UNCUT CLASSIC
3 FEET HIGH AND RISING TOMMY BOY, 1989 The birth of the Daisy Age - a neo-psychedelic slice of hippy hop that recontextualised dozens of unlikely samples, from Liberace to Steely Dan
A lot of that album comes from the blend of influences in the band. Dave’s family were from Haiti and listened to salsa and country and all sorts; mine were from the south and liked doo-wop, soul, jazz. Black radio stations played all kinds of music as well as R&B – The Beatles, Steely Dan, Chicago, Kraftwerk, Bob Marley. In New York we had Frankie Crocker on WBLS, who’d play soul, rock, reggae and new wave. So all that fed into our music.
We recorded it at Calliope in the Garment District, the home of the Native Tongues bands in New York – us, A Tribe Called Quest, Jungle Brothers, Monie Love, Queen Latifah. Our producer Prince Paul had recorded there with Stetsasonic. He was very disciplined and focused about us writing lyrics. He would also demand ideas, which is why the album buzzes with themes. There was the concept about us transmitting from Mars and there was the spoof quiz show – but there were more serious moments. “Say No Go” was about drug addiction – the opening lyric is about babies born to addicted mothers. “Stonewashed denim” is a metaphor for people being constantly stoned. I wanted to sample Daryl Hall singing “I can’t go for that” but Paul was keen to find other samples that fitted with that, like The Turtles or The Detroit Emeralds.
But Paul was also great at capturing our natural silliness. We’d start mouthing some inane lyrics and he’d get us to record them in the vocal booth. Dave would be doodling on the piano and Paul would secretly put the mics on and use bits of it in a song. For “De La Orgee” we joked about making orgasmic moaning sounds, and Paul said, “Yes! Do it!”, so a load of us went into the vocal booth and started doing that. We were like bulls in a china shop, knocking stuff down. I love that this album made by a bunch of teenagers, making a beautiful mess, is now regarded as some kind of classic. It’s in the National Registry of Recordings at the Library Of Congress! I think what hit a chord is that it was for everybody. Nobody was excluded from 3 Feet High And Rising.
DE LA SOUL IS DEAD TOMMY BOY WARNER BROS, 1991 The Daisy Age’s demise is represented by a smashed flowerpot for this equally whimsical sophomore classic
The title came after months of touring the first album – press conferences, interviews, live dates, TV, radio interviews, and so on. It was burning us out. In our manager’s office there was a whiteboard listing all the dates that us and the other artists on his roster had to do, taking up the next six months. It was so overwhelming that Dave went up with a board eraser, rubbed out our dates, and wrote “De La Soul Is Dead” on the board! Then Mase said, “Man, that should be the title of our next album.”
A lot of people say it was darker than the debut, but I’m not sure. The humour, the silliness, the skits, were still there. “Ring Ring Ring” and “A Rollerskating Jam Named Saturdays” were joyful. You’ve got samples of everything from The Doors to Genesis and Tom Waits. Even the theme of death isn’t bleak – it’s more about transitioning to another plane, metamorphosing into something else. However, I think it’s more laser focused than the first album. Instead of allowing Prince Paul’s energy to control the room and encourage us to be constantly zany, we mix it up. “Afro Connections At Hi 5” is us getting a bit more “street”, a bit more serious, like a blaxploitation movie. “Millie Pulled A Pistol On Santa” is based on a real story. “My Brother’s A Basehead” is partly autobiographical – my older brother was a crack addict. Thankfully, he’s been in recovery and he’s in a good place now. But that was me dealing with some difficult stuff.
BUHLOONE MINDSTATE TOMMY BOY WARNER BROS, 1993 Moving in a jazz and funk direction, with James Brown’s horn section
The title means having the elevated mind state of a “buhloone”, or balloon. We might blow up but we won’t go pop, or in other words, we’re popular but not trying to make pop music. Hanging out with Q-tip got me deeper into jazz and funk. We were also inspired by that Brand New Heavies album featuring guest rappers [The Heavy Rhyme Experience Vol 1]. We loved James Brown’s horn section – Maceo Parker on alto, Pee Wee Ellis on tenor, Fred Wesley on trombone – so we thought, ‘Why not ask them to guest with us?’ To our surprise, they were keen. It was really inspiring to see them record – they’d hang out, chat, laugh, have fun, they’d sing ideas and jam. It was amazing to see that. This is the first album where the live musicians started to become as important as the samples, and they affected the samples – Lou Rawls, Eddie Harris, Lou Donaldson, Lonnie Smith and so on.
