Fact #160718
When:
Short story:
De La Soul's debut album 3 Feet High And Rising enters the UK album charts, where it will peak at No13.
Full article:
Ian Broudie of Lightning Seeds tells Johnny Black why he loves 3 Feet High And Rising by De La Soul.
Ian Broudie : The thing about this album is that it was a classic as soon as it came out. Its influence has been huge, and people like The Beastie Boys owe it a lot. The first point I’d want to make, though, is that it isn’t my favourite record of all time, but it really has been a life-changing one for me.
People probably think of me as a white pop kid, which is fair enough because a lot of my favourite records are things like See Emily Play, but I’d also always listened to Stevie Wonder, Sly Stone, Marvin Gaye … so when the hip-hop and rap thing came along, I was interested right from the start. That image of kids dancing on the streets and the New York deejay culture was very exciting, but I wasn’t sure if it was a genuine new musical movement or just a fashion thing that would pass.
I was living in Liverpool back then, and I think I bought it on CD in HMV, because the cool little shops like Probe records probably wouldn’t have been stocking it. It was an unusual record for me to buy, I think, but my mate Simon Rogers, who’s worked on a lot of Lightning Seeds stuff, recommended it to me as something that was very experimental and interesting, and then I heard Magic Number on the radio, which prompted me into buying the album.
I didn’t listen to it right away. It lay around the house for a couple of weeks before I played it but, as soon as I did it blew my head off, because it was so fresh and appealing, which was not at all what I’d expected. So I had an immediate enjoyment of it that made me play it again, but it still wasn’t until I’d heard it several times that the cleverness of what they were doing started to come through. I think that’s often a distinguishing feature of really great records - they sound so easy the first couple of times you hear them, and then they gradually reveal all these other layers.
I’ve always loved the sound of sixties records and, as someone who makes records, I used to spend a lot of time trying to capture that sound, trying to analyse what it was and then re-create it. I’d try using original 60s equipment, or deliberately distorting sounds, and it’s so hard to achieve it. You can get totally tied up in pursuing that sound to get to the magic.
What De La Soul did was to use loops and samples in a new context that enabled them somehow to capture that magic. With almost every modern pop record you hear, you can identify elements of Sly Stone in them, and I feel that this album is the same.
Their approach is totally different from the way a conventional songwriter works. As far as I can tell, there’s almost nothing actually played on the album. The tracks are all constructed from samples, and they use their voices as the instrumental elements. They have so many different ways of using their voices, as percussion, as bass lines, as sound effects, which I suppose must go back to the street tradition of black music as an a capella thing.
Magic Number is a great opener, sort of welcoming you in to the album, and then you come to Cool Breeze On the Rocks which is built round loads of sampled voices saying “rock’n’roll”. I thought that was an almost Frank Zappa thing to do, a piece of totally conceptual music.
A good instance of their intelligent use of a sample would be in I Know where they sample a little bit of the whistling that Otis Redding does in Dock Of The Bay. It’s such an evocative thing to choose, and they integrate it beautifully into what they’re doing.
I’d just finished making our first album when I came across De La Soul, and when I started our second one, it was this album that got me into the idea of using loops, which is something I’m doing even more overtly now than I’ve ever done. On the new album, for example, I use a Peter Green sample from Man Of The World very much the way De La Soul might do it.
One very specific influence on me was their use of a Turtles’ orchestral sample. De La Soul use it in Transmitting Live From Mars, but they slow it down, and they include a little bit of the organ stab. As soon as I heard it, I knew I loved that sound but I wasn’t completely sure where I knew it from. I eventually tracked it down to the Turtles album Battle Of The Bands, where they do a version of The Byrds’ You Showed Me, and that of course, led me to do my version of the song, also in The Turtles arrangement. Since then, I’ve heard that sample used in so many dance records, it’s become a staple element, almost like a Chuck Berry riff is to a rock guitarist.
It also seemed to me like this was the first rap record I’d heard with a sense of humour, the way the lyrics take the piss out of designer-name trainers, for example.
There are no credits for the samples on the record, because this was in the days before all the legal problems had really started, and I think they got sued by quite a few people. But I keep coming back to it, and it still sounds fantastic. Inspirational.
