Thrasher Magazine

After raising over $600,000 via Kickstarter, legendary hip-hop trio De La Soul was finally able to complete its most recent magnum opus, And the Anonymous Nobody, an album that finds the three hip-hop heavyweights—Kelvin “Posdnuos” Mercer, David “Dave” Jolicoeur and Vincent “Maseo” Mason—collaborating with a curious mix of artists ranging from David Byrne of Talking Heads and Snoop Dogg to 2 Chainz and Little Dragon. However, that’s really nothing out of the ordinary. De La Soul has been breaking new ground since its 1989 seminal album, 3 Feet High and Rising, which was produced by the talented Prince Paul and is a certified Golden Era classic. As the New York natives tour the world in support of the record, Maseo took some time while in Argentina to discuss the album, performing on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and whether or not working with Prince Paul will ever happen again. —Kyle Eustice

Some of the collaborations on the record are so unexpected, but somehow work, specifically the ones with 2 Chainz and Justin Hawkins of The Darkness.
We’re dealing with a record right now that bridges the gap in a major way. It speaks slowly to the freedom of an artist. We’re talking about a record right now that makes it feel good for adults to love hip-hop again. We have so many people that feel like when they reach a certain age that they feel like they grew out of hip-hop because of the content in its current stages caters to a much younger audience.

Right, and they can’t relate to it.
To me, this is a record that holds so much relevance it should be inspiring my peers to make music again.

How have you felt about the album’s reception?
I was happy when we achieved the Kickstarter goal. 
I was content with that. For it to now come to fruition and to know we actually met the demand of the campaign, that makes me feel complete. Now we just gotta let the record do what it’s going to do. We’re obviously in a time where music is just so saturated so we have to keep coming up with savvy ways to put the record in people’s faces. I don’t really expect the record to really do well until maybe the end of next year.

What does that look like? How have you been doing things differently than you did in the ‘90s?
I think we’ve definitely been highly interactive in all the social media that takes place because that is the big brunt of our world nowadays. In the ‘90s, you didn’t have social media. Now we have the ability to really connect with the fans, let alone hear different comments instantaneously, which gives us a better scope on what people are checking for or not checking for. It’s been great to see how great the record has been received based on curiosity alone. For not having a record in 11 or 12 years, one thing I know about the world we’re in is we are more in an image-driven world than we are a sonic-driven world, so people saw the narrative of the record long before they heard the record, and a lot of people turned their nose up to the 2 Chainz collaboration. But when they finally heard it, they liked it.

I thought it was good and I was never a 2 Chainz fan, but you guys made it work. What’s your favorite song on the record?
“Nosed Up.” It just has that Parliament Funkadelic feel that I grew up on. I’m such a Parliament head.

What about your favorite collaboration?
Justin Hawkins.

Wow that’s unexpected. What made him so amazing?
He just nailed it. The song itself overall has that “Walk This Way” feel. 
It’s not “Walk This Way” obviously, but it’s got that feeling—that rock-rap sound. It kind of reminded me of the old Run DMC produced by Rick Rubin and Aerosmith vibe.

How did it feel to perform “Memory Of” on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon?
It was really cool. Estelle is a long-time friend. She used to rap. People don’t really know that. During the Lyricist Lounge era, there was another thing going on in England called Apricot Jam and Estelle was a part of that.

Tell me about “Exodus.” The hook says, “It’s the years that we own and we earned them/See the bridges we built now are burned down.” Can you expand on that a little?
We’ve been a group to play by the rules. We played by these rules and we realized the industry, overall, no one else plays by the rules. These are unwritten rules that exist and we’ve played fair. We’ve played fair to what was always presented to us and we’ve always been treated unfairly, but we kept doing what we’re doing. At this point in time, how we make music, create music, release music—we’re going to go against the written rules, all barriers, all molds and go against the grain. We’re going up against those traditions. This is a non-traditional record, even the way a lot of the songs are formatted makes it so the they wouldn’t be played on the radio.

And this time you didn’t really use samples, right?
We sampled from live instrumentation. We had musicians do 200 or 300 hours of jamming and we sampled those elements like they were records.

Sounds like a daunting process. What’s up with you and Prince Paul? What is to prevent you guys from ever working together again?
Nothing is preventing us from working together. I think the stars never really lined up for that to happen. There’s no drama. It’s just a natural separation. On Stakes Is High [1996], things was more serious for us than it was for Paul. Around this time, Paul had other options, even like he does now. Win or lose, he had options. De La is all we got.

Is it something out of the question? You had magic chemistry.
I wouldn’t say it’s out of the question. We’d all have to be on the same page, I guess.  

That would be a dream come true for a lot of De La Soul fans.
At the same time, and definitely with this record, I think it was about showing people that we’ve always made music, even without Paul, although the chemistry we had was incredible. Paul was like the fourth member of the group.

Like the fifth Beatle.
Yeah, and we had to prove a lot to ourselves. We had to prove we could do it without Paul and without Tommy Boy [Records]. I’m going to be honest. I never want to do business with Tommy Boy again, but with Prince Paul, we’d love to do another record with him.

Hell yeah. I love to hear that. Maybe you guys can talk about that in the future.
Maybe that can be our retirement album. We can go out the way we came in.