This is the first time I’ve written one of these entries not listening on headphones. Instead, I’m pumping out the jams from my laptop while sitting on the couch next to Megan. Nobody cares, Josh! Get to the music!
De La Soul, “Snoopies (featuring David Byrne)”
As I mentioned in the first entry on They Might Be Giants, De La Soul is probably the only band that I’ve been listening to longer than TMBG. I bought Three Feet High and Rising on the strength of being blown away by “Say No Go”, and I haven’t ever stopped listening to them. While they’ve had some ups and downs (the two Bionix albums being the major downs), every De La Soul record release has been an event for me. Their most recent record was an even bigger departure than usual: they crowdfunded it on Kickstarter, and decided to use a pretty novel method of making it. They brought a band into the studio, recorded them playing a wide variety of stuff, and then used that work as a basis for their sampling to make beats. Thus, they didn’t need to clear any samples: they were only sampling themselves. The results are interesting, and worth looking into.
[Read More]