the best of de la soul album download Download De La Soul's entire back catalogue for free. In a Valentine’s gesture to their fans, hip-hop trio De La Soul are making their entire back catalogue available for free online. For 25 hours, listeners can download the band’s music to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their debut album, 3 Feet High and Rising , released in 1989. "Check back on Valentine's Day at 11am EST for some de la love," a message on the official De La Soul website read. Much of De La Soul’s seven album repertoire is not usually available online (or at least, not legally), as the many samples used on their tracks are difficult to license. As a result, most of the group’s music is not for sale on digital retail stores such as iTunes. “It’s about allowing our fans who have been looking and trying to get a hold of our music to have access to it,” MC Posdnuos told Rolling Stone . “It’s been too long where our fans haven’t had access to everything. This is our way of showing them how much we love them.” Some brand new tunes are expected to appear on De La Soul’s website later this year in the form of their first LP in ten years, You're Welcome . “We’re just getting in the mode of constantly giving people new music,” said Posdnuos. “We’ve sat a long time without releasing an album. It’s high time we start releasing a bunch of stuff because it’s there.” Join our new commenting forum. Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies. De La Soul – 10 of the best. They weren’t, as they proclaimed, Transmitting Live from Mars, but Long Island MCs Posdnuos and Trugoy the Dove, and their DJ Maseo (AKA Plugs One, Two and Three respectively), might as well have been. Hitting record racks already stuffed with classic albums by Public Enemy, BDP, EPMD, Big Daddy Kane and Stetsasonic, De La Soul’s 1989 debut 3 Feet High and Rising brought the Daisy Age (da inner sound, y’all) to hip-hop at a time when the culture was hitting full bloom. De La – who were members of the Native Tongues collective alongside the Jungle Brothers, Queen Latifah and A Tribe Called Quest – allied an Afrocentric, boho bent with a nerdy, recording room exuberance that was all their own, linking with free-spirited producer and Stetsasonic DJ Prince Paul for an album packed with kaleidoscopic samples and silly skits. Powered by an infectious central sample of Funkadelic’s (Not Just) Knee Deep, first single Me, Myself and I lit the fuse for 3 Feet’s mainstream explosion, and while the Plugs would grow increasingly weary of performing the song to pop crowds unhip to their oeuvre, the tune’s individualist ethos, if not its aesthetic, would remain central to everything that followed. 2. Say No Go. A classic case of hip-hop flipping a pop record correctly, 3 Feet’s anti-crack track – in the lineage of hard-hitting fare such as Melle Mel’s White Lines and Public Enemy’s Night of the Living Baseheads – nabs its bassline, drums and titular vocal sample from Hall & Oates’ 1981 smash I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do). A less personal precursor to My Brother’s a Basehead (1991), Say No Go showcases the group’s impressive ability to sugar a lyrical pill. Backed by that infectious, blue-eyed soul backdrop, Pos wastes zero time in painting a picture of chemically caused despair: “Now let’s get right on down to the skit / A baby is brought into a world of pits / And if it could’ve talked that soon / In the delivery room / It would’ve asked the nurse for a hit.” There’s also a reverent reference to an old-school hip-hop crew (the Funky Four Plus One) and, of course, an eye for humorous detail: a predilection for stonewash denim is a symptom of drug addiction that’s seldom been chronicled elsewhere. 3. Afro Connections at a Hi-5 (In the Eyes of the Hoodlum) Any possible confusion over their second album’s title − De La Soul Is Dead − was ended with its cover art, a simple, sombre illustration of wilted daisies spilling from a cracked, overturned flowerpot. Calling time on the Daisy Age before their sound became pigeonholed, the Plugs unveiled a set that was both astoundingly self-assured and endearingly self-deprecating. While the French-language records and raps about squirrels were jettisoned, the humour remained, albeit drier, a few shades darker and aimed at the increasingly cynical hip-hop world. Here, over a sparse, snapping beat that teams samples of Chuck Jackson, James Brown and, resourcefully, old muckers Stetsasonic, the guys puff blunts and sport multiple beepers as they indulge, ahead of their time, in the type of gangsta parody around which Masta Ace would build his second album, 1993’s Slaughtahouse. Indeed, De La themselves would return to the concept with Ego Trippin’ (Part 2), which riled Tupac Shakur with its allusions to his 1992 hit I Get Around. Their tongue-in-cheek rhymes still land easily on the ear – witness rapper Kurious sampling Posdnuos’ “Now I hold my crotch ’cos I’m top notch” line to great effect on his antisocial, pro-sexual 1991 single Top Notch. 