Prologue
Welcome to Artefacts, the first in a series of planned posts in which I revisit some piece of art that has been important in my life. Artefacts is my attempt to pay some homage to the books, the music and film, the visual and performing arts that played the biggest roles in developing my aesthetic tastes and shaping my world view.
Let’s start the first installment with a musical introduction.
1.
#DeLaDay was March 3rd, the day that De La Soul’s catalogue finally became available on streaming services. This was a big deal for me. The group’s first album, 3 Feet High and Rising, came out in 1989. I was thirteen. I’m having a hard time remembering whether I had it on cassette or if it was one of the first CDs I got when I finally scored a Sony Discman. I likely had both, because for several years that album was pretty heavy in my personal rotation.
Why was this album so special to me? For one, there was De La Soul’s whole black hippy aesthetic, which didn’t perfectly match, but certainly vibed with my own style at the time. However, let me put the identity element to the side for a moment. I’ll come back to it. Let’s start with the music, which really hit me in a particular kind of way. I hadn’t quite heard anything like 3 Feet High and Rising before. That statement reads awfully cliched and a bit hyperbolic, but it also happens to be true.
To understand the newness of De La’s sound, it helps to understand a bit about the history of hip hop. Hip hop culture has been distinct and identifiable from its inception, but rap music existed first as a sub-category of other genres. The music was built from samples, from funk breakbeats overlayed with snippets of disco and R&B. Some of the earliest rap hits used live instrumentation but were often interpolations of funk and disco songs.
Beginning around 1983, that earlier style of hip hop gave way to the so-called Golden Era, which was characterized by a stripped-down sound. As Run raps on the opening verse of Run DMC’s seminal track “Sucker M.C.’s,” “Dave cut the record down to the bone. And now they got me rockin’ on the microphone,” a reference to producer Davy DMX, one of the pioneers of this bare bones production style.
Run DMC’s image was stripped down as well, black Levi’s and leather jackets, Adidas track suits and gold ropes. The over-the-top costuming of Afrika Bambata and the Studio 54-ready suits of Kurtis Blow gave way to street style.
The next evolution was in how rappers rapped. Different rhyme schemes came to replace the straight-ahead staccato of early MCs. Rakim has said that he wanted to rap like John Coltrane played the saxophone, employing syncopation and switching up rhythms. He, along with Big Daddy Kane and KRS-One came to typify that Golden Era sound, which became less sparse but was still based on dominant breakbeats with minimal melodic elements. The music was about making you move and giving the MC a runway from which to take off.
The lyricism continued to evolve throughout the 80s, along with the subject matter, but the basic template was set. Straight-ahead production matched with street style and verbal braggadocio.
That was the milieu into which 3 Feet High and Rising was released.
2.
I have a confession. The first time I heard A Tribe Called Quest, I thought it was just the wackest shit ever. It was the video for "I Left My Wallet in El Segundo" and I saw it on Video Music Box. I didn't get it at all. The beat was compelling, but everything else was just too out there for me. For lack of a better word, I thought it was corny. That didn’t last long. By the time I’d heard “Bonita Applebum,” “Can I Kick it?” and the rest of their first album, I was fully in love with Tribe. The music won me over, but the thing that made me give ATCQ another shot was finding out that they were down with De La Soul.
De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest were both founding members, along with the Jungle Brothers, of the Native Tongues collective. I won’t go too much into the history of Native Tongues here. If you want to know more, I recommend this video.
I’ve chosen to focus on De La Soul and their first album, because of how much it meant to me personally, but much of what I’m attributing to De La Soul extrapolates more broadly to the whole Native Tongues movement.1 What’s written in the section above is a very simplified history of 1980s rap music and I should clarify so as not to imply that all 1980s hip hop sounded the same. It didn’t. What I do feel confident in saying is that nothing out at the time sounded quite like 3 Feet High and Rising.
It’s not that De La Soul was so far afield of its contemporaries. The album’s main producer, Prince Paul, was part of a group called Stetsasonic, who were very much in the mold of mid-80s hip hop. The James Brown breakbeats, the scratching, the funk samples, they are all there on 3 Feet High and Rising. But there’s also Johnny Cash and Steely Dan and music from Schoolhouse Rock. And notably, 3 Feet High and Rising was the first hip hop album to feature skits prominently, something that would quickly become ubiquitous. Again, I don’t want to portray myself as the authority, but I have a hard time thinking of many albums that were this varied.2
Golden-era hip hop mostly sounded like New York, but De La Soul and Native Tongues sounded like somewhere that I’d never been before. It was this widening of sonic possibility that drew me in. A lot of this sonic variety came from the liberal use of samples, which alas, was the reason that the album was unavailable for so long. Tommy Boy Records, De La’s label, was either unwilling or unable to get the right clearances. De La Soul tried selling their albums directly to consumers a few years back, but the legal troubles made that short lived.
