De La Soul are probably the biggest kids on hip hop’s playground. There’s no telling whether its just De La’s underlying, caustic rap punches, or whether there’s a legitimate playfullness there that we ‘old heads” sometimes take for granted when it’s time to party at a rap show. So, while last night, at Carrboro’s Cat’s Cradle De La’s performance was more ritualistic in the sense that an opportunity to see a hip hop group with an 21-year, unscathed reputation should be a rites of passage for any music connouseir, it was also a play-date with three guys who have managed to keep up laughing and rapping along with them for two decades. No one has ever begged for mainstream coverage for the trio, we have always just been been happy to have them around in any capacity so, in between songs” when Posdnuous asked the crowd if they ‘fuck with Britney Spears or Justin Timberlake, it seemed like a rather rhetorical question to be asking a hip crowd that’s been busy sweating themselves out of their graphic tees to sub-surficial hits. It also makes one wonder if Posdnuos was taking the safer route by not invoking any divisive hip hop controversy by taking shots at an artist like Soulja Boywho, coincidentally , performed in Raleigh on the same night–and instead targeting two, irrelevant, white, pop artists. Given his Twitter comments in response to THIS article, it didn’t seem surprising that he’d avoid such topics.
De La went through a lengthy medley of songs before even introducing themselves to the at-capacity crowd, but the folks in attendance didn’t want commentary or drawn-out subtext, they wanted De La’s party jams. When Trugoy and Posdnuos jumped into ‘A Roller Skating Jam Named ‘Saturdays”’ the Saturday night was granted their wishes.
It was unrealistic to expect MF Doom to show up and rock ‘Rock Co. Cane Flow with De La, which would have made the night even more legendary. However, without him in-tow to perform his verses, no one seemed to care and De La, in turn, turned the song into their own thespian performance. In between the songs piledriving bass-sequences they paused and froze in-position in between verses like divine mannequins. During these 15-second pauses, the buildings life became a bubble of hip hop clarity and the audience clamored. Those applauses became the praising voices that De La has consistently proved themselves to deserve over all these years. Later, when an attractive young female fan wearing a wife-beater on which she had written ‘De La Soul is NOT Dead . . .” as a homage to De La’s 1991 LP De La Soul Is Dead was invited on stage to dance the truth to De La’s souls dominance became very clear: They’ll never die, and as long as the ladies love De La too, hip hop is going to remain as a fun place to party at.