West coast stand up! Spring has arrived and we here at HipHopDX have a sunny treat that will double your pleasure as we amplify the fun with this April’s Underground Report, featuring veteran emcees hailing from the sunshine state itself: California. As we gaze toward the sun, craving back to Cali, we link up with some of the best from the West: Heiroglyphic’s Del the Funky Homosapien and Living Legends Crew's The Grouch. Both rapper/producers just released their solo albums (11th Hour, Show You the World), both are continuing to perfect their craft, and both are part of influential Hip Hop crews founded in the west coast, recognized world-wide.

Even prior to his beginnings with the Heiroglyphics, Del has had a notable solo career, which began at the release of his first album, I Wish My Brother George Was Here, at the youthful age of 18. At the time highly noted for his familial ties with rapper Ice Cube (Del and Ice are cousins), it wasn’t much before the Oakland-born rapper paved his artistic path, leading him toward some of the most notable group, solo and collaboration albums, including No Need for Alarm and Deltron 3030. We caught up with the Funky Homosapien to discuss his hiatus before the 11th Hour [click here to read], the rumors claiming jeopardized health, and the decision to take his music back to basics.

HipHopDX: It’s been seven years since your last solo album prior to the 11th Hour. What were you doing in the meantime?
Del the Funky Homosapien: Umm [laughing]. Let’s see - how can I explain it? I was trying to get myself out of a twist, and at the same time I was studying music theory. So I was trying to study music theory and finish the album, but at the same time, I had a lot of toxic people around me that were trying to keep me doing from what I was trying to do. And it was pretty serious so I had to spend most of my focus on that - but that didn’t stop me from focusing on what I had to do.

DX: Music theory…what did you learn?
D: Really, I wanted to study more about Funk and groove ‘cause I wanted to get my funk motor revved up; I felt like I could be more funkier. I wanted to work on my all-around funk-ness, but to do that and to understand what dudes like James Brown and the Jungle Brothers or James Brown’s band, The J.B.’s or Funkadelic…I had to learn music theory because they were speaking in musician’s terms. So I learned what I needed to learn so I can have a basic foundation of how music works. And I still study now but I have a workable amount of knowledge in my head – it helps.

DX: Some would say that Funk died in the early '80s; thoughts?
D: In a way…it came out in different types of form. It wasn’t the traditional type of Funk. We had more electronics and stuff like that. The Hip Hop generation, we was playing them records and sampling them records and rapping over them breaks and stuff like that. We took the rawest part of Funk – the funkiest part of Funk, we took and rapped over it basically.

DX: Jazz is another one of your influences. Please explain its connection to Hip Hop.
D: Jazz and Funk to me are interwoven but Jazz is more technical. I look at jazz as being the link to Hip Hop as far as rhyming, for example. The way dudes freestyle and rhyme, when they really do it, it’s like a Jazz musician improvising. You might have a certain structure that you work around. You got your few words or your subject you’re gonna rap about and you just go. And it’s the same type of art form, that spontaneous combustion that you get…

DX: One of the best known Jazz singers of our time – Nina Simone (who by the way doesn’t use the word “Jazz”, instead, she labels it “Black Classical Music”) didn’t consider rap to be a musical art form, let alone an art-form rooted in Jazz.
D: That’s interesting. Just the fact that black people are doing it is the first link – it’s definitely connected. She [was] probably looking at rap [when she was alive]; she can’t be talking about somebody like Rakim. There are rappers out there that exemplify what I’m talking about and then there are rappers out there that don’t. […] I think it’s the same with Jazz too.

DX: You produced just about every track on the 11th Hour?
D: There are three that I didn’t produce.

DX: Some of the criticism for the beats is that they are not memorable; that they are great while the track plays but forgetful afterward; thoughts?
D: I guess people are gonna have their opinion on whatever. Most of the comments that I’ve gotten back are good.

DX: Why do you think some refer to the beats as “unmemorable”?
D: ‘Cause they don’t like it. [Laughs] There’s some people that do and some people that don’t. I can’t really argue with that, ‘cause that’s their opinion. What I tried to do with the beats, some of them, I tried to make [them] with a more minimalist approach. So maybe that’s what they mean when they say “Some of them are not memorable.” Maybe they’re just not doing that much for them. Continued on page 2 »