DE LA SOUL IS DEAD by Shawn Taylor (33 1/3 B-sides 乐评翻译）

当个黑人太累了。你走路姿势对吗？说话方式对吗？球鞋鞋带系得潮不潮？你的球鞋到位吗？你气场咋样？你能一进屋就吸引所有人的注意吗？你酷吗？你是你黑人朋友想要的黑吗？你能不吓到你其他有色人种（和白人）朋友吗？你是否愿意事情做的两倍好却只得到三分之一的尊重和五分之一的奖励？问题和争斗比比皆是。这些就是我在1991年的危机，再加上一波波的抑郁，我虽然没有自杀念头，对身上发生的事也矛盾的不行。

我刚勉勉强强在一个白人为主的大学熬过了第一年。阅读障碍、没钱、家庭冲突、种族认知危机一起把我推到了最低谷。我当时在妈妈家厨房里（很多年没和她住一起了），Derek Turner（独立Hip-Hop组合Atmosphere前创始成员）在我们去俱乐部前给我剪头发。我没想去，但又没理由不去。事情本来好好的，直到我听到一小声“靠”，然后剪发器发出了个奇怪的声音。Derek递来镜子照给我看头侧面他剃的新图案。他特可爱地笑着说：“哎，就说这跟De La Soul似的。”

我越想他的缺德事儿（太缺了）越琢磨，对啊，我这造型太De La了。一个随随便便的De La Soul玩笑就让我打起了精神。我从椅子上起来，穿上dashiki（译注：西非服饰），戴上几个非洲皮挂坠，去了俱乐部。这是我这辈子玩的最爽的一次。最后一首我跟着跳舞的歌是“A Roller Skatin’ Jam Named ‘Saturdays.’”。是时候了/像个傻子一样玩吧。在流行文化了里，我从没像当时那样那么需要这么一条信息。这也不是De La Soul第一次给我打起精神。

在高中第三年春季，我天天和自己打架。长期从布鲁克林Fort Green和明尼苏达Minneapolis大巴来往，我总碰到要嘴横拳头更横才能解决的事。我对布鲁克林来说“说话太白了“，对Minneapolis来说又太黑了，我身边的人非让我知道我和他们想的样子不一样不可。我困在Dana Dane（译注：黑人说唱歌手）, The Cure（译注：英国后朋克乐队）, 我妈妈牙买加血统里的Rude Boys，和科幻小说的十字路口，人们搞不懂我，我自己也搞不懂。

我半只脚就要踏进深渊收不回来了。有一次，我过了很糟的一周，我叔叔Maurice（R.I.P）来看我并留了盘磁带。“侄子，这里面都是你。我希望你看得到。“磁带底纸上全是黄紫橙绿粉色荧光，和三个黑人，其中一个还带了眼镜：不是Cazals的，是tm普普通通、我不戴就看不见的眼镜。我听了这张磁带，立马就tm变了。3 Feet High and Rising伴我度过了剩下的高中。我几乎天天听它，整整一年。De La展现给我，一个不同的黑人世界、不同（而真实）的我是可能的。我跟自己较劲是因为我从没接受自己。我在向太多人证明太多东西，我心力憔悴是因为我都不知道自己是什么。我没有依靠。De La Soul帮我看清了我如何能同时成为一切，不再当（可怜的）变色龙了。“自豪，我以我为自豪/我说的诗句就是Plug Two 的”。

如果3 Feet是一个通往新黑人世界的窗户，展现出那么多精彩的做黑人的方式，那下一张，De La Soul is Dead，就是入住那个世界的邀请函。Dead是3 Feet的终极B面。它不仅展现了De La全部的音乐可能性，而且还偷偷地带你进入那个世界。

De La最绝的招就是迷惑我们以为他们第二张专辑是第一张的反面。Dead封面画着一个碎了的插满雏菊的花瓶，好像在声称D.A.I.S.Y (Da Inner Sound Ya'll;译注：首张专辑的主题)已死，他们其实并不存在的“hip-hop的嬉皮士“（Arsenio Hall；译注：黑人喜剧演员）的人设被赶走了。实际上，De La Soul Is Dead放大了3 Feet High and Rising拥护的一切想法，是他们“黑人小聪明”主旨的具像化。

简单来说，“黑人小聪明“是幽默地搞怪，是把内心的快乐和好奇新投射到每日生活的无趣，是无惧直视阴暗甚至为了看看里面有什么走进去。它是自我否认的反面，是主动的改变。黑人小聪明使De La Soul能谈些非常严肃的话题，却从不脱离他们特殊的魅力。

