I CAN DO ANYTHING (DELACRATIC)
Where the De La sound came from...

Dave (De La Soul): A lot of the records were things we were just fans of, stuff we enjoyed, whether it be the Hall & Oates record or Parliament-Funkadelic. There were so many songs that we used on 3 Feet High and Rising that we just enjoyed for the music, that were favourites of ours. And then, along the way, when those records were being made, you know, the basis of the record was probably something we'd know and love, and then all the extra additives probably that were used as extra were sounds that sounded good to add on to something. Like on The Magic Number - all the stuff that's being scratched and cut at the end, it just sounded good. But for the most part those were records that we enjoyed. We enjoyed Multiplication Rock and the song Three Is the Magic Number, and that's why we used that. We enjoyed Knee Deep by Parliament-Funkadelic. It was a mixture, but for the most part the basis of the songs were songs that we appreciated and loved.

Prince Paul (Stetsasonic/De La Soul producer): Pos had the [Bob Dorough] record, he was like 'Yo, I wanna use that Magic Number record.' And I remember us being in the studio and going through records, trying to figure out what the beat was. And I remember skipping through the records, and Mase had come across [Double D & Steinski's] Lesson 3. We just ran the loop and he just said 'Let's try this one.' And it worked! They were like, 'Let's sing Three Is the Magic Number.' And I said 'No! When we do it, let's do it in harmony! I'm gonna use the pitch shifter!' If you listen to the record real closely you can hear some high voices, some low voices, you know - that was my weak interpretation of being a producer! 'I'm gonna do the vocals in harmony!' I had no idea what harmonies were, but I just kinda guessed. Most of it was just real quick and fast. 'Oh, cool! Sounds good!' Very little brain-power.

Pos: The actual original Multiplication Rock record, that was just a very famous song as a child growing up. It was something you would see on Sunday morning TV. They had a cartoon that would go along with that song, with that entire album called Multiplication Rock, entire cartoons each Saturday. And that was the one we latched on to, to do for 3 Feet High and Rising, because there was three of us. It was a song we were very familiar with. I honestly wasn't familiar with all the rest of his work - I didn't realise that he [Bob Dorough] was a very famous musician 'til afterward - but that particular song itself was definitely a part of our lives.

Paul: I guess, for that particular one, I definitely have to give the credit to Pos, man. That was his concept. I was like, 'Oh my God! That's incredible! Let's get a beat behind it!' And then I think we put in the Holy Cow record, what's his name? Lee Dorsey, Get Out of My Life Woman, and sped it up real quick. And at the same time, it's funny - Biz Mark came in and he was like, 'Yo! I was gonna use that beat! I was gonna use it a lot slower! Let me hear how y'all used it!' And that was when he did Just a Friend. It's the same beat, but slower.

Dave: I think we more or less had the ideas, and the records. The records in our homes and the ideas in our heads. I don't think we really went out shopping to buy records [to sample] until, I don't think, the third album. 3 Feet High and Rising was a record that strictly came from ideas, some of them jotted down, some of them filling out spontaneously, and records that were from our own collections.

Paul: 'I know I love you better...' Me and Pos were talking about that, and he was like, 'I always wanted to use that.' I was like, 'Go for it, man - I always liked that record too!' You know what was so cool about us working together? Just the taste in music: that's kinda where we come from. In the '70s, black radio was everything - it was Steely Dan, it was Hall & Oates, it was James Brown, it was Brass Construction, it was Captain & Tennile - it was really well rounded. Whereas I guess today it's strictly the hot records, or the records that the labels are paying to get played a billion times. So it made you well rounded. And watching MTV early, when there was really no black videos - I guess all you had to watch was the pop stuff, whatever the case was at the time. So I guess we came in from all angles, and appreciating different music to most people. And I guess what was cool for me was I came from a breakbeat angle as well, 'cos I'd been DJ-ing for so long, and from a point where even before rap records came on wax, so it was like, I was into beat collecting - beats beats beats beats beats! And Pos comes in, and his father has all these crazy records, and he comes from the radio and MTV and stuff, and it's just clashing the two. And Mase being a DJ, plus his family listen to a whole lot of old R&B, then Trugoy being Haitian and listening to country & western...?! It was just combining all of those together. I don't know how everything materialised, but it was just the best combination that could ever happen at that given time.

SAY NO GO
How The Turtles and Biz Markie teamed up to stop records being made like this again...

