De La Soul

Caught the final night of De La Soul’s seven day residency at the Jazz Cafe last night. Always a punchy call to go out on a Monday, but overall I’m glad I did.

Songswise (and not necessarily knowing the entire back catalogue), on the chirpy older crowd–pleasing side, I think they did Pot Holes in My Lawn; Me, Myself and I and Buddy from Three Feet High and Rising and Ring Ring Ring (Ha Ha Hey) from De La Soul is Dead. On the slightly harder more recent side, I think they did U Can Do (Life); My Writes and Oooh from Art Official Intelligence and unsurprisingly, they also did some stuff from the latest album, The Grind Date, but I hadn’t heard that album before so I couldn’t recognise tracks.

They were supported by a guy called Butter V, from Florida, who guests on the latest album. He was OK, if not amazing; and of course it’s always more difficult to get into something when you don’t know any of the material. Also, during the De La Soul set, Talib Kwali came on and did a couple of tracks, which was cool. Butter V came back on for a song (presumably, that on which he appears on the new De La album?)

The sound was alright, but not great — not great clarity and quite hard to make out the lyrics to the songs you didn’t know. The crowd was fairly diverse, but tended towards the studenty (Monday night, I guess). Both Butter V and De La on several occasions exhorted the crowd to “put your hands up if you love hip hop”, which got a mixed reception from the crowd. “Put your hands up if you smoke weed” a bit later on got the biggest cheer. Perhaps in an attempt to keep the old hippy image stuffed firmly back in the past, Dave “Trugoy” also invited the crowd to “put your hands up if you do cocaine”, which they did, somewhat equivocally (joined enthusisatically, however, by Butter V from the wings, I was amused to note — I understand that the stuff is used instead of baby powder in Miami, right?). I am pleased to report that “put your hands up if you do crack” was widely booed, although Trugoy confessed to partaking (perhaps tongue in cheek?!) “on three days of the week”.

That exchange kind of illustrated the vibe of the evening. Although it was a good evening, I had a funny feeling throughout that De La Soul were kind of taking the piss out of the crowd, but that not everyone was quite getting it. Despite the comments about it being their last night, London being off–the–hook and De La wanting to make the final night the biggest party of the trip, there just seemed a slight air of cynicism and a hint that they were raising a slightly weary eyebrow about being received to some extent as a bit of a “heritage” act, where the joints that got the biggest cheers were those from 18 years ago. Kind of like Steve Hackett playing an old Genesis tune — but whereas you get the impression that Steve Hackett doesn’t care, De La still seemed just slightly pissed off about it to me. Maybe I’m tripping…

Anyway, it was still a good night and worth seeing, not least because having been around for 18 years, they are great on the mic and on the deck and put out a highly professional set. Nice intimate venue, also.