De La Soul

In 1989, the rap scene was turning increasingly dark and stagnant under the vicious cycle of hard-core rappers trying to outdo each other with tales of prison and guns and bitches and killing cops and all that jive that scared the suburbs so much. Rap had started out as a party vibe, and once it was politicized in the groundbreaking Grandmaster Flash track The Message (rhythms provided by Fats Comet), it never turned back. Not that that’s a bad thing – in fact, it was very necessary. According to Chuck D, the main voice behind the other biggest rap group of ‘89, Public Enemy, rap functioned as “the black CNN”, keeping the community informed about issues that were relevant and not being covered by the white media establishment. And Public Enemy, and other politically motivated rap groups, did a fantastic job voicing the fears and frustrations of being black in racist society. And part of that experience was expressed by what came to be known as gangsta rappers – telling tales about life on the streets, pimping and selling drugs, gang banging and girls and guns and gold teeth. And it all started getting so inbred that the fun element that started rap had not only disappeared, it was pretty much seen as a sign of weakness if you didn’t have an axe to grind over some jackhammer beats.

And then along came De La Soul to put the fun back in funky. Their first album, 3 Feet High and Rising, didn’t shy away from social messages, but it wrapped the rap in such a breezy, happy, daisy-covered package that the party started rocking again. Even their names took the whole game lightly: Pacemaster Mace, Posdnuos, and Trugoy the Dove (who, rumor has it, likes yogurt). Part of the fun of De La Soul was their encyclopedic knowledge of music past and present, and their willingness to use samples from as many varied sources as possible – from Led Zeppelin to Hall and Oates to Schoolhouse Rock to Liberace. The beats were happy, the breaks were light, the lyrics were clever, and the whole package was so appealing that you couldn’t help but nod your head and grin. It was an ideal summer vibe, and along with Deee-Lite, perfectly recalls that glorious, fun-loving summer of 1989 in Brooklyn, one year out of college before the weight of NYC sunk in and crushed all the fun out of my soul (or, as the French say, tout le joi de la soul).

In addition to putting daisies in the uzis of the gangsta rappers and putting the party back on the platter, De La Soul’s debut was an important record for another reason. The practice of sampling – “biting” bits of another person’s song – was still fairly new and largely uncharted legal territory. The technology that allowed one to sample and loop and manipulate that sample came into its own right about the time that rapping was really taking off. It was a perfect harmonic convergence. Many early rappers weren’t musicians (and couldn’t afford studio time even if they were), and they relied on the skills of a DJ to find and repeat funky breaks from old soul and R’n’B records. This hypnotically repetitive bed would provide the wind over which the rapper’s words could fly. Sampling just automated that process and made it a lot easier. But there was a storm brewing as the RIAA, never the most lenient or forward-looking of professional organizations, started chafing over the increased unlicensed use of copyrighted material. Smelling a dollar (the RIAA is famous for favoring litigation over innovation), they pressured Congress to come up with new guidelines for the use of samples. It all came to a head over a fairly minor track from 3 Feet High and Rising, the charming and inconsequential Transmitting Live from Mars, which is built around an irresistible sample from the Turtle’s You Showed Me (as well as a French language instructional LP). The Turtles sued De La Soul and won, and the wild west frontier days of sampling with impunity were over. De La’s second album, De La Soul is Dead, was delayed almost a year while they painstakingly cleared their samples and removed the ones they couldn’t get permission to use. While still lyrically clever (“Jody’s got a cat, but she won’t let it out”, they rap on Keeping the Faith, an ode to faithfulness and abstinence, “padlocked Jody’s got the whole scene played, no knocking boots ‘til she’s 14k’d”), the sampladelic free-for-all has been curbed considerably (although Keeping the Faith is built around surprisingly complimentary samples from two Bobs – James and Marley (!)). The infectious joi-de-vivre of the first album is largely lost underneath De La Soul’s curiously angry reactions to the limelight they thrust themselves into. The daisies wilted and I lost interest.

Actually, I started losing interest when I went to see them live and realized how dangerous a rap concert could be. Not dangerous in an oh-my-god-I’m-gonna-get-jacked-up kind of a way, but dangerous in an oh-my-god-I-just-paid-twenty-bucks-to-watch-these-clowns-rap-to-their-record kind of a way. In the studio, great, on the stage, not so much.