Soul survivors

False alarm! De La Soul is not dead. Although you couldn’t be blamed for thinking they were – after all, the warning signs were all there.

Firstly, there’s the mystery of the Art Official Intelligence trilogy. With Volume 2 released in 2001, we’ve been a long time waiting for the final installment. Then, last year, there was what seemed to be an all too familiar death knoll – the Greatest Hits collection. And that’s not to mention their online presence which, excluding the ever-faithful legion of messageboarders, has been virtually comatose since 2000.

But as a few hundred Dubliners will be able to attest this week, De La Soul are very much alive and kicking. Speaking to Posdnuos ahead of their once-off Irish date, it seems that they’ve been industrious as ever. Aside from family management, label management (Dave) and side forays into writing children’s books (Pos) De La Soul have not one but two albums in the pipeline.

“We were going to finish up the last of the Art Official Intelligence series and then we realised that we just needed to do a regular album,” explains Pos.

“We’d just been away a little too long and we didn’t want to put out this DJ album that was full of instrumentation and not enough songs where you’d hear myself and Dave rhyme. So we shifted gears and started from scratch on another album, called The Grind Date.”
Which is due on September 28.

“The title is playing off ‘blind date’,” explains Pos. “And we’re using the ‘grinding’ in the sense of everyone working to their best ability and pretty much trying to meet their destiny. But you don’t really know how your destiny looks until you get there or reach it. So it’s almost like you’re on a blind date because you don’t know how he or she will look.”

Did De La Soul ever imagine that their own blind date with destiny would extend into 2004?
“Honestly we felt like we’d be around for a long time,” says Pos, matter-of-factly. “But we had no idea, until we got into it, that it would be hard for a lot of groups to stay around. We didn’t realise that people’s attention spans are really short. It’s taken a lot of hard work and a lot of
luck but we are still here.”

Not that success has led to any complacency within the New York-based trio. “We don’t come from the standpoint of ‘We are the legendary De La Soul’ where we’re only embracing the lyrical styles that we’ve done in the past,” says Pos. “I feel like, myself and Dave have been doing our best to be students of hip hop. And we have been improving – you can see the growth. You see us getting better as musicians, as lyricists and as people.”

Pos reveals that The Grind Date will feature collaborations with Gorillaz (“Those songs are quite out there,” he admits), plus Ghostface, Common, Carl Thomas and rising New York underground rapper MF Doom.

Speaking enthusiastically about the current hip hop climate, Pos makes only one negative observation: “I don’t feel that there are a lot of hip hop albums that are complete. Often there are just two great songs that are trying to propel the whole album and then when people buy it they don’t like the album as a whole.”

They may take years between releases but De La Soul can never be accused of delivering half-baked goods. And while their debut opus set a certain 3 Feet High benchmark, Pos is quick to give props to his contemporaries.

“The likes of Outkast inspire us to continue, to know that you don’t have to follow what everyone is doing. So it’s not like, ‘50 Cent sold this amount of records so let me only come at you like that’ – we can go outside of the realm of what hip hop is and still be respected. I know that’s how Outkast see it and how Run DMC did in the past.”

And speaking of the Native Tongues spirit, any substance to the rumours of A Tribe Called Quest reunion? “At one point they were in the studio and working but as far as I am to understand the album has been postponed again,” he says, “I believe they are going to be doing shows but unfortunately the album release is tied to contractual arrangements with their former label.”

As for their own label movements, De La Soul will be releasing The Grind Date through the Urban Music Group, which is run by Mathew Knowles (Beyoncé’s father). As for the third AOI album – expected to be ready by December – Pos reveals something of a star-studded, dare we say, concept album in the making.

“It’s just trying to give respect to the cornerstone of rap, which was and is the DJ,” he explains. “So the people that we want to appear on it could be as monumental as Grandmaster Flash or someone like Funkmaster Flex, who’s a DJ and a radio personality in New York. We wanted to feature all types of DJs whether it was a mixtape DJ or a turntablist (like The Executioners), and incorporating different settings that a DJ is a part of. So one example is Mase needing to use the bathroom but he’s on the turntable and he can’t stop rocking the party. That’s something that’s a real danger to someone who carries crates!”

De La Soul play Dublin's Spirit venue on July 27 as part of the BudRising festival.