The BV Q&A: De La Soul
By Quibian Salazar-Moreno
The hip-hop game is often compared to the NFL or the NBA. It’s a young man’s game where the vets are slowly being fazed out every year. For De La Soul however, their relevance in the scene is longstanding. Now in their mid-30s, Pos, Dave and Maseo have struggled over the past few years due to unfortunate issues with their former label Tommy Boy.
De La’s last album, ‘Art Official Intelligence: Bionix,’ was released in 2001 and was the second part of a trilogy of albums with the ‘AOI’ theme. However, the third and final album, a dedication to the art of DJing, has yet to see the light of day. Instead, the group has released ‘The Grind Date’ with its new label, Sanctuary Records.
We caught up with Pos and Maseo while they were promoting their new album and found out what’s up with The Grind Date, what really happened at Tommy Boy Records, and how it feels to be the “old school” cats in a young man’s game.
What’s the science behind the title, ‘The Grind Date’?
Maseo: The terminology “grind” is slang for saying you’re on your job, bustin’ your butt for getting to where you want to go and making it happen everyday. It’s a play on “blind date.” Dave saw an episode of ‘Making The Band’ and Puff sent Babs on a blind date with Juvenile but she didn’t know who she was going on the date with. It cut back to Puff saying that we got to get on our grind and make it happen. That’s what we gotta do to go out there and make this project pop.
On this album you collaborate with cats like MF Doom and Ghostface Killa. How was it working with them?
Maseo: [I’ve been] listening to Doom for the last year or so and he’s been really putting it down. It was Dave’s idea to have Doom on the record. When Doom came to the studio, it was an exciting day. He’s such a nonchalant laid back fan of just hip-hop. Doom, I think, is one your biggest fans that actually is a part of the art. I was excited that he was excited and he got in the booth and he did his thing man. We knew him very well when he was Zevlove X with KMD in the early ‘90s. We were on tour with him around the time, along with Brand Nubian and Leaders of The New School. We’ve known each other for a very long time. Ghostface was incredible man. We were trying to work with him on ‘Bionix,’ but it didn’t fall into schedule. So when the opportunity and the track presented itself again, we posed the idea again and Ghost was always willing to do that.
On the new album the Tommy Boy relationship is negatively mentioned quite a bit. What happened there?
Pos: It’s not like anybody wants to bring bodily harm to anyone up there, it’s just that Tom Silverman, the CEO of Tommy Boy, he just kind of fell out of touch about how the game has changed. Puffy helped change the game, Def Jam was a part of the change, a lot of other labels as well and unfortunately, outside of De La Soul, there weren’t a lot of artists on Tommy Boy any longer. Latifah was no longer there, Naughty was no longer there, so Tommy Boy didn’t have a lot of bargaining chips. They couldn’t turn around and say, ‘Look Def Jam, if you let Redman do the ‘Oohh’ song, don’t charge De La $20,000 for him to do it, because I’ll let so and so rhyme on this for you and you can get him for that, etc.’ He didn’t have that power that Sylvia Rhone may have or Lyor Cohen may have.
Maseo: At the same time, they were lying a lot too. There was a lot of deception. Not to say that things were contractually messed up, it wasn’t. It was just that they were lying to us. The things they did say they would do, they couldn’t do. But it is what it is, they just fell out of the loop of what was going on and it just became more of a situation where they were depending on us instead of us depending on them.
Your ‘AOI’ albums were supposed to be a trilogy. ‘The Grind Date’ is not part of that trilogy, did the Tommy Boy relationship prevent that third album of the trilogy from coming out?
Pos: Well, it had something to do with it indirectly due to the fact that Tom Silverman owed Warner Bros something in the range of like $40 something million. So by him having like three to four months to get that money, he couldn’t. So what Warner Bros chose to do was, since he couldn’t pay back the money, they took what they felt like it was worth, which was his masters. So of course they snatched De La, they snatched Prince Paul, and they snatched Everlast, they snatched all his groups. So that happened on ‘AOI 2,’ and that’s why you only saw one video, which was ‘Baby Phat,’ and everything else on the project stopped. We were then supposed to be picked up by Sylvia Rhone at Elektra, but that just didn’t happen. So basically we wound up being free agents [and] we wound up getting out of the deal.
This kid Tom Wally, who was one of the main people at Warner Bros who was taking over, he was a big De La fan, and he knew that Warner Bros was in the middle of a lot of big changes themselves and if we would have went directly to them we wouldn’t be coming out because there was too many changes going on. Atlantic said they would love De La to be there but they had too many artists to deal with at the time so we got released. In doing that, we felt like wherever we went with our new deal, whether it was Sanctuary, which is where we are now, whether it was Jive, Def Jam or wherever, that label wouldn’t want its first impression of De La Soul to put out a DJ record (‘AOI 3’). So we had to come with a straightforward De La Soul record first. But in a nutshell, we definitely plan on releasing the third ‘AOI’ record. Sanctuary seems like they’re interested. Hopefully we can do it here, but if we can’t do it here we’ll find a way.
Maseo: It’s coming out baby, it’s coming out!
Being that you guys are vets in the game and are older than most of the cats that are making hits today, how do you see your relevance within hip-hop today, especially when most people consider it to be a young person’s culture?
Pos: See, that’s why De La Soul has been blessed to be here so long. We don’t look at rap like that. I think when you have even younger rappers look at rap like that, they only set themselves up to be in it for only one or two albums. We look at rap like it’s nothing but art. DaVinci can be 65-years-old but he’s still getting commissioned to paint on a wall. And that’s how we look at our art. Our art is painting, painting pictures that a 10-year-old can do in a little art class and a 35-year-old credible painter can do. From that point after you make your art, your record label is the one that has to commission the sale. That’s all it is. Unfortunately, even with Jay-Z being as big as he was, I don’t agree with what he said. I don’t look at rap like a sport. It’s not. It’s a sport in a sense of it’s mental. As long as your mental ability is where it needs to be and your creative ability is where it needs to be, there’s no cause for lifting weights, it doesn’t matter if your joints are getting messed up, you can still write a rhyme [or] recite a rhyme. You just have to be able to condition your mind mentally so that even a 16-year-old guy can understand certain things that De La Soul, who are 35, is saying.
We see ourselves like, yo, we’re just like you. We’ve been through what you’ve been through so we know what you’ve been through. But you don’t know what we’ve been through so we’re telling you what we’re going through right now. There’s always room for you to be there and be consistent as long as someone is willing to setup and sell your art, you good.
With the Tommy Boy situation, and ‘AOI: Bionix’ not doing as well as you hoped, did you guys ever feel like just hanging it up, going solo or playing the background.
Maseo: Nah, we felt like that more when ‘Stakes is High’ came out. We’re still hungry and we feel we can still make good music.
October 26, 2004