Archive News
New York’s hip hop legends De la Soul for Festival Big Top
Date Published: {J}
It was something of a coup when it was announced that De La Soul would be playing the Big Top at this year’s Galway Arts Festival. The hip-hop trio, acclaimed for classic albums like 3 Feet High and Rising and their mega selling success with Gorillaz, come to Galway on Saturday, July 23.
Kelvin Mercer – better known by his MC name Posdnous – is talking from a hotel room in Shepherd’s Bush, London. Though away from his native Long Island, he doesn’t really consider himself as being ‘on tour’.
“We just had a few dates that we were doing,” he says. “But everything’s going really well, we were just in Paris. We’re just doing one-offs here and there. When I’m back home every four or five days, it’s like I’m flying in and out to do shows.”
Posdnous – ‘Pos’ to his friends – will be joined by his bandmates David Jude Jolicoeur and Vincent ‘Mase’ Mason for Galway. Although they sometimes tour with a band, De La Soul will be performing as the classic trio for the Arts Festival. Each member will be firing out witty and high energy lyrics, with Mase also performing DJ duties.
“It’ll be the three of us performing; we’re going to give it our all and have fun with it,” enthuses Posdnous. “A lot of the music we use is on MP3s, so we can turn around and manipulate them on a computer. A band is a different dynamic and a feel but I think we try our best – and I think we succeed in having that same energy.”
De La Soul have been performing together since 1987. Mace started out using vinyl to DJ with, but the band members have made the transition to the digital era.
“We had a lot of fun,” Posdnous says about the band’s early days. “But you had to be very conscious sometimes while you’re performing, you gotta make sure you’re not jumping too hard, ‘cos you may make Mace’s record skip!”
De La Soul released their debut album 3 Feet High and Rising in 1989. The record was instantly hailed as a classic and is still revered to this day. The success of De La Soul’s debut lay in its appeal to fans of all genres, not just hip-hop.
Most hip-hop bands at the time were sampling soul and funk, but 3 Feet High featured snippets from artists like Tom Waits, Steely Dan, The Turtles and Johnny Cash.
“It was just music that was in our parents’ catalogue, honestly,” says Posdnous. “The title of that record, 3 Feet High and Rising came from a Johnny Cash song called 6 Feet High And Rising. I grew up around a lot of soul music, but it didn’t make me think that ‘OK, this is what I need to sample’.
“We just felt there was so many different ways to pull the music from, I think we were blessed to be all like minded in that respect.”
When hip-hop became a mega-selling genre, it was understandable that the artists whose work was being sampled came looking for royalty payments. Do stricter copyright laws make it difficult these days for bands like De La Soul?
“It’s not hard to make the album, it just may not be considered lucrative,” explains Posdnous. “Sampling is almost more established now than ever, the laws are in place. It’s just certain artists, if you’re gonna sample from Paul McCartney – he loves hip-hop music and the dynamic of it – but you’ve got to play a steep price for it.”
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
People’s living conditions less than 100 years ago were frightening. We have come a long way. We talk about water charges today, but back then the local District Councils were erecting pumps for local communities and the lovely town of Mountbellew, according to Council minutes, had open sewers,” says Galway County Council archivist Patria McWalter.
Patria believes we “need to take pride in our history, and we should take the same pride in our historical records as we do in our built heritage”. When you see the wealth of material in her care, this belief makes sense.
She is in charge of caring for the rich collection of administrative records owned by Galway County Council and says “these records are as much part of our history as the Rock of Cashel is. They document our lives and our ancestors’ lives. And nobody can plan for the future unless you learn from the past, what worked and what didn’t”.
Archivists and librarians are often unfairly regarded as being dry, academic types, but that’s certainly not true of Patria. Her enthusiasm is infectious as she turns the pages of several minute books from Galway’s Rural District Councils, all of them at least 100 years old.
Part of her role involved cataloguing all the records of the Councils – Ballinasloe, Clifden, Galway, Gort, Loughrea, Mountbellew, Portumna and Tuam. These records mostly consisted of minutes of various meetings.
When she was cataloguing them she realised their worth to local historians and researchers, so she decided to compile a guide to their content. The result is For the Record: The Archives of Galway’s Rural District Councils, which will be a valuable asset to anybody with an interest in history.
Many representatives on these Councils were local personalities and several were arrested during the political upheaval of the era, she explains.
And, ushering in a new era in history, women were allowed to sit on these Rural District Councils – at the time they were not allowed to sit on County Councils.
All of this information is included in Patria’s introductory essay to the attractively produced A4 size guide, which gives a glimpse into how these Rural Councils operated and the way political thinking changed in Ireland during a short 26-year period. In the early 1900s, these Councils supported Home Rule, but by 1920, they were calling for full independence and refusing to recognise the British administration.
“I love the tone,” says Patria of the minutes from meetings. “The language was very emotive.”
That was certainly true of the Gort Rural District Council. At a meeting in 1907, following riots in Dublin at the premiere of JM Synge’s play, The Playboy of the Western World the councillors’ response was vehement. They recorded their decision to “protest most emphatically against the libellous comedy, The Playboy of the Western World, that was belched forth during the past week in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, under the fostering care of Lady Gregory and Mr Yeats. We congratulate the good people of Dublin in howling down the gross buffoonery and immoral suggestions that are scattered throughout this scandalous performance.
For more from the archives see this week’s Tribunes here
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
SLIGO 0-9
GALWAY 1-4
FRANK FARRAGHER IN ENNISCRONE
GALWAY’S first serious examination of the 2013 season rather disturbingly ended with a rating well below the 40% pass mark at the idyllic, if rather Siberian, seaside setting of Enniscrone on Sunday last.
The defeat cost Galway a place in the FBD League Final against Leitrim and also put a fair dent on their confidence shield for the bigger tests that lie ahead in February.
There was no fluke element in this success by an understrength Sligo side and by the time Leitrim referee, Frank Flynn, sounded the final whistle, there wasn’t a perished soul in the crowd of about 500 who could question the justice of the outcome.
It is only pre-season and last Sunday’s blast of dry polar winds did remind everyone that this is far from summer football, but make no mistake about it, the match did lay down some very worrying markers for Galway following a couple of victories over below par third level college teams.
Galway did start the game quite positively, leading by four points at the end of a first quarter when they missed as much more, but when Sligo stepped up the tempo of the game in the 10 minutes before half-time, the maroon resistance crumbled with frightening rapidity.
Some of the statistics of the match make for grim perusal. Over the course of the hour, Galway only scored two points from play and they went through a 52 minute period of the match, without raising a white flag – admittedly a late rally did bring them close to a draw but that would have been very rough justice on Sligo.
Sligo were backable at 9/4 coming into this match, the odds being stretched with the ‘missing list’ on Kevin Walsh’s team sheet – Adrian Marren, Stephen Coen, Tony Taylor, Ross Donovan, David Kelly, David Maye, Johnny Davey and Eamon O’Hara, were all marked absent for a variety of reasons.
Walsh has his Sligo side well schooled in the high intensity, close quarters type of football, and the harder Galway tried to go through the short game channels, the more the home side bottled them up.
Galway badly needed to find some variety in their attacking strategy and maybe there is a lot to be said for the traditional Meath style of giving long, quick ball to a full forward line with a big target man on the edge of the square – given Paul Conroy’s prowess close to goal last season, maybe it is time to ‘settle’ on a few basics.
Defensively, Galway were reasonably solid with Gary Sice at centre back probably their best player – he was one of the few men in maroon to deliver decent long ball deep into the attacking zone – while Finian Hanley, Conor Costello and Gary O’Donnell also kept things tight.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
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