![]() 1 hit on Billboard’s R&B chart with the ebullient “Me Myself and I,” which went on to earn a Grammy nomination for rap performance. The album was an instant success with listeners and tastemakers, topping the Village Voice’s annual Pazz & Jop critics poll and spawning a No. ![]() The result? She’s now one of pop’s biggest and boldest stars. The singer-songwriter took six years between album releases, a lifetime in the streaming era. Music Your favorite artist’s favorite artist: How SZA went from cult star to pop superstar Intricately assembled by De La Soul and their producer, Prince Paul, from dozens of samples of far-flung tracks by the likes of Steely Dan, Liberace and Hall & Oates, the LP showcased a more playful and melodic idea of hip-hop, with the rappers musing on identity and friendship and lust in a coded language over welcoming, lightly psychedelic grooves riddled with hooks. Yet less than a year after Public Enemy released the pummeling “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” - and N.W.A the furious “Straight Outta Compton” - the three middle-class misfits of Long Island’s De La Soul dropped 1989’s “3 Feet High and Rising,” a lush and whimsical debut that “wasn’t abrasive or agitated or in your face,” Shocklee says. Shocklee would know: As a founding member of Public Enemy’s production team, the Bomb Squad, he’s as responsible as anyone for shaping the blaring, dissonant, pugnacious sound of hip-hop in the mid- to late-1980s, when the music “was almost like a football game - just smacking you upside the head,” as the producer puts it. ![]() Before De La Soul, says Hank Shocklee, “‘beautiful’ and ‘rap’ weren’t two words that went together.”
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