‘Itzsoweezee’ Provides Questions De La Soul Admit They Aren't Equipped To Answer
De La Soul have never shied away from speaking out about topics and issues that are close to their vest. The trio often do so through the lens of the man on the street POV. At a time, in 1996, when gangster & maximalist mafioso raps were flooding the airwaves, De La Soul seemed to be talking from the streets and high schools where the bulk of their audience were apt to be more concerned about just getting by or how their parents were making end’s meet.
Directed by Marcus Turner, ‘Itzsoweezee’ distills the motifs of parent album Stakes Is High down to a thick, syrupy concentrate. Trugoy appears center-frame in a packed lunchroom, gliding around on a steadicam as teenage shenanigans are breaking out all around him.
The high school setting isn’t new for De La Soul, as it was the main setting of their 1989 breakthrough ‘Me Myself And I.’ While that video served as an introduction to the De La Soul world, attempting to show the music press that the Plugs were not to be pigeonholed as just “Black Hippies,” this time around the Plugs aren’t trying to answer anyone. No rebuttals. No mission statements.
In fact, the tables have turned. Now De La Soul are the ones asking the questions. The high school setting, this time around, serves as a melting pot or a living snapshot of the everyday life around the group. As things get increasingly raucous, nobody knows how to calm the tide.
This sentiment can be read in the lyrics themselves, in lines such as:
“If money makes a man strange (we gots to rearrange that)”
“If love is against the law (listen, I don’t know)”
“When's the last time you had Happy Days? (Uh-huh)
Blazin' up your herb to escape the maze, but the problem stays”
The video ends with a cut between the group sitting in the empty lunchroom after everyone has left and a shot of a teen getting hassled on a park bench; echoing the ironic closing refrain of “It’s so easy, it’s gettin’ hot this year.”
From De La Soul’s vantage point, there’s a lot out there that needs answering for or addressing. At the same time, many of these big questions don’t have easy answers. Instead of faking it and trying to put forward some kind of makeshift solutions, The Plugs do what they do best and keep it real. They don’t have the answers and they’re not going to pretend they do.
But should that stop them, or any of us, from asking the questions and raising the concerns that are on our minds? Of course not.
‘Itzsoweezee’ isn’t your traditional call-to-action track. It’s not imploring us to vote or write a letter to our local councilman. But what it is trying to do is get us to look around our own corner of the world and, at the very least, see what’s going on.
Admitting you don’t have all the answers is OK. But ‘Itzsoweezee’ scales the stakes down to high school to give us an idea of what the scene around us might look like if we stop the conversation right there.
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