3.
I’ve tried to give a pretty faithful and objective rendering of De La Soul’s place in hip hop. But this piece is all about me. So yeah, I guess I should circle back and talk about the identity aspect.
Questions of blackness can be complicated, in large measure because so many of these questions are imposed from outside. Take for example, the evergreen discussion about acting white, which is a conversation that holds almost no interest for me. I've learned to tune it out, as it is most often rooted in the endless left-right culture wars rather than any real sense of black life. That said, there is definitely a meaningful conversation that can be had about what it means to fit in in black spaces.
Golden Era hip hop was full of MCs who might as well have been superheroes to me. Like the comic book pantheon, they all had different powers. Rakim was the super lyrical. Big Daddy Kane was super smooth. KRS-One, the teacher. Chuck D, the militant. Slick Rick, the storyteller; so on and so forth. But while they all had different MOs, they were all still of a similar mold in how they expressed a certain kind of braggadocios, unapologetic black masculinity.
Native Tongues was one of the first times that I saw an alternative. It’s not just that De La Soul were suburban teenagers rapping about hanging out and meeting girls between silly skits. Kid ‘n Play and Will Smith did exist, after all. As much as I love hip hop, it can be a conformist culture and one with an emphasis on conspicuous consumption. In De La Soul, I found some attempt to reckon with what it meant to be cool and the idea that self-expression could, in itself, be cool.
It is important that I impress upon you that I’m not suggesting De La Soul as some kind of anecdote to mainstream hip hop or to some toxic form of black masculinity. I don’t think that black identity works that way. And I don’t think black art works that way either.
Musical genres evolve through a dialectical process in which the pendulum swings from one end to the other and back again. In jazz for instance, the danceable music of the big band era gave way to bebop, which demanded that audiences stop dancing and pay attention; that then evolved into hard bop and then swung the other way towards modal music, which was sparse and expressive, and that, in turn, led to fusion and free jazz, which was again noisy and frenetic. Each time the pendulum turned, it brought back to the center some element of where it had been.
De La Soul and Native Tongues were a key part of this dialectic in the history of hip hop, both in terms of their production and their style. What De La Soul and Prince Paul and Q-Tip, from ATCQ, and the rest of Native Tongues did was important because they reached outside of hip hop and brought elements in that would in time become a part of hip hop. For example, when Nas was forming a roster of producers for his much-anticipated 1994 debut album, he called on DJ Premier and Pete Rock, two producers who are emblematic of early 90s Boom Bap, but he also enlisted Q-Tip to produce for the album. Prince Paul would go on to form the group Gravediggaz with Wu Tang’s Rza, another key figure in the evolution of New York hip hop. Music that started out as an alternative to the mainstream eventually became part of the mainstream’s DNA, making the whole culture that much better.
Without De La Soul and Native Tongues, you don’t get The Neptunes or Kanye west (the producer, not the anti-semite). You don’t get The Roots or Donald Glover or Tyler the Creator. Go read the references on the album’s Wikipedia page if you’d like more information on the album’s influence. I’m here to testify to its influence on me.
Ta-Nehisi Coates once likened hip hop music to strong coffee, something to steel yourself for the demands of inner-city life. The more mainstream models of black masculinity found in hip hop culture were an important part of my development. I don’t reject them in any way. What De La Soul showed me was an alternative and that embracing alternatives can offer a different kind of steel. And aesthetically, 3 Feet High and Rising taught me that truly great art doesn’t follow a formula but is often about following a bunch of disparate threads and weaving those threads into something new and wonderful.
I will end by again saying #HappyDeLaDay and saying RIP to Dave, the member of the group who didn’t live to see their music return to its fans.
I actually heard Jungle Brothers before I heard De La Soul. Their debut Straight out the Jungle was released in 1988 and their dance music inspired track “I’ll House You” was being played all over that year.
The other obvious one is the Beastie Boys sophomore album Paul’s Boutique.