Some reviewer called it ‘the first psychedelic hip-hop record’ and that’s almost a blueprint for everything I try to do, although I’d define psychedelia as experimentation rather than massive drug intake.
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Ian Broudie : The thing about this album is that it was a classic as soon as it came out. Its influence has been huge, and people like The Beastie Boys owe it a lot. The first point I’d want to make, though, is that it isn’t my favourite record of all time, but it really has been a life-changing one for me.
People probably think of me as a white pop kid, which is fair enough because a lot of my favourite records are things like See Emily Play, but I’d also always listened to Stevie Wonder, Sly Stone, Marvin Gaye … so when the hip-hop and rap thing came along, I was interested right from the start. That image of kids dancing on the streets and the New York deejay culture was very exciting, but I wasn’t sure if it was a genuine new musical movement or just a fashion thing that would pass.
I was living in Liverpool back then, and I think I bought it on CD in HMV, because the cool little shops like Probe records probably wouldn’t have been stocking it. It was an unusual record for me to buy, I think, but my mate Simon Rogers, who’s worked on a lot of Lightning Seeds stuff, recommended it to me as something that was very experimental and interesting, and then I heard Magic Number on the radio, which prompted me into buying the album.
I didn’t listen to it right away. It lay around the house for a couple of weeks before I played it but, as soon as I did it blew my head off, because it was so fresh and appealing, which was not at all what I’d expected. So I had an immediate enjoyment of it that made me play it again, but it still wasn’t until I’d heard it several times that the cleverness of what they were doing started to come through. I think that’s often a distinguishing feature of really great records - they sound so easy the first couple of times you hear them, and then they gradually reveal all these other layers.
I’ve always loved the sound of sixties records and, as someone who makes records, I used to spend a lot of time trying to capture that sound, trying to analyse what it was and then re-create it. I’d try using original 60s equipment, or deliberately distorting sounds, and it’s so hard to achieve it. You can get totally tied up in pursuing that sound to get to the magic.
What De La Soul did was to use loops and samples in a new context that enabled them somehow to capture that magic. With almost every modern pop record you hear, you can identify elements of Sly Stone in them, and I feel that this album is the same.
Their approach is totally different from the way a conventional songwriter works. As far as I can tell, there’s almost nothing actually played on the album. The tracks are all constructed from samples, and they use their voices as the instrumental elements. They have so many different ways of using their voices, as percussion, as bass lines, as sound effects, which I suppose must go back to the street tradition of black music as an a capella thing.
Magic Number is a great opener, sort of welcoming you in to the album, and then you come to Cool Breeze On the Rocks which is built round loads of sampled voices saying “rock’n’roll”. I thought that was an almost Frank Zappa thing to do, a piece of totally conceptual music.
A good instance of their intelligent use of a sample would be in I Know where they sample a little bit of the whistling that Otis Redding does in Dock Of The Bay. It’s such an evocative thing to choose, and they integrate it beautifully into what they’re doing.
I’d just finished making our first album when I came across De La Soul, and when I started our second one, it was this album that got me into the idea of using loops, which is something I’m doing even more overtly now than I’ve ever done. On the new album, for example, I use a Peter Green sample from Man Of The World very much the way De La Soul might do it.
One very specific influence on me was their use of a Turtles’ orchestral sample. De La Soul use it in Transmitting Live From Mars, but they slow it down, and they include a little bit of the organ stab. As soon as I heard it, I knew I loved that sound but I wasn’t completely sure where I knew it from. I eventually tracked it down to the Turtles album Battle Of The Bands, where they do a version of The Byrds’ You Showed Me, and that of course, led me to do my version of the song, also in The Turtles arrangement. Since then, I’ve heard that sample used in so many dance records, it’s become a staple element, almost like a Chuck Berry riff is to a rock guitarist.
It also seemed to me like this was the first rap record I’d heard with a sense of humour, the way the lyrics take the piss out of designer-name trainers, for example.
There are no credits for the samples on the record, because this was in the days before all the legal problems had really started, and I think they got sued by quite a few people. But I keep coming back to it, and it still sounds fantastic. Inspirational.
Some reviewer called it ‘the first psychedelic hip-hop record’ and that’s almost a blueprint for everything I try to do, although I’d define psychedelia as experimentation rather than massive drug intake.