Dave: One of the things that I think will always tie in with the name De La Soul is sampling and sample clearance issues and court dates and so on and so forth. I guess we obviously had a part in making this great business called sample clearance, where there's people making money just off clearing samples, not even being the people who own the publishing. Clearance companies are definitely booming nowadays. But it was one of those things I think needed to happen, and fortunately we were a part of making it happen. Rightfully, we were definitely wanting to be able to acknowledge the fact that we sampled some people, and they rightfully should know that we used it, and we'd get the clearance for it. And if there has to be a payment structure, let's make it happen. That's exactly what we did for 3 Feet High and Rising. We went through the process of making sure we had all the information. Unfortunately, the record was going so much in demand at the time that Tommy Boy didn't take the opportunity to clear all the samples prior to the record's release: they just released it anyway, and then we found ourselves in a lot of trouble. But it's important to us that we clear samples, from day one to today. We definitely want people to be acknowledged for what they've done, and paid for what they've done.

Paul: Yeah, I remember there was a law suit going on [with The Turtles - whose version of You Showed Me was sampled for Transmitting Live from Mars]. I remember the lawyer sending me questions: 'When y'all did this, what did y'all do?' And blah bah blah. But they more or less sued the label. You know what happened, and why I never really paid much attention? I never made money making a record, so them suing Tommy Boy wasn't like it was hitting my pockets, because I'd never seen any money. I was like, 'So? Whatever.' It wasn't like I was gonna come home and find my furniture was gone - I didn't have anything to begin with! You know? I never seen a royalty cheque. But then, even after the law suit I got a nice royalty cheque, which I thought was nice for me, because I made no money. But now I think about it, man, if there hadn't have been a law suit maybe I'd have made more money! But that was Tommy Boy's fault. They decided not to clear the sample. We gave them every lick, every sample that we used, and it was their decision. I remember clearly them saying, 'Oh, this is obscure, don't worry about this.' Hall & Oates they had to clear. 'This? We don't have to worry about this.' We wrote down everything, so the label could never say 'You guys! How could you do this!' It was never that. They knew it was their fault.

Our court case, yeah, it was known because it was the first. But if you wanna blame somebody [for ending sampling], put the blame on Biz! I tell him that all the time. He was the one who blew it totally out of the box [when he sampled Gilbert O'Sullivan's Alone Again Naturally]. It's different when somebody says, 'Hey, don't use my record', and you use it. You know what I'm saying? That's wrong! And very bold! You know? Nobody knew - there were no guidelines for sampling - then he just blew it out of proportion.

HOW MANY TIMES DID THE BATMOBILE CATCH A FLAT?
About that game show...

Pos: That came all the way at the end. Literally, we were already mixing songs, mixing the album, and Paul was like, 'You know what? We should still see if we can find something to just glue it together.' So we started tossing ideas around about what we could do, and once again, stupid old me said something like, 'Heheh, yeah, we need something like a game show!' And then Paul was, 'Yeah! That!' It was that simple. It wasn't even like we went from that point and mapped it out - it was all done, right then and there.

Paul: We did the album, it was done. We were in the studio to sequence it, and I'm writing out the sequence. And I'm thinking, 'Man, the album needs something!' I remember pacing in the studio... 'You know what we're gonna do? We're gonna do a game show! And the reason why we're gonna do a game show is because it's gonna give an opportunity for people who listen to the album to know who you are individually.' And that was the problem I had listening to it. A lot of the albums that came out during that time, if you didn't know the emcees maybe sometimes they sounded alike and you couldn't distinguish between them. And I was like, 'We're gonna make this different; I want everybody to have a persona.' And in a game show, you always introduce yourself. 'Hi, my name's this, I like this, that, I'm from here.' So that was what I wanted to do. The engineer played the game show host, and we just did it as we went along.

Pos: Our mix engineer, he was there, and he had a real dry type of voice. So we said, 'Yo Al, you be the show host!' And he was, 'Err, OK!' And he walked in, he's supposed to be the one mixing the session and tracking, and he walks in and we're tracking him instead! That's how it was. Then we went in and did our little parts as far as the contestants and all, right then and there. Right then and there. It wasn't like we had the idea then said 'Let's come back tomorrow and do it.' It was right there. We kicked around what we were gonna say, and someone says something stupid about the Batmobile catching the flat, and Paul laughed. Then someone said something about cereals, so we had to do that. The more dumb it sounded, the more we wanted to keep it.

Paul: We did it together. Everybody was responsible for their parts, but I more or less arranged it. 'You first, you second, you do this, you do that'. But as far as everybody's individual portions, it was like, 'Off the top of your head!' We sat down and wrote [the questions] collectively. My whole thing was getting the listener involved in your record: I wanted the listener to become a part. I grew up with children's records, and I wanted the listener to feel like they're in it. So that was the whole concept.

