“At the time I was heavy into Fishbone and Living Colour and Jimi Hendrix and John Coltrane…” – Yasiin Bey (Mos Def)
Recently Apple Music marked the entry of De La Soul in Spatial Audio with a two-hour-long round table talk hosted by Ebro, Zane, Nadeska and Estelle. This virtual meet-up saw some of the biggest names in Hip Hop reflecting on the group’s contribution as well as offering an insightful journey into this musical form’s genesis.
Black Thought, DJ Premier, DJ Shadow, Pete Rock, Yasiin Bey (Mos Def) and B-Real were among the many to join the discussion and give praise to one of music’s preeminent acts. The speakers imparted their perspectives in an honest manner, paying homage to this extraordinary ensemble.
Check out what Yasiin Bey (Mos Def) had to say about hearing De La Soul when he was in high school and then what De La means to him as an artist….
Yasiin Bey (Mos Def) on hearing De La Soul for the first time…
That was before 1996, that’s for certain. And the first thing I remember hearing of De La was the ‘Jenifa’ single. And I was a high school sophomore and I never heard anything like that before. I had never heard anybody expressing themselves like that in hip-hop. At the time I was heavy into Fishbone and Living Colour and Jimi Hendrix and John Coltrane and all of that. And I wasn’t really seeing that type of expression in my contemporary generation. But of course I was very much interested in hip-hop, but didn’t see my interest of personality necessarily reflected in and the expression in hip-hop in that era. There was some things, Queen Latifah, others… Lakim Shabazz and others. From that point, of course, ‘3 Feet High and Rising’ is this landmark. But by the time I got to meet them for Stakes Is High, I was already like a devotee.
Yasiin Bey (Mos Def) on what De La Soul means to him…I don’t know what it meant to nobody else, but De La Soul to me is like, there’s no Mos Def, there’s no Common, there’s no OutKast, there’s no Pharcyde. There’s nothing dynamic, or interesting, or that challenges the status quo on identity and expression in this art form that is called hip hop without De La Soul. And to quote Paris, he says, “First to do a lot of things in the game, but the last to stay.” Don’t even put it on a scale away and don’t talk about praise, or to raise the bar because it’s raised already.
