De La Soul

Sheesh, this one is all over the map.

Here Lies Man, “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere”

Like some kind of fuzzed out combination of stoner rock and Afro beat, Here Lies Man is another one of those Bandcamp discoveries that come from checking out their daily blog. It’s pretty fun stuff!

De La Soul, “Pain”

From one end of De La Soul’s career to the other, this comes from their most recent album, And the Anonymous Nobody. As I mentioned in the first entry on them, this album was produced using Kickstarter, and all the samples came from their own recording sessions. I’m curious to see what their followup will be like. Will they use the same methods to make their next record?

Where else can you get a TMBG kids’ song and a wordless Negativland piece?

De La Soul, “De La Orgee”

So, uh, 14-year-old Josh was PRETTY BIG into this song. I actually greatly preferred the second half of 3 Feet High and Rising, and would usually play it over and over again. Not just because this was on it, of course, but the second half also started with my favorite song from them (“Say No Go”), had “Plug Tunin’” and “My Myself and I”, and, um, “Buddy”. I’m just saying, I was 14.

We’re majority rap today, which is totally ok with me. Hopefully it happens more often!

Devin the Dude, “Highway”

Here we find Devin in a rare contemplative mood, examining the sociopolitical origins of…naw, he’s rapping about women and weed. HIGHway, geddit?

De La Soul, “D.A.I.S.Y. Age”

Some seriously old De La Soul here, but still somehow sounding fresh. This was the proper album closer, although most versions of 3 Fee High And Rising have a second version of “Plug Tunin’” after it in the track list.

No intro today, just tunes.

De La Soul, “Jenifa Taught Me (Derwin’s Revenge)”

I remember being pretty baffled by a lot of the slang that De La Soul used on Three Feet High and Rising. This is mainly because I was a sheltered 14-year-old boy living in Spokane, and the internet didn’t exist to sort things out for me (or misinform me, to be fair). I worked out the general gist of a fair bit of it, and it never really bothered me or stopped me from listening to the music, but I was nevertheless baffled. I think it was an album designed to baffle folks.

Would anybody be interested in weekly summaries, or merged playlists of this stuff, or a “best of” thing periodically? I’m not sure if I want to do it or not, but it might be interesting. I’m also unsure if people want me to throw in random related songs onto these playlists or not. As always, I await your deafening silence down below. Accompany that silence with some tunes!

Ooh, we had our first repeated song today! MU330’s “Tune Me Out” showed up again. I’m going to skip it, because repeating songs is not what this project is about.

Hey! There’s an index to these things, meticulously maintained. I’m going to periodically mention it here, because these intros are dumb and why am I still typing I could just say here’s the music and you’d all be happier if any of you existed that is…

By the way, shout out to the song “!!!!!!!” by the Roots for being one of my most listened songs, simply by being virtue of the first song in my entire list. I hear it whenever I forget to switch on shuffle.

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.