Pos: It was a real competition, but no-one really got it right! 'Toosh Et Leleh Poo' was 'Shut The Hell Up' backwards [Tuhs Eht Lleh Pu]. I don't remember how many times the Batmobile caught a flat: I know it happened once, but I don't know if it was more than that. I didn't come up with that one! The fibres in the Shredded Wheat biscuit? I have no fucking idea! I think that was just Paul being an idiot.

Paul: We got tons of letters, man. But I have no idea if there was a winner.

Pos: Nobody won. Nobody, man! Hurr hurr hurr.


D.A.I.S.Y. AGE
What happened next...

Paul: [The cover] was all Tommy Boy. I think Monica Lynch came up with the concept, and I think later on that made the group kind of upset, because that made 'em look all hippy-like, the dayglo colours. But when you think about it in hindsight, it was a good marketing tool. It worked. I liked it, but I didn't have any idea... none of us had any idea it would have the impact that it had. I remember, even the people around us, friends who were coming up to the studio, they were like, 'That record? These guys? How did that happen?!' I was saying this more as a coach, and I hate to sound like I was insincere, but maybe I was: but I took on this role that I felt as though, I'm almost like their father in the studio. Even though I'm just a year or two older, it's just like, 'I'm the older, more experienced guy.' And I remember at the end just saying, 'Man, we got a good record. We're gonna go gold.' [Laughs] I was saying, 'Feel good about yourselves! We're gonna go gold!' Just to cheer them on and make them feel good. Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I had a Number One album, Number One singles. This record, it changed... whatever! People were dressing like them! And I had no clue. That was amazing.

Afrika Baby Bam (Jungle Brothers): It was, 'Daisy Age? They on something new.' That had more of the press going, more of middle America, white America, going. I think they had something that the crossover road was more interested in, because it represented that whole '60s hippie culture where there were more white artists, like your Paul Simons and Art Garfunkels. They were using samples from that era, and also from P-Funk, who were a band where anything goes too. Jungle Brothers, we was moving from keeping the Zulu Nation going... if you look on Straight Out the Jungle, we thanked artists like Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. When they made their records there wasn't really a special thanks section, but we were paying respects to what was becoming known as the old school. And then we moved further into our blackness, by associating with... 'OK, what we do doesn't only go back to the old school here in New York City, it goes back to the old school from the African griot poets. Let's check some Last Poets and Gil Scott Heron out.' That's what appealed to me, and that's what appealed to Mike [G] too. If I was on some, 'We're gonna be just like Ill & Al Skratch and we're gonna buy a big Mercedes Benz and be chillin',' Mike would have looked at me like, 'We're not gonna be doin' this long.' But we moved more into our blackness and then, I think, that's when it began to mean more to us than hip hop.

Paul: [Making 3 Feet High...] was never really to outdo anyone for me. But my inspiration at the time was... I remember I was listening to Nation Of Millions, Beastie Boys' Licensed to Ill, Eazy E's album, and more so than anything? And if you listen to the album now, you can probably hear it, is George Clinton - and not necessarily for the funk aspects, but conceptually. He conceptualised all his records: like, they're underwater, or they're in space, or in the White House. I always appreciated that, and as a kid I was always able to visualise stuff. And I always wanted to make a record like that, and this gave me the opportunity. That's why it had the little cartoon on the inside. I wanted to get Pedro Bell to do the illustrations but they said it would have been too much like Parliament-Funkadelic, so we couldn't do it. You know. All that stuff, man! That was me. I wrote that little story inside, with the cartoon - that's where that came from. Because I wanted to be George Clinton, man! I idolised that man so much! I would skip school to listen to his albums. 'Ma, I don't feel good.' She'd go out to work, and I'd just constantly play his records over and over and over again. So, it's like, you know, this gave me an opportunity to make my Parliament-Funkadelic record, and that's what 3 Feet High and Rising was. For me.

