Travis Sengaus
De La Soul’s debut changed the face of hip hop — and not just musically
Listening to the radio these days it seems that NWA was the only hip hop group that mattered during the ’90s but to make such a pronouncement would be ignoring De La Soul and their 1989 debut 3 Feet High and Rising . While NWA ruled the radio and Billboard charts De La Soul’s intelligent lyrics and eclectic sound found support on college campuses across the country helping give birth to the so-called alternative hip hop community. Led by Prince Paul then of Stetsasonic fame 3 Feet High and Rising featured an unparalleled layering of samples with sources ranging from Funkadelic and James Brown to ’60s psychedelic bands like The Turtles. A sample from Johnny Cash’s hit “How High’s the Water Mama?” gave the album its title while “Cool Breeze on the Rocks” contained an unprecedented 16 samples leading The Village Voice to label the album “The Sgt. Pepper of hip hop” — the diversity of the samples and the creativity of their use lent a huge crossover appeal to De La Soul.
“I distinctly remember this being a very big album with the first wave of Ravers” recalls local DJ Sideshow Sid Marricks. “You’d just as likely hear ‘Say No Go’ in a set by Danny Rampling as you would [early techno track] ‘Good Life.’ For a moment there it seemed like everyone was dancing to the same beat.”
Part of De La Soul’s allure was its use of a ’60s-style hippie sound as opposed to the more funk- and soul-oriented work of groups like Public Enemy and NWA making them something of a hip hop oasis throughout the ’90s. As former DJ and music journalist Joe Chan says “In my mind 3 Feet High is very much the product of its environment De La having formed in [middle-class] Amityville — the type of neighbourhood where drive-bys pale in concern to teenage politics. The De La album captures all the beauty — if there is any — of an innocent adolescence in the Calgary suburbs where self-involvement is your biggest worry. [The album] is almost brazen that way particularly in the larger hip hop context.”
The musical landscape wasn’t the only thing to change when acts like De La Soul started topping the charts. When members of The Turtles heard their music being used on the song “Transmitting Live from Mars” they filed a multimillion dollar lawsuit against the band.
De La Soul was not the first hip hop group to be taken to court over the practice of sampling pre-existing music in their songs — that honour belongs to Biz Markie sued only a few months earlier. However while both sides in the De La Soul dispute eventually settled out of court the legal impact did as much to change hip hop as NWA’s depiction of gang life. Following the settlement record companies required that all musical samples be “cleared” with the artist in question and licensing fees quickly began to escalate production costs. By 1992 costs for samples of George Clinton’s legendary Parliament were so high that Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg hired live musicians to create an approximation of the funk sound they were looking for (later dubbed G-funk). The model would prove highly economical.
“Sampling definitely became more of a risky business at that point which more than likely led to a bigger abundance of keyboard and live instrument-based production” says Adam Hicks better known as DJ Cosm of Calgary’s Dragon Fli Empire. "However many artists have still found ways to make sample-based production work for them. Some producers pride themselves on disguising samples via chopping them into very small snippets and re-arranging them. Some producers only hunt for very obscure samples which will more than likely never be discovered. I’ve always heard the basic rule of thumb is that if you are not selling more than 10000 copies it would not be worth the original artist and label’s time and money to take legal action.”
According Edmonton’s Cadence Weapon before De La Soul and Dr. Dre “Run-DMC using live guitarists and Afrika Bambaataa getting people to interpolate Kraftwerk jams were more common ideas. I think the problem is more with a lack of ideas than a mere change in the framework. As a musician you have to be capable of getting around the restrictions put around you financial or conceptual. In an industry sense sample clearance made a lot of commercial rappers cheap out and make synth beats but it’s more about the ideas and less about how they are created.”
The issue of sampling is still not resolved. Polaris Prize-nominated hip hop artist Shad points to the ongoing legal battles that producer Danger Mouse is facing regarding The Grey Album his legendary mashup of The Beatles’ White Album and Jay-Z’s The Black Album . “I think worrying about those legal issues is bad for music” he says. “Creativity isn’t something we need to worry about. Artists — real artists — are always gonna be around and they’re always gonna want to express themselves and be unique and interesting. We don’t have to worry about creativity in the world. Creativity is like breathing for humans. It’s the most natural thing. It’s OK and very natural even for artists to build on old musical ideas and make something new with it. It’s inspiration. It’s evolution. It’s how creativity works.”
Looking back De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising stands out for its creativity. Its psychedelic rock jams existed at odds with the resurrected funk sounds of the West Coast while its idyllic songs about dandruff potholes and magic numbers offered an alternative to the harsh gangster life depicted by NWA. De La Soul may have recognized that the brief Arcadian image they captured was over when they titled their next album De La Soul Is Dead but by that point they had already helped inspire bands likeT Jungle Brothers and A Tribe Called Quest while laying the groundwork for others like the Black Eyed Peas.
