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By Martin Woodside Time To Get Ill In a career that spans nearly two decades, Del the Funky Homosapien only issued four solo albums. It’s been eight years since his last record but the producer/MC talks about his new fifth album, The Eleventh Hour, as if it were his first. “I wanted to keep it fundamental so anyone could get into it, but I also wanted to keep it funky at the same time, have some kind of groove happening,” he says. “Really, I just wanted to shape my whole thang, so to speak, for the rest of my career. This is what it’s boiling down to, this is what people are going to be expecting out of Del.” Of course, many fans already have expectations of Del. He’s Ice Cube’s little cousin; he’s the wisecracking slacker from his acclaimed debut I Wish My Brother George Was Here; he’s the spaced-out concept rapper from Deltron 3030; he’s the guy flowing over that Gorillaz track that was on the radio for three or four years straight. Of course, Del wants no part of that kind of labeling. “People are just fickle, you know?” he says. “We want something new but we don’t want something so new that you can’t even understand it. It’s kind of like walking a tightrope. Some people can do it, some people can’t do it. I’m one of those people [who’s] going to try to do it because I feel like I can relate to anything.” On The Eleventh Hour, Del steps away from humor and hijinks to embrace the personal struggles he’s been dealing with over the last few years. The messy details of personal relationships are laid bare throughout the album, from the caustic swagger of “Back in the Chamber” to the defiant “Hold Your Hand.” Every track is anchored by a steady beat drowned in layers of slinky funk. Del handled all the production himself, changing the way he approached writing and composing songs. “If I had a beat and I liked it, I dug it, then the lyrics had to go with it,” he explains. “It wasn’t no, ‘I got a book full of lyrics and now let me try to find some music to it.’ It didn’t work like that. Everything was worked as one. I wanted to make everything cohesive. Let me go in there like I’m a producer and be like, ‘This is what the song needs, this is what I need to do.’” In many ways, Del found that the new approach brought him full circle. “To tell you the truth, when I first started making songs, it was natural to be like, ‘What’s the topic going to be? Okay, what are we going to rap about? Okay, how we gonna flow on the song — to the beat?’ It was just natural to do that. I guess as time progressed we got further away from caring about that and just concentrating more on how raw we was. I felt like I kind of exhausted that. Like okay, you’re raw. Who cares? What are you really saying?” On the web: hieroglyphics.com/artists/del/ |
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Copyright © 2002 Mean Street Magazine, LLC |
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