“I Am I Be” was an autobiographical lyric – Hattie Mae was my mother who had recently passed away, and I was talking about that, and the tragedy that she never got to meet my children. She, like my father, was from the South. Growing up in New York, my parents worked hard and never took holidays. They’d just send us to relatives in North Carolina for the summer!
A lot of people hated this album when it came out, but a lot of those same people stuck with it and now say it’s their favourite De La Soul album. It’s a grower!
STAKES IS HIGH TOMMY BOY WARNER BROS, 1996 The band’s first album without producer Prince Paul, dissing the nihilism of gangster rap
This was the first album where the title came before any recording sessions. Buhloone Mindstate hadn’t done too well; we toured with Tribe and The Pharcyde and got sick. I ended up in hospital with spinal meningitis, while the single release for “I Am I Be” was cancelled because I couldn’t film a video. Our manager said to us, “Your popularity is on the slide, you need to tighten your belts.” Dave’s cousin heard this and said, “Man, for this next album, stakes is high.” So this became our mission statement. It needed to get serious, bleaker, less comedic. We spent some time working on ideas at Paul’s crib, but we decided that his ideas weren’t on the path of that mission statement. He was in the middle of doing stuff with Gravediggaz, so we decided to open things up and work with outside producers. Jay D was already in the picture, Q-tip was a friend, there was a Slum Village demo that was floating around, so all those influences fed into the album. As it happens, 90 per cent of the album was produced by us, Dave mainly. The rapper Mos Def was a big influence – he’d struck up a friendship with Mase. He made me dig deep into rhyming.
Some people thought that “Baby Baby Baby Baby Ooh Baby” was a pisstake of Puff Daddy. It kinda was, but it was acknowledging that someone like Puff could make something magical over a very simple loop. It didn’t have to be intricate and complex.
ART OFFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: MOSAIC THUMP TOMMY BOY, 2000 The start of a trilogy: laden with special guests, from Chaka Khan to the Beasties, and from Busta Rhymes to Redman
The idea was to do a triple album. Tom Silverman at Tommy Boy said, “Yes, that’s a great idea, but why not split it up into three separate releases? That way you’d get a separate budget for each one.” The title of this projected trilogy was, obviously, a pun on artificial intelligence, which has become quite a big deal now.
I think, looking back, we might have gone overboard with the guest slots! But we loved them. Chaka Khan was amazing. We had a track that was supposed to be with Outkast and Goodie Mob, but they couldn’t make it. We thought a great soul voice would fit well, so we approached Chaka, not thinking she’d agree. It was like having a goddess in the studio! She was very cool but a little nervous. We were lucky to have her engineer working on the sessions. She’d do a take and we’d think it was amazing, but her engineer would say, “Yeah, she can do it even better than that.” So he got us to push her. The song was going to be called “All Good”, about things being great, but Chaka thought it would be more interesting if we said that it ain’t all great. Which is why the title now has a question mark
after it. We invited all three Beastie Boys for “Squat!” – Ad Rock and Mike D made it, but MCA didn’t. We were a little bummed about that, but I think he was already having issues with his throat glands – the cancer that eventually killed him.
AOI: BIONIX TOMMY BOY, 2001 Taking it to church with a heavy gospel session
We got to know Dave West through A Tribe Called Quest; he was already part of our production team on the first AOI album. He came up through the church – he was a drummer and a beat producer, and he had access to some great gospel musicians who feature on this album. The linking device was these little skits featuring a character called the Reverend Do Good, who was played by Troy Hightower. You won’t believe the effort that went into recording those skits! We had to recreate a church congregation by multi-tracking 10 voices in a booth and making it sound like 100 people. We soundscaped him walking out of the church, so you had birdsong and footsteps and passing traffic. It was like scoring a movie! There’s a track where the Reverend smokes some weed and then the skit segues into “Peer Pressure”, produced by
J Dilla, which is like a sonic drug experience. I’ve never actually smoked weed, but I get that.
Again, there are lots of great and unlikely samples. Paul Mccartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime” features on “Simply”. There’s some jazz vibraphone from Cal Tjader on “Watch Out”. A track I produced, “Held Down”, featuring Cee Lo Green, has a sample from Serge Gainsbourg’s Melody Nelson. I only found out about Serge while we were promoting 3 Feet High And Rising in Paris, and a French journalist said we reminded him of Serge. Next time we saw that journalist he brought us a bunch of Serge CDS. He’s a genius. I got a bunch of samples from his albums.
