News: De La Soul Launch Kickstarter Campaign To Fund New Album

Legendary rap group De la Soul are using the popular site Kickstarter to fund their new album. They have just launched their campaign with a capital goal of $110,000 and have already raised $112,761 with 32 days to go. This will be the first album the group will release since The Grind Date LP in 2004. Take a look and read more below.

Hey, everybody: We are De La Soul: Posdnous, Dave, and Maseo. We’re best known for our albums 3 Feet High and Rising, De La Soul Is Dead, Stakes Is High and many others. Some of our hit singles include “Me Myself and I,” “Saturdays” and “Feel Good Inc.” a collaboration with Gorillaz.

We’ve collaborated with everyone from Chaka Khan to Common to even NASA: In 2004, our song “Potholes in My Lawn,” became one of the first rap records to be beamed from another planet by the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity. Now we are here to collaborate with YOU, humanoid, on the most exciting project we’ve ever done.

For the last decade, we’ve been independent artists, free of a record label interfering in our creative process. This will be our first De La Soul studio album in eleven years. We’re excited and ready to create. It’s been essential that we find ways to fund, record and release new music. Typically the fans have been the ones who support and appreciate our vision, so using Kickstarter and giving our fans the opportunity to be a part of the process just feels right. We see Kickstarter as a home for creative minds and a wonderful platform; where people who believe, respect and see the vision, can support an idea and make it a reality.

True to our Hip-Hop roots, we make music without limits. This new album will incorporate elements of Jazz, Funk, Rock, Country Western and anything else we’re feeling in the moment. To us, music is the influence of sounds, sounds in all vibrations and sizes, telling a story or pointing a direction. Some of these sounds we call samples, samples we use to make songs.

Sampling is basically copying a piece of sound, from one recording, and reusing it to create a new recording. It is how De La has always made music. The sampler is our instrument, but people who copy, and in this case “sample,” have also been considered thieves and unoriginal. So, unfortunately a huge part of our career has also been spent fighting off the “sample police.”

Enough of those battles! For the new album, we needed a completely new approach, something Hip-Hop hasn’t done before. So, here it is: For the first time, we’re going to sample ourselves.

We have a fantastic cast of artist we’re collaborating with. So far Damon Albarn (of Blur/Gorillaz), 2 Chainz, Little Dragon, and David Byrne (of Talking Heads) have blessed us with their talents; and we’ll have more announcements of collabs to come, right here on Kickstarter.

To read more on their Kickstarter campaign click here.