De La Soul
The Grind Date [20th Anniversary Edition]
BMG
By the time De La Soul got to their seventh album, 2004’s The Grind Date, the Long Island rap trio were pretty beat down. Forget about the fact that Posdnuos, Maseo, and the now-late, great Trugoy the Dove had released back-to-back-to-back-to-back classics in 1989’s 3 Feet High and Rising, 1991’s De La Soul Is Dead, 1993’s Buhloone Mindstate, and 1996’s Stakes Is High—they still had to endure the embarrassment and pay the (literal) price for their sampling indiscretions, having borrowed The Turtles’ “You Showed Me” for a fucking interlude track. De La had only just begun catching their breath when their longtime label Tommy Boy broke ranks with the trio, cancelling the upcoming third album in their innovative Art Official Intelligence trilogy due to its supposed inaccessibility. Whoever said De La Soul was supposed to be anything but its own phase-shifting brand of pop-a-delica?
Once gathered, the De La braintrust took itself out of robo-inspired AOI mode and made The Grind Date into something new: their meanest, leanest album yet, buoyed by the defining Pos’ lyric from the anthemic closer “Rock Co.Kane Flow”: “Unlike them, we craft gems so systematically inclined to pen lines / Without sayin’ a producer’s name all over the track.” Born into the era when chart-topping producers’ names were hung like banners before the artists, The Grind Date does feature the incendiary mixes of Madlib, 9th Wonder, J Dilla, and Jake One. But the majority of the project was manipulated by Supa Dave West, who worked the knobs across De La’s AOI albums, in order to maintain a cool uniformity. That’s particularly good, as De La’s testosterone-prone guests such as Ghostface Killah and Flavor Flav pull you away from Pos’ mellow, jazz-bo tones. Lean as Grind Date may be, there’s room for complexity, like Dilla’s Tom Tom Club/Talking Heads reggae vibing bonus cut “Shoomp” featuring Sean Paul, or the two shots of prog-rock wonk heard on “Verbal Clap” and the title track.
And the 20th-anniversary package’s never-before-released oddities are total winners, too. “Bigger” with guest vocalist Choklate is easily one of the trio’s most accessible, melodically jazzy tracks, a hit in any universe with its ticklish electric piano and sandy live drums. So, too, is the surprisingly poppy, downright effervescence of “Respect,” a cut with a contagious melody that Rod Temperton–era Michael Jackson would have killed for. What’s most interesting about this collection, though, is that it comes with a handful of its best tracks’ bone-stripped instrumentals for the DJ elite: the very thing that Tommy Boy disliked about what De La Soul had planned for AOI Vol. 3. That’s right. This 2025 package is a big ol’ fuck-you to the record’s would-be label.
