Inside De La Soul’s Experimental, Crowd-Funded Comeback Record
“I don’t want to sit here and say it’s another 3 Feet High and Rising, I would never say that,” says De La Soul’s Kelvin “Posdnous” Mercer about his group’s upcoming eighth album, their first in 12 years. “But that element of not knowing what you’re doing, like, it felt like 3 Feet High and Rising. Like, we walked in, we didn’t know the rules.”
The pioneering Long Island expressionist rap crew has come a long way from their 1989 debut, which turned hip-hop upside down with puzzling samples of learn-French records, delirious skits, out-of-this-atmosphere poetics and naughty noise. But for their first album in their 40s, And the Anonymous Nobody, De La aren’t afraid to speed over the potholes on the road less traveled: Nobody will be the first album by a major rap group completely financed by crowd-funding site Kickstarter. The record was recorded with a live band, Los Angeles’ Rhythm Roots All-Stars, and then manipulated later with producer Dave West. One song, the Little Dragon-assisted “Drawn,” is an avant-indie opus full of plucked string counterpoints which goes nearly five minutes before anyone from this legendary rap group actually … raps.
“We couldn’t do that on a regular label,” says Posdnous. ” How you gonna present them with a song like this? They may think it’s beautiful but then it’s like, ‘Okay, so, there’s no chorus. For maybe the first three minutes of the record, you’re nowhere to be found.'”
De La will be releasing the album under their newly minted AOI imprint. Physical and digital distribution will be handled by Kobalt, the label services company that has recently worked projects by Prince, Lenny Kravitz and Best Coast.
“The idea of signing [to] a label was a bit scary,” says bandmate Dave Jolicoeur, who says they treated the Kickstarter campaign like a challenge. “We’ve been, obviously, on a label for about 20 years or so and then got moved and kicked around in the whole WEA system, and then ended up on Sanctuary. They really didn’t support that record [2004’s The Grind Date]. So just the idea of putting our project and what we create in someone else’s hands … is a scary thing.”
This exploratory, self-funded, self-released album comes after a monstrously successful Kickstarter campaign last March. The group’s $110,000 goal was met within hours — and then met nearly six more times. The group had put together a imaginative line-up of “rewards” for donors: $30 got you the album loaded on a thumb drive shaped like one of the group members’ heads, $350 got you a hand-written lyrics sheet, $7,500 let you appear on a skit on the album. The group put in hours of work getting all the tiers situated with their project manager, Brandon Hixon.
“We love the freedom. But with that freedom and trying to run this, there’s a lot of responsibility that goes into it,” says Posdnous. “Because, you know, sometimes, you just wanna be, like, ‘Alright, look, but today I need to write. Yo, man. Like, we’ve been on the phone for two hours. I gotta go!’