In 2016, De La Soul , one of rap’s most elemental groups, had to start from scratch. After elevating hip-hop in the late 1980s and ‘90s with a four-album run that rivals any in the history of the genre, the trio found itself snake-bitten by its own inventiveness — specifically its copious use of samples as inlays in a fanciful mosaic, which swept it into protracted legal battles that kept the music inaccessible well into the post-Napster digital age. As the members continued to seek restitution (even releasing the albums for free at one point out of frustration), they crowd-funded a new album on Kickstarter.
And the Anonymous Nobody...
, a largely sample-free affair in silent protest of the hostage situation around their catalog, overhauled the De La sound for an internet-connected era, taking 200 hours of recorded audio from the soul band the group toured with and melding it into a sweeping amalgamation of funk. Both their misadventures and eventual sonic migration charted the distance between the hip-hop world that De La Soul helped build and the one it found itself navigating online, challenging its very identity in the process. If the group was doomed to be anonymous to a generation of young rap fans, it would lean into that obscurity in pursuit of creative freedom.
“This is about a person selflessly giving everything they could to make something cool or new or fun or better happen,” Trugoy the Dove told The New York Times that August. Being unplugged from the a.