De La Soul Photo: Supplied
Nick Bollinger discusses the crowdfunded return to disc of hip-hop pioneers De La Soul.
In any account of hip-hop’s evolution, De La Soul occupies an important place. With absurdist humour, a playful casual rapping style and a hitherto unthinkable variety of samples, their 1989 debut 3 Feet High and Rising was like nothing that had come before and its influence was widely felt. 27 years on, De La Soul could be excused for seeing themselves as something akin to rap royalty.
But in ‘Royalty Capes’, from their first album in twelve years, they reflect on their regal status in their own typically quizzical way. Who, after all, would rather be consigned to history than seen as a still viable and relevant force?
If you caught De La in their headlining set at WOMAD earlier this year, you would already have had a chance to consider this question. With a nine-piece band boasting horns and three percussionists, and MCs Posdnuos and Dave working the crowd like a hip-hop Sam and Dave, they put on a terrific show – closer in many ways to a classic soul revue than a current hip-hop act. And again there’s a live band at the heart of this new album.
3 Feet High and Rising might have been revolutionary in the breadth of its sampling, but one of its samples in particular – a grab of an obscure Turtles song - became an expensive legal test case, and it is the complex question of sample clearances that continues to keep De La Soul’s back catalogue largely unavailable. For this latest album they chose to avoid that minefield altogether. How? By, effectively, sampling themselves. They invited musicians – including members of their live band – into the studio to jam, amassing over a series of sessions an extraordinary 200 hours of music, from which they selected, edited, looped, and created the beats and beds that make up these new tracks. And comforting though the crackle of old vinyl might be, there is something powerfully present about these crisp, fresh rhythms.
Of course all those studio hours and live musicians – which include horns, backing singers, and, at one point, a full orchestra – is ultimately no less expensive than clearing samples. But it’s part of an ethos of independence that underpins the whole project. Rather than enslave themselves to yet another record contract, they funded this album with a Kickstarter campaign, which massively exceeded its initial goal and landed the group a budget of more than half a million dollars. Which allowed them a few extravagances.
That’s ‘Lord Intended’, a seven-minute opus that realises its stadium rock ambitions in a climactic finale featuring Justin Hawkins of the Darkness doing his best Freddie Mercury. And on ‘Snoopies’ there’s the familiar signature of David Byrne who encases Pos and Dave’s verses in a song that could comfortably sit on any of his solo albums.
Such collaborators from outside the traditional hip-hop sphere are a reminder that De La Soul was one of the first rap outfits to cross over to audiences not necessarily weaned on hip-hop. And while there are guest rappers here as well – from Snoop Dogg to Roc Marciano - the flavour of the album as a whole is a long way from the prevailing sound of current hip-hop. With no identifiable sampling (other than an almost-mandatory James Brown shout) there isn’t the sense of familiar hooks redeployed, a kind of subtext hip-hop listeners have almost come to expect. But there’s still some interesting stuff going on lyrically and Pos and Dave still have their sense of the absurd. Which is not to say they don’t also have some poignant or pertinent stories to tell, such as ‘Greyhounds’, a saga of migrants and broken dreams with Usher crooning the choruses.
27 years after their debut, and following a 12 year recording absence, De La Soul have made a big eclectic production that neither recycles their own past nor mimics the currently fashionable styles of anyone else. The title De La Soul And The Anonymous Nobody acknowledges the eleven thousand donors who contributed to its making, but might also refer to the existential questions about who we are and where we are going that, with the passage of time, have come to inhabit these rappers’ thoughts. And the choruses of ‘we’re still here now’ in ‘Here In After’ (co-written with Damon Albarn) seem as much a comment on De La Soul’s longevity as an acceptance of the fact that, in the end, whoever we are, we’re not going to be here forever.
Songs featured: Here In After, Royalty Capes, Trainwreck, Pain, Lord Intended, Snoopies, Drawn, Greyhounds.
and the Anonymous Nobody is available on AOI Records.
