De La Soul (Kelvin "Posdnuos" Mercer, David "Trugoy the Dove" Jolicoeur, and Vincent "Maseo" Mason) take hip-hop in a lighter, more fun direction than the aggressive gangsta of NWA. Although they use the same elements, rapping over stitched-together samples, the sounds they use are a lighter kind of funk, their lyrics are less about violence on the streets and mistreating women, and more about talking animals and playfulness in romance.
The album is interspersed with a quiz show skit with such questions as “How many fibres are woven into a shredded wheat?” - the returns are the group members as contestants failing to answer. This alone sets the tone, a kind of hip-hip version of the Bonzo Dog Band.
You’ll know Three Is The Magic Number and Me Myself And I, I expect. The rest of the tracks are roughly along those kinds of lines. I was reminded of other groups with similar styles; Mr Wendal by Arrested Development came to mind, and Q-Tip from A Tribe Called Quest has a guest appearance; if you like one of these, you’ll probably like the others.
Samples come from all over the place - credits include Lionel Ritchie, Hall & Oates, George Clinton, James Brown and Johnny Cash. I was quite pleased to recognise the whistling in Eye Know as coming from Otis Redding’s Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay. Although most samples form the basis for the underlying tune, sometimes there are crazy drop-ins more like the likes of A Tribe Called Quest or The Avalanches; Jenifa Taught Me (Derwin’s Revenge), for example, suddenly breaks for Chopsticks (played badly as if by a child) in the middle.
As well as Q-Tip appearing, De La Soul pay some homage to Public Enemy in the track Plug Tunin’ which references Chuck D and states “My enemy’s publicly proclaiming”. Transmitting Live From Mars is a brief bit of trip-hop with French conversation sampled which took me back to Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melodie Nelson album, and talking of Gainsbourg and musical sexual moaning, watch out for De La Orgee if you’re listening to this album in public!
As with the prior variants of hip-hop, just over an hour of this began to get a bit monotonous despite the greater variety (and feeling less like you’re being shouted at like with NWA), but it’s definitely one to dip into and appreciate. Some may (and did) wonder about how skilful it really is to take music made by other people and stitch it together as your own – I'd say more than you think, to be honest.
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