippies.
This stereotype greatly agitated the group's members, as they always
envisioned their career as a constantly changing style; this frustration
would influence their next recording sessions. In the press kit for 3 Feet High and Rising, the members explained their stage names:
Trugoy when reversed spells yogurt, because he likes yogurt, and
Posdnuos spelled backwards is "sound sop". The album artwork was
designed by radical British artist collective the Grey Organisation[6]
De La Soul's second album, De La Soul Is Dead
(1991) was a much more mature album. It featured a wealth of material
that criticized the violent, careless direction that hip hop was heading
in at the time, though it still managed to maintain a light, absurd
sense of humor. The cover of the album features a broken daisy flower
pot, symbolizing the death of the "D.A.I.S.Y. Age" and the imagery that
went along with it. The album spawned several singles, including the
dark "Millie Pulled a Pistol on Santa", a tale of a young girl who could no longer take the sexual abuse from her father, and the lead single "Ring Ring Ring (Ha Ha Hey)", a story about the people rated with the Black Sheep on "Fanatic of the B Word," Q-Tip from A Tribe Called Quest on "A Roller Skating Jam Named 'Saturdays'", and Prince Paul makes an appearance on the mic in "Pass the Plugs" with a verse of his own. The album also more prominently featured Vincent Mason as a rapper, providing verses of his own on "Bitties in the BK Lounge," "Afro Connections at a Hi-5," and "Ring Ring Ring (Ha Ha Hey)".
Though it received mixed reviews and did not sell as well as 3 Feet High and Rising it eventually became a cult classic. The Source
magazine listed the album as one of their top 100 hip hop albums of all
time, stating that "its true genius is rarely understood"[citation needed].
There are several major differences between the CD version of this
album and the other formats, as the tracks "Johnny's Dead AKA Vincent
Mason", "My Brother's a Basehead", "Kicked Out the House", and "Who Do U
Worship?" are only available on the CD. The limited edition double
vinyl promotional copies of the album distributed to the media before
the official release did not feature these.
Middle period
The group's third studio release, 1993's Buhloone Mindstate,
saw the group evolve a new sound as they continued to grow
stylistically and musically. There were several moments on the album
which proved the band had matured. "I Be Blowin'" was a departure as the
track was an instrumental featuring saxophone playing by Maceo Parker.
The introspective "I Am I Be" showed De La Soul at their most
self-referential to date with subject matter about Pos' daughter Ayana
Monet as well as his grandmother. "Long Island Wildin'" was a
collaboration with Japanese hip hop artists Kan Takagi (Major Force) and
trio Scha Dara Parr (SDP). The album's first single, "Breakadawn",
used a sample of Michael Jackson's "I Can't Help It" and Smokey
Robinson's "Quiet Storm". De La Soul collaborated for the first time
with Gang Starr's Guru on "Patti Dooke", female MC Shortie No Mas,
a cousin of Posdnuos, was prominent on many tracks on the album,
showcased particularly "In The Woods". The album ended with an old
school Biz Markie
collaboration called "Stone Age". Missing from vocal duties is Mase,
whose voice can only be heard on "Area" in a break near the end of the
track. Also rarely featured is his scratching which was heard often on
previous albums, with only "In the Woods" showcasing his talent in that
area. The album was a critical success, but it was the biggest
commercial failure for the group at the time of its release. Many
publications, such as Rolling Stone, have listed this album as one of the best hip hop albums of all time.
In 1994, 500 copies of a promotional EP called Clear Lake Audiotorium were released on clear vinyl and CD. The 6 track EP contained edited versions of tracks off of Buhloone Mindstate
but also featured the tracks "Sh.Fe.MC's" (Shocking Female MC's) which
was a collaboration with A Tribe Called Quest, and Stix & Stonz
which featured old-school hip hop artists Grandmaster Caz, Tito of
Fearless Four, Whipper Whip, LA Sunshine and Superstar. The EP was
widely bootlegged afterwards.
Stakes Is High (1996) was the first album not produced by Prince Paul,
with overall production credits given solely to the trio. Although it
was met with poor sales, it has been critically lauded for its music,
lyricism, and its overall message concerning the artistic decline rap
music began to face in the mid-90s. The title track and first single, produced by J Dilla, was not a hit, but the album's second single, "Itzsoweezee (HOT)", with only Dave on vocals, did fare better due to its creative music video. The album spawned a third single "4 More", featuring Zhane which peaked at #52 in the UK. The album did provide a launching pad for future star rapper and actor Mos Def, who appeared on the track "Big Brother Beat". The album also featured collaborations with Common, Truth Enola, and the Jazzyfatnastees.
Later period
De La Soul in 2002
Four years later, De La Soul announced that they would release a
triple album series entitled "Art Official Intelligence" (or AOI). All
three albums were intended to be released within a year, beginning with
the release of Art Official Intelligence: Mosaic Thump. This was followed by AOI: Bionix
in late 2001. After this, however, the third and final album in the AOI
series was never released. For the next two years, the only De La Soul
releases were singles or remix compilations. David Jude Jolicoeur stated
in an interview that it usually takes about four years for the group to
record an album, promote it with advertisements, touring and so on. The
group was having trouble finishing the last AOI installment for many
reasons, one of which being an ongoing struggle with Tommy Boy Records,[citation needed] which had been releasing its albums ever since its debut.
