With their second album, De La
Soul Is Dead, the mood had changed along with the sound.
Lengthy and expensive battles to clear sample loops
were exhausting. Despite all this effort a brief fragment
of "You Showed Me" by The Turtles, slowed
down from 45rpm to 33, slipped through the net. Flo
and Eddie found out about it and pursued Tommy Boy for
publishing. To add to the sampling issue, a problem
that had taken a lot of the fun and mystery out of finding
loops, De La Soul felt that their Daisy Age slogan had
been misunderstood. "People weren't paying attention,"
complained Posdnous. "They were looking but not
touching. We died and now we're alive again, rejuvenated
into a new form."
"Things hit really fast and hard," Monica
admits. "They felt they had been painted into this
corner as being the hippies of hip-hop. They didn't
want to carry that weight on their shoulders because
they wanted to be affiliated with the rap community
and also feel they were free to experiment without being
perceived as those De La Soul hippie guys. If you have
a huge success then from the get-go it can be a blessing
and a curse."
Yet even the disillusionment produced good music. Tracks
such as "Ring Ring Ring" and "A Roller
Skating Jam Named 'Saturdays'" predated the late
Nineties revival of the disco Seventies. "In New
York, a lot of the records from New York hip-hop acts
had underground club records as their base." Monica
says. "But De La Soul were very democratic and
experimental in finding samples from all over the place.
Prince Paul finds stuff from everywhere. After 3 Feet
High and Rising came out, everybody did the skits."
Founder members of what later became Native Tongues,
De La Soul collaborated with other like-minded rappers
- The Jungle Brothers, A Tribe Called Quest's Q-Tip,
Queen Latifah and Monie Love - on "Buddy",
a sample-mad song that dared to be eccentric and funny
about sex.
The kings of sex and comedy - funk, sex and samples
- were Digital Underground, an Oakland group led by
Shock-G and Chopmaster J. "I have a very strong
memory of our promotion guy, Ed Strickland, bringing
us a tape of 'Doowotchulike'," says Monica, "De
La Soul were in the office and were really into it.
I thought that was a good sign."
One of the first acts from the west coast to gain popularity
on the east coast, Digital Underground took inspiration
from George Clinton and Bootsy Collins, with Shock-G
developing comic characters in the P-Funk tradition.
Using samples from classic Funkadelic tracks like "Flash
Light", Shock-G also threw jazz elements into the
mix. "Doowutchyalike", taken from the Sex
Packets album, featured a jazz piano solo (as well as
a rap by Tupac Shakur), while Shock-G's rap on "Same
Song", from "This Is An E.P. Release",
takes off with a nod to jazz bebop vocalising. "Kiss
You Back" somehow succeeded in combining crazy
word play with a serious message, while "The Humpty
Dance", another Sex Packets cut, showcased the
sex magnetism and big nose of Shock-G's alter-ego, Eddie
'Humpty Hump' Humphrey.
In 1989, Queen Latifah was brought to Tommy Boy to DJ
Mark James (The 45 King), Fab Five Freddy and a young
A&R man named Danté Ross. "She was still
in high school when we met her," says Monica. "I
met her when she was 17. She came over to the office.
The first impression is usually the one you wanna go
with. Here's this Latifah, coming in from East Orange,
New Jersey. That's the hip-hop hinterlands of their
day. There were no big acts from New Jersey at that
point. She comes in, blue jeans and a sweatshirt on
and this bubble haircut. She seemed really youthful
on the one hand but she seemed completely possessed
of herself and confident and just had this incredible
presence. She was not nervous or afraid. She spoke right
up.
"Her first album was produced by Mark, the 45 King.
She was hanging out in Mark's basement in East Orange,
along with other fledgling Flavour Unit folks like Lord
Alibaski, Lakim Shabazz and Naughty By Nature, who at
that point weren't even Naughty. Mark was the one who
really brought her along. There weren't a lot of female
hip-hop artists at that point. Apart from Salt 'n' Pepa,
none of them had |
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