Interview with Del, the funkee homo sapien
d...@frenzy.sybase.com
Oakland native. The interview is by Danyel Smith, the {}'s are mine, as are
the typos... I thought that it held some interesting insights that were worth
reprinting.. here goes-
"Del tha You-Know-What talks. And talks. And talks..."
'My music is hella psychedelic. The theme for this album is P-funk. It
has a P-funk aura, but really only two songs are P-funk. I get into a lot of
60's soul -- before it turned all computerized and shit. Some songs are
straight jazz. Yeah, my stuff is straight soul with a hip-hop twist. I got a
funky bassline with a jazzy piano. Even some ska sounds, some high-pitched
clarinet sounds.'
This is Del speaking. Del Tha Funkee Homo Sapien. Del the 18-year-old
Oaktown native with an album called _I Wish My Brother George Was Here_ that's
taking the hip-hop world by storm. "Fools in the Bay Area missed out on salsa,
ska, house even, for the most part," he says. Del is friendly, goofy, and
appealing, and Del talks. A lot.
"Fools used to dis Fishbone," he continues. "Now they embrace them.
But only because certain rap groups mention them. I couldn't even let fools
know I listened to Jefferson Starship. I had to say I just listened to Too
Short, because that's all brothers wanted to hear. That's one nigga [Too Short]
that never sold out, and he came up regardless, doing the same shit he always
does."
Del's inhaling a triple scoop of vanilla bean ice cream at a window
table at Uncle Gaylord's on Piedmont Avenue, where we met. "So, do I look like
what you expected?" had been the first words out of his mouth as he loped up to
me, both hands in his pockets, smiling, wearing a big brown coat, the saggiest
jeans, blue-and-black Nikes, a beret, and a striped T-shirt - the picture of
b-boy style, circa Christmas 1991. "I'm hec'uv hungry... They sell ice cream in
here, don't they? I think I'm going to have to indulge."
At the sun-splashed table, Del quotes Organized Konfusion (his
favorite group of the moment) at length. He tells me he lives up off of
Sequoia View in the Oakland hills. He has small spaces between his wavy-at-the
bottom teeth and a very loud, deep voice. "Am I, like, talking helluv loud?"
he asks. He has long feathery eyelashes, wide eyebrows, a fuzzy goatee, a baby
moustache.
He used to be a student at Skyline High. He didn't like it. "I didn't
have the patience for Skyline," he explains. "I hate Skyline. I don't like white
racist principles telling me what to do. They think we're invading their little
territory up there, and they hate it. {note for non Bay Area residents :
Skyline is a public school in the Oakland hills, and is a typical white
people in the hills, black people in the flatlands situation} Just because
there are a few bad apples in the bunch, they try and lump us all together like
we're the same. I feel sorry for anybody that goes there. It's a big fashion
show." (He makes a point of noting that he passed the high school proficiency
exam.)
If you're going to trade in school for a career in rap, it helps to
have connections. Del has connections - his cousin is rap star Ice Cube.
"Nobody wanted to believe in us at first," says Del. "All of a sudden, when
Cube said in The Source that he was down with me and Heiroglyphics [a loose
crew of friends], we were cool then."
Helping hand or not, Del is not an Ice Cube clone. In fact, he explains
between licks of ice cream, his main thing was to be true to himself. That
meant being different from everyone else. "So many groups out now are so
ancient," he says. "N.W.A. was ancient even back when they did 'Fuck tha
Police.' Cube's whole verse made sense, right, even when he was still kicking
it with them. He was talking about how he was a minority and how cops just
wanted to fuck with him because he had a beeper and looked like he might be a
dope dealer. [MC] Ren's whole verse was basically 'I'm mad because when I do
wrong things the cops catch me.' And Eazy's was 'I'm mad because when I sell
dope the cops catch me.' Their new album is so emetic - there's a word for you
- it makes me wanna vomit. The album is straight nonsense."
Del's favorite word is "ancient," and he refers to everyone who isn't
down with new-school hip-hop as a fool. Actually, he calls everyone a fool. But
he means it in a nice way. He still rides AC Transit {the local bus} (he talks
about it at length on his album). He still hangs out on Telegraph Ave. in
Berkeley, in front of Waldenbooks, and Mrs. Fields cookies.
I tell him local music critic Harold Olaf Cecil picked his album as one
of the best of the year, a fact Del was unaware of. "I'm hella proud," he says,
immediately humbled. "See? I know there's some people out there who peep what
I'm saying. Some, though, they hear me lighting up a fat joint at the beginning
of one of my songs and they think that's what the album is about."