In the summer of 2002, De La Soul toured with Cake, Modest Mouse, The Flaming Lips, Kinky, and the Hackensaw Boys during the Unlimited Sunshine Tour. The band was briefly featured in the video game PaRappa the Rapper 2 with the song "Say "I Gotta Believe!"", featuring Double, and also appeared on the soundtrack of the game.
In 2004, De La Soul released a new full album: The Grind Date
on Sanctuary/BMG Records because the venture between Tommy Boy and
Warner Bros. Records was shut down and the group's contract was shopped
to the other WEA labels. The band thought about having its contract absorbed by Elektra Records,
but it decided to leave WEA altogether. Although it was not the third
AOI album fans had been expecting, the album was released to some
critical acclaim and was well received by most fans. The album features
guests MF Doom, Ghostface Killah, Butta Verses and Flavor Flav, with production from 9th Wonder, Jake One, Madlib and more. The lead single "Shopping Bags (She Got from You)"
did not fare very well and set the tone for disappointing commercial
acceptance. In conjunction with the album's release, the group also
offered up the track "Come on Down" featuring Flavor Flav for remixing
on Sony's Acid Planet website. The winning remix was "Come On Down (KY
Raised NY Glazed)" by Interlude Jones who said he tried to "take the
influential sound of old New York hip hop and marry it back to its
roots."
Since The Grind Date
In 2005, De La Soul collaborated with Gorillaz on the hit single "Feel Good Inc.," which won a Grammy for Best Pop Vocal Collaboration (the first Grammy win in the group's career) after being nominated for a total of three Grammys.[2][7] De La Soul also appeared on the LA Symphony single "Universal" and Posdnuos collaborated with the Portuguese MC Boss AC on a track called "Yo (Não Brinques Com Esta Merda)". The following year they released mixtapes Hip-Hop Mixtape, a covermount with British dance magazine Mixmag, and The Impossible: Mission TV Series - Pt. 1, a release on the group's own AOI Records label.[8] De La Soul collaborated with the athletic sneaker company Nike to produce two versions of the Nike Dunk under their skateboarding division, Nike SB.
Posdnuos of De La Soul performing at the Marsatac Festival in 2008
In 2008, the group joined A Tribe Called Quest, Nas, Tech N9ne, The Pharcyde and others on the annual Rock the Bells tour[9] and were honored at the 5th Annual VH1 Hip Hop Honors. Later in the year they collaborated with dan le sac vs Scroobius Pip on a re-recording of the British group's debut single "Thou Shalt Always Kill."
De La Soul returned as a guest on the third Gorillaz studio album, Plastic Beach alongside Super Furry Animals frontman Gruff Rhys on the song "Superfast Jellyfish".
Two other collaborations were recorded, but did not make the final cut
for the album. They were supposed to appear on a track entitled "Sloped
Tropics", though this song did not make the final cut. The group remixed
indie rockers Yo La Tengo's single, "Here To Fall for the Here To Fall" remixes EP which included remixes by RJD2 and Pete Rock, and were featured on a remix of Matt & Kim's single "Daylight" by DJ Troublemaker. In 2011, the group earned Top 5 rankings on both NPR and Soul Train’s year end “Best of” lists with the Amerigo Gazaway produced De La Soul/Fela Kuti mashup, Fela Soul. De La Soul and Nike released Are You In?: Nike+ Original Run, which was the group's first original material since The Impossible: Mission TV Series - Pt. 1. The album features Raheem DeVaughn as well as production from the Chicago-based duo Flosstradamus.[10]
The recording is a single-track recording at 44 minutes, 17 seconds,
part of a continuing series of releases through the "Nike+ Sport Music"
section of the online store.
The group released De La Soul's Plug 1 & Plug 2 presents... First Serve
in April 2012, an album that did not feature any contributions from
Maseo. With very little promotion, the album was released to positive
reviews. This was followed by releasing one track a month during 2013.
In March 2015, De La Soul created a Kickstarter to help fund their upcoming album. It surpassed the original goal of $110,000 in under ten hours.[11] The resulting album, And the Anonymous Nobody, was released in August 2016. Originally planned for an April release,[12] but delayed due to rights issues,[13] the full-length was preceded by 4 track EP For Your Pain & Suffering and the single Pain, featuring Snoop Dogg. The album was nominated at the 59th Grammy Awards for Best Rap Album.
De La Soul was featured on the track "Momentz" on Gorillaz 2017 album Humanz.,[14] on Leap of Faith by Mr. Jukes, alongside Horace Andy, and on Tom Misch's 2018 single It Runs Through Me. A tenth studio album, featuring production contributions from Pete Rock and DJ Premier, will reportedly be released by Mass Appeal Records.[15]
THE
MUSIC OF DE LA SOUL : AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF
RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS
WITH DE LA SOUL:
Kofi Natambu, editor of and contributor to Sound Projections, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He has written extensively about music as a critic and historian for many publications, including the Black Scholar, Downbeat, Solid Ground: A New World Journal, Detroit Metro Times, KONCH, the Panopticon Review,Black Renaissance Noire, the Village Voice, the City Sun (NYC), the Poetry Project Newsletter (NYC), and the African American Review. He is the author of a biography Malcolm X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: The Melody Never Stops (Past Tents Press) and Intervals (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of Solid Ground: A New World Journal, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology Nostalgia for the Present (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
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