Afrika: Straight Out the Jungle came out June '88, 3 Feet High and Rising came out in '89, so that was out when we were making our second album. I think we began recording the second album like November, December '88, got in the studio probably January, February, March. But I know De La's first album was out. Did it have an impact on what we were doing? For me, absolutely not. We almost didn't do Doin' Our Own Dang. It was the suggestion of somebody at Warlock records. The negotiations for Jungle Brothers to be on Warner Brothers was still taking place, and it was almost like it was still Warlock's record. I remember going and playing them some stuff, and he was like, 'You should do something with De La. They got y'all on their record, you should get them on yours.' He was thinking cold business - cold turkey business. So I was like, 'Yeah, that's cool, that should work.' So we did it. When we got to our album, we just was going off of... 'We've been around the world, we've been to Europe and Japan, we've seen all the cultures that are into Straight Out the Jungle, we got a world view now, we've been in clubs where people wanna dance, and clubs where people wanna think; we're promoting our positivity, and we want people to look at hip hop as something that comes from Africa, that has its origins in Africa. Let's make this album like a college piece, an intellectual piece: let's do 16 songs, and...' We had 20-something songs for that album, but we wanted to make a body of work. 'Let's use something from funk, something from soul, something from disco, something from doo-wop, something that reaches all the way back' - poetry. Black Woman, What U Waitin' 4. 'Let's do an album that encompasses all of that!' We was wearin' our African medallions and identifying with that. We was going to a place in Harlem called Africa House, burning incense and reading books, drinking sorrel and not eating meat, and talking with the elders about Bob Marley and Ghana and South Africa and apartheid. And taking all of those experiences back into the studio and making the studio environment almost like our village, our hut: just creating that whole environment. I had this red, gold and green flag with this kid on it who had dreads: I had that hanging up there in the studio. I had all these beads that I made, some of 'em had bells on, and you can hear them on the recording because I didn't take 'em off when I went in the booth. There was a set of tom drums in the booth that I played on Good News Coming. It was just about a village, tribal, hut type of environment in the studio. So we wasn't even thinking about the Daisy Age, about Me Myself and I, about strategically trying to build off of what De La did, which built off of what we did in a certain way.

Kool Keith (then of Ultramagnetic MCs): Pluckin' Cards was raw dissing. That was a straight-up record, me goin' against people. I wasn't mad. I wrote a record at that time, and I used the X-Clan. That was really cool back then. I was just... against Native Tongues by myself. The whole aura of that type of rap. I didn't ever dis the Jungle Brothers, I just didn't like that whole aura. I was mad because I thought they didn't respect what I was doing at that time. They got more centred into that rather than what rap was. Rap went back to that neo-soul, Arrested Development sort of thing. I never liked that era of rap that comes and goes - that neo-soul type of sphere. It takes away from rap itself. It takes away from the Just Ice. It takes away from the Tricky T, it takes away from Eric B and EPMD.

Paul: Q-Tip was the first person I heard talking about Paul's Boutique, then I immediately went and bought it. No: I bought it way before I heard Q-Tip talk about it! Right after I bought it, I remember me, him and Pos talking about how great it was. It wasn't 'til later, 'til I met the Beasties, they was like, 'Man, we was mad with you when you made 3 Feet High and Rising! That's what we were doing! That was our concept! We were putting all these samples together and stuff! And we were like, awww, now we've got to go back to the drawing board!' I was like, 'Really?' They were like, 'Man, we hated you guys!' Wow!

Mike D (Beastie Boys): I do remember... I was telling the story earlier, but... Actually, I don't remember running into Paul.

Adrock (Beastie Boys): I feel like I do. I think that was me.

Mike: So there you go. But I was just telling the story earlier that I remember the day that I got 3 Feet High and Rising. I don't know if it was the day it came out, or whatever, but we got it and we were in the studio, or on the way to the studio or whatever, and I remember listening to it, and I felt pretty crushed. I felt, 'Oh fuck! We've been putting all this work in, and like, they did it!' You know what I mean?

MCA (Beastie Boys): I think they're pretty different, actually.

Mike: I think in hindsight, they're radically different albums in terms of tone and feel and even just in terms of what they do. But it was just...

MCA: Most rap records in the immediate time before that was just beats, and people yelling over the beats. All the beats were trying to sound really big.

Mike: And shit trying to sound hard: instead of being brain-expanding material, they were trying to be hard. And all of a sudden De La Soul came out with, like, musically and lyrically a whole expansion of ideas. And Paul's Boutique did too.

Adrock: Public Enemy too.

Mike: Yeah, the Bomb Squad too. The Bomb Squad had... there was an eclecticism to what they did but it was somehow more focussed, or more purposefully kept to a certain tone, whereas 3 Feet High and Rising had such crazy, different shit on it, going on at the same time.

Adrock: 3 Feet High and Rising also sounded like those tapes you made when you were a little kid, on your tape deck, when you tape all stuff. All those skits and things. I'm not saying it's a child's thing, though.

Mike: [laughing] You're calling Paul a child?

Adrock: No.

Mike: But the shit still sounds really good today.

Paul: It was funny, because I used Licensed to Ill as a basis for a lot of the stuff! I was heavily listening to Licensed to Ill! That was my favourite! I thought Rick Rubin was a genius. Oh my God, I loved that record! That had a lot to do with 3 Feet High and Rising - Just the fun behind it. And even at the end, on Let's Get Ill, where they're cutting in Mister Ed, and there's all that awkward stuff, I'm like, 'God! This is incredible!' And I said, 'Man, I based a lot of my stuff on y'all!' Isn't that weird?

* A double-disc expanded platinum anniversary remastered edition of 3 Feet High and Rising isn't available now. Blame Biz...