De La Soul - Classic or Dud?

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.

The tracklist from that promo LP version of the second album is a lot clearer and a more lucid statement. Since their songs are already built upon digression, adding more digressions in-between the songs is overkill, especially once you've read the comic strip in the liner notes and understand the general attitude behind the album.

ahh it was buhloone not dead that had the animal noises on it. one of those things i had only ever heard about, not actually heard.

also i think it's important to remember the format and media of the time: no internet, 900 numbers, jerky boys hadn't even come around yet, and most people didn't even have cable at that point. even with music there was an expectation of one-liners, "outrageous" and "wacky" situations... cheap entertainment basically! my point in bringing this up is: in 1991 it was still very much acceptable to thematically create an album the same way you would a movie. they certainly weren't the first music act to do it, but there is a sense of sarcasm and embellishment (especially on the second album) that is 100% theirs. it's one of the reasons i revere that album so much: it's like hiphop vaudeville.

I revere it, don't always wanna hear it

That's it! Thanks Josh, I was wondering why I couldn't find anything on that, but I was searching for the wrong album.

Haven't heard it myself either.

I wonder if Greg Kott didn’t get it:

‘While renouncing the conventional topics of hard-core hip-hop (guns, ho's, inner-city pathology masquerading as manhood), it flirts with cultural and musical criticism on such cuts as "Ego Trippin' (Part Two)" and "I Am I Be." The braying of a donkey and the mantra "It might blow up but it won't go pop" also provide an oblique, running commentary on the hip-hop nation.’

Looks like he got one.

this is a cool find - Shortie No Mass from Buhloone Mindstate finally released her first solo album in 2021, it's a nice old school NT vibe, love that this isn't much different than a debut album from her would have been in 1993

https://shortienomass.bandcamp.com/album/here-goes-nothing

she also put up a single from those days, produced by rockwilder and da beatminerz, i think this was all that ever came out then

article:
https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/shortie-no-mass-here-goes-nothing-interview

thanks!

here's the old single: https://vindig.bandcamp.com/album/like-this-u-like-my-style

yeah i posted on random old rap about shortie's album some time ago — it's really good and the first voice you hear is phife!

Yo and we won't stop rocking til we retire
But since the economy is such in them dire straits
That isn't an option

The big rediscovery for me from all of this has been Buhloone Mindstate, which I liked at the time but it was never a big part of my listening the way the first two were — they were very much a college band for me, the first two albums came out while I was in school, so by the time of the third one I was off listening to a bunch of other stuff, De La Soul weren't "the future" anymore. BUT. Wow that's a great album. Maybe their best! I was surprised by how much of it I remembered even knowing that I'd never listened to it much. So anyway, I know I'm 30 years late on that, but it has been a real pleasure to dig back into.

It's the best kind of "mature" record - full of complexity and emotional depth, while the shift from dayglo sampledelia to more muted jazz shades (not to mention Maceo Parker's interludes) complements the shift in text. Complicated, not hard.

The best kind of mature album in that it also revels in play.

Yes, definitely.

Anyway... Vibe. Vibration.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ6JXCaOttw

god what a great performance. wouldn't be surprised if pos and ma$e go on tour with a ringer (like, say, the mighty mos def)

Yaasin would be great, just make sure he has his passport

Just relistening to Is Dead this afternoon, loving the line of "curiosity killed the cat" in My Brother Is A Basehead, given Ring Ring Ring is based around a hook from a Curiosity Killed The Cat track.

OMG. That Fallon clip!