2014 marks the 25th anniversary of De La Soul‘s classic debut album 3 Feet High and Rising. In celebration of their two-and-a-half decades of groundbreaking, innovative hip-hop, the trio of Posdnous, Maseo and Dave are releasing their entire catalog for free download today February 14th. The downloads will be available on De La Soul’s official website.
Posdnous talked to Rolling Stone about the ambitious project. “It’s about allowing our fans who have been looking and trying to get a hold of our music to have access to it,” he said. “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.”
De La’s first two albums have become increasingly hard to find on digital platforms in recent years. This is mostly due to those albums’ abundance of uncleared samples. Pos says that it’s been frustrating trying to get through all of the legal wrangling. “It’s been a trying journey,” Posdnous said. “We’ve been blessed to be in the Library of Congress, but we can’t even have our music on iTunes. We’ve been working very hard to get that solved.”
Pos also revealed plans for new music this year.
“We’re just getting in the mode of constantly giving people new music,” the rapper said. “I’ll be the first to say that not everyone can do it. You can put out a new mixtape every week, but it can dilute what you’re putting out because you haven’t had enough time to see what’s going on with your life to write something from a different angle. With us, 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.”
“We have tons of music, but we’re our own worst critics,” Posdnuos said. “Certain groups have too many ‘yes men.’ In our group, we have too many ‘no men.’ When we look back on some of the stuff we have, we’re like, ‘Yo, we need to just put this out.’ The album is still called You’re Welcome, but we also have this whole other album that we’re working on that…Wooo, I wish I could talk about it.”