De La的制作（Prince Paul的功劳，我要为他给史上最被低估的hip-hop制作人里投一票）仍然花哨、聪明、先锋，而他们的歌词更成熟了。专辑仍有那种低俗的幽默，比如Dead专辑里的翻页儿童书的设定。几首歌激发人的想象，突破说唱可以（应该？）是什么的界限。但同时也有Millie Pulled a Pistol on Santa和My Brother's a Basehead这样的歌。

Millie以Patrice Rushen、Funkadelic和Melvin Bliss的采样构成，讲述了De La的同学Millie被父亲猥亵的凄惨故事。歌以她拿枪打死父亲结尾，此时父亲正在一个百货商店里扮圣诞老人。这首歌直接导致了我在青少年法和青少年心理健康二十多年的工作。作为一个在虐待家庭长大的孩子，这首歌让我直面我的虐待经历，也刺激我为他人提供我小时候没得到的帮助和支持。在训练临床医生时，我把这首歌作为训练的一部分。它强烈地强调了他们工作的庄严性。

我认识的我那代来自相似文化环境的人，没一个躲过了白粉。要么你用过、看人用过、看人卖它致富、目睹人因它被抢劫谋杀，要么看着它毁掉了整个社群。很多人都经历了这些事。“跟我说你还要拉一把？/看看86年白粉的世界吧。”

My Brother’s a Basehead既是一封给Posdnous兄弟的情书，也几乎是一本如何帮助成瘾的人的教科书。这首歌采样Dougie Fresh和 Slick Rick，N.W.A.，The Doors和 Wayne Fontana and The Mindbenders做了一个1960年代的伴奏来强调Po（和他兄弟）的挣扎。对于这些痛苦来说，伴奏几乎太阳光了。叮叮当当、轻松灵活的伴奏和歌的信息几乎完全对立。这也是为什么De La Soul这个乐队，特别是De La Soul is Dead这张专辑，对我成为现在的我这么重要。

本文作者Shawn Taylor也是33 1/3第47本People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm的作者。

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Lived blackness can be exhausting. Are you walking correctly? Talking correctly? The laces of your sneakers tied in the most current fashion? Do you have the right sneakers? How is your bravado? Can you walk into a room and have all eyes on you? How cool are you? Are you the right kind of black for your fellow black folks? Are you safe enough so other POC (and white folks) accept you without fear? Are you willing to be twice as good, for a third of the respect and a fifth of the rewards? Questions and negotiations abound. In 1991, this was my crisis. Layer this with an undulating wave of depression and I was, not suicidal, but pretty ambivalent to what happened to me.

I had barely completed a disastrous first year at a predominantely white university. Dyslexia, poverty, strife with family, and racial identity crisis all conspired to bring me to my lowest. I was in the kitchen of my mother’s apartment—not having lived with her in years—getting my hair cut by Derek Turner (Spawn from the original incarnation of the indie hip-hop group, Atmosphere), before going to the club. I didn’t want to go, but had no good reason not to. Things seemed alright, until I heard a subdued “oops” and the clippers made an unfamiliar noise. Derek handed me a mirror and allowed me to see the new pattern he had shaved into the side of my head. In that remarkably charming way he had, he laughed: “Yo. Just say it’s some De La Soul shit.”

The more I considered his mistake—it was awful—the more I took his words to heart. Yeah. I would De La the hell out of this look. A half-hearted joke implying De La Soul was anything goes helped to lift me out of my funk. I got out of the chair, changed into a dashiki, put on a few leather African medallions, and went to the club. I had the time of my life. The last song I danced to was “A Roller Skatin’ Jam Named ‘Saturdays.’” Now is the time / To act a fool tonight. Never in my relationship with popular culture had I needed a message more than that, at that time. This wasn’t the first time De La Soul gave me the lift I needed.

In the spring of my junior year in high school, I was pretty much a brawler by default. Routinely shuttling back and forth from Fort Green, Brooklyn and Minneapolis, Minnesota, I regularly found myself in situations where a quick mouth or quicker fists had to be deployed. I’d be too “white talking” for Brooklyn and too black for Minneapolis, and folks around me would make damn sure I knew I didn’t fit into their preconceptions. I stood firmly at the four-way intersection of Dana Dane, The Cure, the Rude Boys from my mom’s Jamaican heritage, and science fiction—folks did not know what to make of me. I was just figuring it out myself.

