De La Soul - Classic or Dud?

pgwp otm about ...is Dead. I love the singles, "Bitties...", "Millie Pulled a Pistol on Santa," a couple things I can't remember at the end, but while it's got a groove it wears me down.

I wouldn't judge Is Dead that harshly but this definitely confirmed to me that Buhloone is their best album, and I agree that 3 Ft > Dead.

This performance-disk version, which omits 15–20 minutes of skits and japes, brings ...Is Dead into focus. It really is probably their best, it's just somewhat destructively intermingled w/ a Prince Paul comedy record https://www.discogs.com/release/210087-De-La-Soul-De-La-Soul-Is-Dead

I think its so cool that Scha Dara Parr got a spot on Buhloone Mindstate

as fun as it was to hear all that stuff again i had been thinking about making skit-free playlists of 3 feet high and Is Dead

without the skits how will we know who likes money and who needs a haircut???

hey we are always going to need to know who has dandruff

de la doesn't get the credit they deserve for shining a light on the global dandruff pandemic

I used to be against the skits, then I heard an argument that the skits were meant to be an alternative to the traditional silent gaps between tracks. For some reason, framing them from that perspective made them all work for me after that.

the skits on 3 feet are pretty inextricable from the whole experience for me. i'm not opposed to a skitless edit of 'dead' especially if it shaves about 20 mins off the runtime

they had to be hygiene conscious because if you're gonna take it off at the De La orgee, it's best to first sort out that dandruff and use a little bit of soap

I don't love skits in general but these ones are pretty classic

lol i always thought they were saying "money" not "buddy" shame on me

in junior high (circa 1990 or so) some friends and I did the game show skit for our school's talent show. thankfully I have no memory of how that went down

I used to be against the skits, then I heard an argument that the skits were meant to be an alternative to the traditional silent gaps between tracks. For some reason, framing them from that perspective made them all work for me after that.

One of the many, many reasons I instantly loved 3 Feet High when I first heard it was that the skits reminded me of The Who Sell Out.

thinking about making skit-free playlists of 3 feet high and Is Dead

Just don't ever excise Little Derwin from Jennifa.

without the skits how will we know who likes money and who needs a haircut???

never thought of that one as a skit tbh

I have that edited 2LP of DLSID, it's good!

Hard to imagine 3 Feet High without the skits, one of the few albums where I think the skits really add to the experience

yep

the other two albums not so much

I'd be OK with a skitless or skit-lite De La Soul Is Dead, but listening to it again after many years mostly reminds me how much I love it. It doesn't fall off! The last two tracks are "Fanatic of the B Word" and "Keepin' the Faith," both jams.

Ok hear me out...

Pony Ride > Stakes is High > Sunshine is up there for the best three song sequence in their catalog. It's a pitch perfect close to the album.

I'm there with tips and "Fanatic of the B Word" and "Keepin' the Faith."

https://www.stereogum.com/2215964/best-de-la-soul-songs/lists/10-best-songs/

I am pretty hardline about the opinion that if you take the skits out of Is Dead, you ruin the album

Still pissed off at the number of reviews of Buhloone or Stakes saying “they’ve matured at last”, like fuck you guy, enjoying what you do and being playful isn’t “immature”, this isn’t the Derwin Academy of Serious Music. If anything the hard-man stance is less mature in many cases.

Also, did those people just ignore My Brother’s A Basehead and Millie Pulled A Pistol On Santa?

I guess my memory is that Is Dead was perceived as a move towards seriousness at the time (as compared to 3 Feet)

Is their Nike Run mixtape still available anywhere? Feels like there's a lot of post-AOI marginalia waiting to be collated

Ah I’ve been listening to is dead a lot for the first time since the 90s. I loved 3ft but never really got into is dead at the time so it’s a kind of discovery now and I find it great actually !
I remembered the album version of « Ring Ring » was different from the single but I didn’t remember ir was THAT different, without the sax etc. It was their biggest hit, wasn’t it ? In France, by far anyway.
So glad they’re now available on line (I still had the cd of is dead but without this I would never have tried listening to it again…).
So far I haven’t noticed any differences on 3ft.

nuts how deep into DLSID Ring Ring, certainly the big crossover hit in the UK, appears

All of the first 4 are pretty backloaded.

Got to applaud that faith that listeners will get all the way to the end. I guess that's evidence of working in the era when people had to buy your albums to hear them, and therefore were invested and had skin in the game of it being good to the last drop.

how the FUCK did I not know that Dave was the guest on “Feel Good, Inc”? I knew they’d collaborated on “Superfast Jellyfish” but somehow thought the other was a UK rapper. Idiot. What a couple of verses they are. Legend.

I knew that but wasn’t actually expecting De La to show up onstage with Gorillaz when I took my kids to see them in October. But there they were! Made it all the more surprising to me when Dave died, because I’d literally just seen him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fh0HDHX-g-Y

pos did that exact same call and response monologue when i saw the group in 2016 at a festival, around the time of anonymous nobody

All of the first 4 are pretty backloaded.

― Chris L, Wednesday, March 8, 2023 bookmarkflaglink

I got so deep into 3 Feet the other day, I’d totally forgotten to even expect “Me Myself and I”. It was a pleasant shock when it came on!

made a skit-free playlist of Is Dead...this is very enjoyable

I'll admit that this was probably my introduction to De La Soul:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srvxoHYQENY

made a skit-free playlist of Is Dead...this is very enjoyable

I haven’t been following this closely (apologies); but presumably the reissues of the CDs that come in a few weeks are still the original recordings, without the alterations that were done for the streaming versions… yes(?)

I can't find a definitive statement on that, but I assume they'd be the originals, they were already all licensed for distribution. It was just the streaming clearance they lacked, right?

Yeah, that’s sure what it seems like – would be really weird otherwise!

But then why weren’t the CDs available for all this time?

Did they fall out of print sometime during the whole Tommy Boy dispute/sale, or the band’s subsequent acquisition of their masters?

It sounds like the group is now licensing the albums to Chrysalis, so maybe there was just no one to distribute them for a few years?

Anyone else remember the promos of "Buhloone Mindstate" with the braying donkeys?

What, to stop broadcast/bootlegging?

Yeah! It was a big deal at the time, iirc. Just every several second/minutes there would be a big, loud donkey bray.

https://ew.com/article/1993/09/10/latest-war-bootlegging/

Music critics who received advance copies of De La Soul’s latest, Buhloone Mind State (Sept. 21 release), were treated to 13 new songs whose principal accompanist was a braying donkey. Another one of the hip-hoppers’ musical innovations? Nope, just the latest weapon in the war against bootlegging and the bigger problem of review tapes leaking out. ”With these noises, someone would be deterred from leaking it to radio stations, or actually enjoying it,” says De La Soul front man Posdnuos. ”This way, if you have one of these tapes, you would still have to go out and buy the CD when it came out in the stores. And if I hear bootleg copies on the street, I can tell where it came from.” It remains to be seen how successful a deterrent the donkey sound will be; some reviewers have told Posdnuos that the intermittent, high-pitched braying kind of grows on you.

Watching old MTV Raps episodes on Paramount Plus, De La is on playing Super Nintendo and talking to Fab 5, anyway he asked them their biggest influences and they all said Ultramagnetic MCs.