De La Soul – Me Myself and I

This album came out in a time when I had minus interest in rap and sampling. I was a musician, and I thought that rap was simple, with subject matter that had nothing to do with me. I thought sampling was cheating. Not becuase it didn’t require human chops to do, but because I thought it used musical phrases that were already in the listener’s DNA, and capitalized on those DNA button pushes without doing the work. I had no problem with paying homage or an artist stealing from themselves (ala Sting at the time), but this seemed to be totally stealing, even with copyrights secured.

Then, there was the non musicality of the whole thing. It seemed to be fraught with gimmick and i tried to get it into my DNA, but my chemistry rejected the whole thing.

When this album dropped, I heard the singles first, then immediately bought the album. The samples on this album were used as in instrument. They were not samples plucked from the DNA of the listener, they were plucked from the secret record collections of music dorks throughtout the world. I sat with a notebook for hours, just trying to identify samples.

This album did not change my mind about alot of the previous attempts at rap and sampling, but it did show me what was possible when an ear for music was brought into the studio. I still love this album.

• Buy on Amazon: Me, Myself & I
• Buy on iTunes: Unavailable
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Categorised in: Jam

This post was written by sergio_101