I had one foot down a very slippery slope, in danger of not being able to recover my footing. After a particularly bad week my uncle, Maurice (R.I.P.), came by and dropped off a cassette tape. “This is all you, nephew. I hope you can see it.” The j-card was all yellow and purple and orange and green and pink day-glo with three black men on it. One of them even had glasses. Not Cazals, but regular-ass, I-need-these-to-see glasses. I played the tape and was damn near instantly transformed. 3 Feet High and Rising got me through the remainder of high school. I played it almost every day, for a year. De La showed me that another black world, another (real) me was possible. I was brawling over my identity because I never owned it. I was trying to be too many things to too many people, and I was lashing out because of my lack of isness. I had no anchor. De La Soul helped me to see how I could be all things at once; no need to be a (poor) chameleon any longer. Proud, I’m proud of what I am / Poems I speak the plug two type.

If 3 Feet was a window into a new black world, allowing us to see all the fascinating ways to be black, their follow-up, De La Soul is Dead, was an invitation to live in that world. Dead is the ultimate B-side to 3 Feet. Not only does it show De La in the full spectrum of their sonic possibility, it sneaks up on you and forces you to reckon with it on its own terms.

The greatest trick De La pulled was in fooling us all into believing that their second album was a refutation of their first. Dead’s cover showed a smashed daisy filled flower pot, seemingly declaring that the D.A.I.S.Y. (Da Inner Sound Ya’ll) was dead—their non- existent “hippies of hip-hop” (reverse shout out to Arsenio Hall) personas exorcised. In fact, De La Soul is Dead is a magnification of all the ideas espoused on 3 Feet High and Rising. It is a reification of their ethos of “black whimsy.”

Simply put, black whimsy is about being playfully odd. It’s about mapping your inner joy and curiosity over the mundanity of your everyday existence. It’s about looking into the shadows without fear, possibly even venturing into them, just to see if anything is there. It’s the opposite of a deficit model. It is also an intervention. Black whimsy has allowed De La Soul to talk about some very serious subjects, while never betraying their sense of wonder.

While De La’s production (courtesy of Prince Paul—my vote for most underrated producer in hip-hop history) stayed fanciful, whimsical, and left of their contemporaries, their lyrical content matured. There is still the scatological humor, exemplified by the beep turn-the-page children’s book framing of Dead. There are songs that exist as exercises of the imagination—pushing the boundaries of what rap could (should?) be. But then there is also “Millie Pulled a Pistol on Santa” and “My Brother’s a Basehead.”

“Millie,” driven by Patrice Rushen, Funkadelic, and Melvin Bliss samples, tells the tragic tale of Millie, a De La classmate, who is molested by her father. The song concludes with her shooting her father, who is dressed as a department-store Santa. This song is directly responsible for my working in juvenile justice and adolescent mental health for two decades. As a kid who grew up in an abusive home, this song forced me to confront my abuse and also spurred me to provide the help and support I didn’t get to kids in similar situations. When I train clinicians, I have them listen to this song as part of their training. It roughly punctuates the gravity of the work they do.

No one I know, from my generation and cultural circumstances, escaped crack. Either you did it, saw people do it, saw people get rich selling it, witnessed people being robbed and killed for it, or watched as it decimated entire communities. These things overlapped for many people. Told me you needed a stronger fix / Stepped to the crack scene in ’86.

“My Brother’s a Basehead” is both a love letter to Posdnous’s brother and an almost cartography of trying to help someone with addiction. Dougie Fresh and Slick Rick, N.W.A., The Doors, and Wayne Fontana and The Mindbenders are used to create a 1960s’ beat to underscore Pos’s (and his brother’s) struggles. The beat seems almost too happy to soundtrack the pain. The jangly, loose-limbed beat is near antithetical to the message of the tune. And this is why De La Soul as a band, but De La Soul is Dead in particular, is so vital to who I am.

With Dead, De La delivered on many levels. They stressed specificity without the burden of uniqueness. They mapped joy over the crooked and pitted paths of young black life. Their black cultural multi-speak allows us to dance in pain, to find our collective humanity in horror, and to be ourselves, our full and beautiful and flawed selves: I was John Doe / Now I’m Mr. Jolicoeur. Not so much demanding or earning respect, but being respected on our strength, respect as our default setting—until we are disrespected— then it is time for some heads to be flown.

Shawn Taylor is the author of People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm (#47).

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这篇译自这本书，我觉得太好玩儿了，和看过的任何乐评都不一样，所以搬运过来。作者讲述Digable Planets如何帮作者在匪帮说唱盛行的年代找到了自己独特的黑人意识。尽管它音乐性上不是最好最超前的，但在作者心中有特殊的意义。

这本书是著名The 33 1/3乐评系列书讲“B面专辑”的一本。黑胶单曲中，正面（A面）刻录了主打歌，反面（B面）则通常收录A面歌曲的remix或其他小众、实验的作品。这本书里讲了很多没有放在聚光灯下作者们却觉得值得一讲的专辑，很多都配了作者自己的故事。其他乐评也很有意思，打算未来多翻几篇。