Kelvin Mercer made sure to catch a screening of Straight Outta Compton when the Hollywood retelling of the rise of rap outlaws NWA opened at his local multiplex last year. He found the movie to be a vivid evocation of an era in which the establishment genuinely believed hip hop was a subversive force, bent on sabotaging America from within (the establishment having apparently confused early-period rap music with late-period Donald Trump).
But Mercer’s interest went beyond mere curiosity. As a member of De La Soul, the foremost ‘alternative’ hip-hop troupe of their generation, he had a ringside seat to many of the events chronicled in Compton. That scene in which NWA are attacked by cops in Detroit? Mercer was there. He confirms some crazy-ass shit truly did go down.
“That was the Nitro Tour,” recalls the amiable 46-year-old, who goes by the stage name Posdnuos. “It was LL Cool J and De La Soul. We were all with the same management – the Russell Simmons management company. As we toured the country, they would add all these other artists such as Big Daddy Kane and NWA. The bit in the movie where the cops in Detroit jump on and try to stop NWA playing – we were there trying to make sure NWA didn’t get caught.”
Some have criticised Compton as a white-washing of the NWA story (it conspicuously glosses over documented violent behaviour by Dr Dre, for instance). As far as Mercer can recollect, however, the film truthfully captured the atmosphere of De La Soul and NWA’s spell on the road together. Seeing the film triggered a flood of memory. “Through the summer of 1989 we spent a lot of time with NWA. They were some of the coolest people to be around. Me and [Ice] Cube would go to the mall and bug out. Even then you could see some of the early dissension. Cube was going, “yo man, I’m going to make my own album”. We’d be like, ‘really… REALLY?’ He felt certain things weren’t right.”
NWA splintered soon afterwards, riven by back-biting and contractual disputes. But De La Soul endured, and have gone on to accumulate one of the most storied catalogues in hip hop. They will later this year drop their new album And the Anonymous Nobody, bankrolled in part by a crowd-funding campaign. It’s their ninth LP, but the first recorded with a live band. Anonymous is also packed with cameos, including Snoop Dogg, David Byrne, Usher and Damon Albarn. ‘Eclectic’ hardly begins to cover it.
“Damon we know from touring with Gorillaz,” says Mercer, who performed with Albarn’s arena side-project during their 2010 Plastic Beach tour (De La Soul guest on the LP of the same name). “A lot of it was a case of getting in touch with people we respect. We’ve always been fans of David Byrne. When we had an idea and reached out, he said yes. Snoop was someone we’ve known through the years. He said to us, ‘hey man, we’ve never done a song together’. So we got together to make it happen. We asked 2 Chainz to help out with a chorus. He said ‘yo man – I don’t do choruses. I have to rap as well’. So we were like, ‘okay – cool’.”
De La Soul formed in East Massapequam, Long Island, a middle-class suburb best known as the setting for The Amityville Horror and far from the ghettos and conflict mythologised by their rhymer contemporaries. Smitten by early hip hop cuts such as The Sugarhill Gang’s ‘Rapper’s Delight’, Mercer and future band-mates David Jolicoeur and Vincent Mason would trade lines at break and after class. An early demo of ‘Plug Tunin’ came to the attention of Prince Paul, a titan of late ‘80s hip hop. Before they could quite take in what was happening, they’d been whisked off to Brooklyn’s Calliope Studio and were recording their influential debut, 3 Feet High and Rising. The rest is hip hop history.
“I was 19 – just a child,” says Mercer. “We were having fun and not thinking about it all too deeply. With 3 Feet High, it wasn’t as if we set out to break boundaries. We didn’t sit back and say ‘look ya’ll, we’re going to reinvent the wheel here.’ We were simply making music that allowed us express ourselves. We didn’t overthink things.”
He remains engaged with the scene and speaks highly in particular of Kendrick Lamar, feeling the young Los Angeles rapper has broken new territory with his thoughtful, provocative rumination on race in the United States.
“I listen to Kendrick’s music as a student,” he says. “He has come up with new ways of using language in hip hop and of being fearless in addressing subjects that are usually not talked about. He approaches it with enormous confidence. I come to artists such as that with the perspective that he has something to teach me. People say we influenced a lot of later hip hop artists. Maybe that’s true. But I don’t take credit for it. It goes back into the lineage. We were in turn influenced by Run DMC. It’s all part of one ongoing continuum of music.”
De La Soul play the Olympia, Dublin on June 16. And The Anonymous Nobody is released in August.