4. Millie Pulled a Pistol on Santa. It may be built around an instantly recognisable Funkadelic loop, but the similarities to Me, Myself and I end there. Over the sombre psych-soul of I’ll Stay (and the drums from Melvin Bliss’ 1974 track, Synthetic Substitution), Plugs One and Two relate a haunting, heartbreaking tale of a teenage schoolmate being sexually molested by her father. The MCs’ displaced narration, chronicling Millie’s nightmare but instantly dismissing her claims out of affection for her father, is a masterstroke, making them complicit in a narrative that ends with Millie shooting her father while he works his shift as a department store Santa. From the seemingly seductive spoken-word intro (“If you will suck my soul, I will lick your funky emotions”) to the father’s abrupt death (“Millie bucked him and with the quickness it was over”), the listener can’t help feeling queasily complicit. De La might not get the heavy rotation of Slade and Wizzard in the Card Factory each yuletide, but this song, for different reasons, lodges just as well in the memory. 5. Breakadawn. De La exhaled with 1993’s Buhloone Mind State, dispensing with their trademark skits and narrative arcs for a groove-oriented aesthetic that, in keeping with the times, was relaxed and inflected with soul and jazz. Nowhere is this vibe more evident than on the album’s twinkly first single, which finds Pos and Dove – now, in fact, just plain old Dave – scattering their humble, gem-studded rhymes (not to mention Star Trek, REM and Phil Collins references) over a blissful backdrop that combines samples of Michael Jackson’s I Can’t Help It and Smokey Robinson’s Quiet Storm. Somewhat lost in the shuffle of one of hip-hop’s greatest years (it’s mind-boggling that De La’s buddies A Tribe Called Quest released Midnight Marauders on the same day the Wu-Tang Clan dropped their debut), Buhloone Mindstate has since gained a reputation as the connoisseur’s choice. Tracks like Breakadawn are the reason why. De La Soul’s 10 of the Best – a YouTube playlist. 6. I Am I Be. Just as Tribe convinced jazz great Ron Carter to lug his bass into the studio for 1991’s The Low End Theory, so De La recruited Maceo Parker, Fred Wesley and Pee Wee Ellis – all from James Brown’s legendary horn section the JBs – to let loose their lips and lungs on Buhloone Mindstate. If their live blowing, co-existing with samples from Lou Rawls’ You’ve Made Me So Very Happy and Jimmy Ponder’s While My Guitar Gently Weeps, brings a level of rawness and maturity to I Am I Be, it’s more than matched by Posdnuos as he delivers rhymes more personal than at any time before. Many MCs boast about dropping jewels, but Pos’s brilliance as an MC lies is his tendency to tuck them within the verses, leaving listeners to peel back layers of metaphor and abstraction. It’s a style that makes his foray into naked autobiography here all the more arresting: “Product of a North Carolina cat / Who scratched the back of a pretty woman named Hattie / Who departed life just a little too soon / And didn’t see me grab the Plug Tune fame / As we go a little somethin’ like this / Look, Ma, no protection / Now I got a daughter called Ayana Monet / Play the cowboy to rustle in the dough / So the scenery is healthy where her eyes lay.” In an era when many a stone-faced MC was mumbling “Keep it real” to champion a grim, steely detachment from their surroundings, De La scored with a different interpretation. 7. Stakes Is High. The testy title track from De La’s 1996 fourth album, Stakes Is High remains one of hip-hop’s great State of the Union addresses, a bristling broadside against what the trio saw as the culture’s money-mad artistic unravelling. While the outlook may be jaded, the result is anything but. Plugs One and Two’s sound invigorated over a beat by soon-to-blow producer Jay Dee AKA J Dilla that riles up an already irate horn sample from Ahmad Jamal’s Swahililand and augments it with a vocal sample from Brown’s Mind Power.