THE GRIND DATE AOI SANCTUARY URBAN, 2004 Ditching the skits for old-school rhyming on De La Soul’s first post-tommy Boy release
This was going to be the third part of our AOI trilogy, but Tommy Boy records folded and there was no way we could get another label to pick that up as their first recording with us. So we had to go another route. Until this point, all our albums had featured comic sketches, and we had even recorded some Reverend Do Good skits for this album, but Dave [West] suggested we ditch them. So this was our beats and rhymes album. We had a lot of guests – Yummy Bingham, Common, Ghostface Killah, DJ Premier, Flava Flav, MF Doom and others. It’s very oldschool hip-hop, but I guess there aren’t many old-school hip-hop albums where people are spitting rhymes over samples of Yes, Mountain and Rick Wakeman!
This was our last album with J Dilla, who produced “Verbal Clap” and “Much More”. He worked on four of our albums in total, going back to Stakes Is High. What a guy. Talent literally fell out of him, like opening a faucet. I’m not exaggerating. He could sit in a studio, load up a bunch of sounds, play them to me and say, “You like this?” He was always genuinely surprised when we’d say, yeah, that’s amazing. That man had something godly within him. He could hear things no-one else could. I used to think that he was like a machine, but that’s not quite right – it was more that he had this amazing organic soul, one that was in complete cohesion with the rhythms.
PLUG 1 & PLUG 2 PRESENT… FIRST SERVE DUCK DOWN MUSIC PIAS, 2012 Not strictly a De La Soul album: Posdnuos and Trugoy team up with two French producers to present a fictional hip-hop band
We were working with The Roots in France and met the promoter Mike Carsenti, who introduced us to two great French DJS, Khalid and Chokolate. They had a whole project lined up for two rappers – they were Dj-ing and producing, so they didn’t really need Maseo, who is primarily a producer and DJ for us. And Mase was cool with that. They had studio time and a label budget, so we met in Paris and talked about a storyline. There was a lot of discussion, a lot of teamwork, it was a very collaborative project. The conceit is that First Serve are not De La Soul, they are two up-andcoming rappers – I’m Jacob Barrow and Dave was Deen Witter. I guess it was very reminiscent of Prince Paul’s Prince Among Thieves – which we featured on – but we took it a bit further, conceptually.
We always loved working in France, going back to our early press trips to Paris. We actually knocked this album out pretty quick – I think we were in a studio for only about two weeks, joined by the occasional female voices. Then Khalid and Chokolate worked on it after we’d finished – me and Dave had rapped over samples, but to save money on sample clearance they got in an actual band and recreated a lot of the samples using live musicians. So it ended up as one of those Brand New Heavies-style live rap projects, a bit like Buhloone Mindstate. It was very different to our other albums, but it stands up well.
AND THE ANONYMOUS NOBODY… AOI KOBALT, 2016 Kickstarter-funded swansong featuring Damon Albarn, David Byrne, Jill Scott, Snoop Dogg, Justin Hawkins, Uncle Tom Cobley and all
We didn’t necessarily need to crowdfund this, but signing to a label means you lose control. Labels have expectations, and they might not have liked our unconventional arrangements. On a track like “Drawn”, Little Dragon sings nearly everything and we barely rhyme until four minutes in. Likewise, we’d start a track like “Snoopies” and say, man, this really sounds like Talking Heads, so we’d ask David Byrne to sing on it. Likewise we’d start “Greyhounds” and realise that Usher would be perfect for it.
Some people were surprised to see us working with the likes of 2Chainz and Snoop. “How can you work with them, ain’t you the anti-gangster guys?” But it’s fans who think like that, never musicians. We’ve often toured with so-called gangster rappers and there’s a lot of respect between us. What it’s about is sonic marriage. De La Soul was always about marrying the right version of me with the right version of Dave, and we do the same with every collaboratiown.
We started working with Damon Albarn in 2004, on “Feel Good Inc”, and appeared on several Gorillaz albums. That definitely inspired our approach of using different guests as instruments. We enjoyed working with live musicians and jamming in the studio, like a Roots or Brand New Heavies project, but it doesn’t sound live. We chopped up the live performances, slowed them down, sped them up, like we were working with samples.
Kickstarter gives you a lot of freedom. We had some very generous big-money donors, like the comedian Russell Peters, but we were also grateful for those thousands of fans who donated a few dollars.
De La Soul’s catalogue is now on streaming services, while physical reissues are available from Aoi/chrysalis