_I Wish My Brother George Was Here_ is selling big in all the right
markets. He's already been hyped up in Spin and questioned in The Source. He is
often compared to _A Tribe Called Quest_. He writes like he talks: deeply and
densely. He is tenatively Afrocentric, post-post-daisy age, seriously new
school, sort of nonsensical, often laugh-out-loud funny, and really really
smart.
Word is getting around, ad Del discovered at this year's New Music
Seminar, where he had a close encounter with Q-Tip [of Tribe Called Quest].
"He came up to me," Del relates. "We traded tapes, and then _he_ asked _me_
if his shit was the beat."
Clearly still amazed at the conversation, he continues: "I was, like,
hell yes, nigga, your shit is the _beat_. Then I realized that what Tip had
come up with this time [on _Low End Theory_] was the solution." the question
being, according to Del: How can I be innovative, do what I want as a creative
person, and get the brothers in the flatlands to buy my shit?
"It's to mix your stuff down a certain way, as far as the music," Del
says, "and then to break it down lyrically so fools can understand it. Tip's
shit was hella complicated on the first album. He would say stuff like
'molecules of the mind they uplift' instead of saying 'smoking weed opens your
mind.'
"His shit is still abstract, but he broke it dwon just far enough. On
_Low End Theory_ when he's rapping, he stays within a beat. But they still
don't always rhyme on fors, they rhyme sometimes on fives and sixes. And, on
their last album, there were no bass frequencies and the highs were hella loud.
Didn't work for a whole lot of fools."
"The bass should be fat, but not totally overwhelming. Fools are
bumping A Tribe Called Quest now because it's bassy. They don't care what
Q-Tip is saying. He mixed it down that way., so more fools could bump that shit
in their cars. Same with my album. Fools out here, they buy tapes by the dozen,
ten at a time... They'll throw away what they don't like. It would have been
innovative, to mix down my album like Quest's first one or KMD's current one,
but I wouldn't have sold _no_ albums."
Del hates bad, boring, non-descriptive writing, just like he hates
Hammer. "Hammer ain't about hip-hop. The proof is that he's not even an MC
anymore. He straight used rap like a gimmick and came up. I remember his weak
ass from when I was like 14 years old and he was on KPOO with his weak demo,
"Ring 'Em."
"Ring 'Em" was a cool song, I tell him, it was slamming - at the time
and to this day.
"What? Uh-uh," he says, "I was listening to, like, Ultramagnetic MCs-
now imagine going from them to Hammer. Big Daddy Kane sold out too - by going
for the ladies. Girls don't buy hip-hop, they mainly listen to what their guy
friends like."
Del's mad, too, at the fact that he can never go to a hip-hop show,
"I went to see a rap show," he complains, "that wasn't even a rap show. I mean
PE was there, but it just wasn't the same."
What was so different about it, I wanted to know. "Primus and Anthrax
and hella white people were there," he explains. "Not that I don't like white
people, but I just miss the feel of going to a real rap show. You can't even
go see a rap show in Oakland anymore, man. I remember you used to go see Doug
E. Fresh, Run-DMC, ... go to the Fresh Fests - but fools are so ignorant, they
are so _ingnorant_, they don't even know what ignorant means. So when people
say, oh Del, you're so big-headed now, you're going around calling people
ignorant, I tell them, ignorant doesn't mean anything bad. It means
'not-knowing,' not that you're stupid.
"They had to cancel all those things, just on the strength that niggas
had to pull up chairs and beat down security and steal their gats. Fools in
Oakland, man, they have no sense of life; they don't have the basic sense to
get through life. They are insane. I call people insane when they only have one
way of looking at thins. Why would you want to kill niggas?" Del asks
rhetorically, incredulously.
"That's stupid," he goes on, "why would you want to mean-mug niggas
from your car like you want to get out and beat them down?"
He's sighing, standing up, putting his coat back on. He reminds me that
he's about to go to San Diego to open for De La Soul, then sits back down and
leans over like he has a secret. "Rap is more beat than anything, haven't you
peeped that? More the beat than _anything_, than jazz, than rock, than R&B,
classical, anything, I'll listen to a weak-ass rapper before I'll listen to
anything else. If I'm listening to the radio and all I hear is MC Hammer, I'll
listen to him over anything else that's on."
"Nothing else in the world compares to the feeling I get when I hear a
dope-ass hip-hop song. Nothing."
your mama your mama your mama your mama your mama your mama your mama your mama
Superhigh \ I saw your mama riding down East 14th on a Ninja
d...@sybase.com / with a skillet on her head
100% dissin you, sucka/ bahahahahahahahaha