Live Review: De La Soul, Royce Hall, UCLA, Los Angeles CA, 12/4/05

by ted kane

At this point in my life, I have pretty mixed feelings when it comes to hip-hop and its attendant culture. There was a time when I was younger that I followed the music with some avidity, but nowadays I mainly experience it as noise pollution. Whereas I used to look forward to, say, the new Public Enemy CD, and tried to keep abreast of all the new artists, now I am mainly exposed to the genre from the wrong end of someone's headphones on the Metro or, worse yet, blaring out of a subwoofer in some jackass's pimped-out ride on the street. And it doesn't help that so much of it seems to me to consist of banal repetitions of the same beats and obscenities. I don't claim to speak for anyone other than myself, but I imagine that I am not the only person in his thirties that feels this way about it.

Watching De La Soul perform at UCLA's Royce Hall, it was clear that the trio remains true believers. They were one of the most creative groups to come out of the late 1980s, and one of things that did and does make them refreshing is the positive focus they have always maintained. While many a rapper has padded their bank account by dropping the N-word with a frequency that would make David Duke blush, De La steadfastly refuses to use it. You don't want to define something by what it isn't, but I experienced a bit of an epiphany about an hour into their show when I realized that I hadn't been subjected that word once all night.

De La Soul brought a lot of energy and wit to the stage, and there was a real excitement to hearing hits like "Me, Myself, and I" and "Potholes in my Lawn" in person. Their newer songs from The Grind Date came off pretty well also. But, like most hip-hop shows that I've seen through the years, their performance petered out once the novelty of seeing them wore off. With just a DJ and two MCs on the stage, it can be hard to build and maintain the kind of momentum that a full band of instrumentalists naturally create. And while their songs are unique montages of different styles, unlike many of their peers, their stage show relied on a lot of stale old rap clichés--discussions of the relative merits of the crowd "over here" and the portion "over there," invitations to "wave your hands in the air like you just don't care" to the point where you finally reached actual indifference and didn't want to raise them at all. So many instructions to do this and to do that, the poor kids from UCLA must have thought they were back in class after awhile.

Still, I enjoyed the show on the whole, even if it did go on too long. At the evening's peak, the grooves were so infectious that even I had to dance. And I have to say that the members of De La Soul collectively do a great robot dance. If De La Soul did not quite resurrect my faith in the power of hip-hop, they did at least remind me of what it is I like about the style of music. I'll try to keep this lesson in mind the next time that I'm subjected to some gangsta nonsense on the train.