De La Soul is... Missing?

Could it be? A golden ticket of some sort? Nope. It's De La Soul Is Dead.

From the recent thrift store exodus yesterday. NC was lucky enough (or shall we say gifted enough?) to find this bad boy in a pile of DVD's. What is it? De La Soul Is Dead - Promotional Copy! As the music guy and hip-hop head for the blog I had no idea this existed... until now.


A HIP-HOP CLASSIC

De La Soul's second album De La Soul Is Dead came out in 1991 after their super successful debut album 3 Feet High And Rising. Like it's predecessor, De La Soul Is Dead is a fine example of early 90's hip-hop and the Native Tongues movement. Dope beats from dope samples and dope lyrics to top it all off. This is an album that must be heard as a body of work, no skips allowed. Listening to this album during bus rides to University back in the day made me appreciate this classic. I Love it so much I have a T-Shirt that bares the whole logo of this album.

Yup... I love it so much I have a shirt too.

A Roller Skating Jam Named Saturdays... Check that song out from this classic.

THE THRIFTDWELLERS PROBABLY ONLY HAVE AT LEAST 1 KNOWN COPY IN EXISTENCE... FOR NOW

At first when NC brought this to me, I thought it was a special edition version from another country. I got excited. However that wasn't the case (still excited though). Upon further examination, the CD itself is a promo and was made in Canada, inside Disc 1 is the album promo with selections from the album, 17 in total from a possible 27. Disc 2 was a PolyGram Records selection mix for their artists at the time.

Disc 1 - 17 Track Promotional Copy

Disc 2 - Various Artists Sampler Disc

My hunch is that it was given to music stores back in the day. Why? HMV used to have album samplers in their CD players in store with white label promo CD's for people to listen to before the street date.

IS THIS RARE?

This is the biggest question on this site... WE DON'T KNOW! I have checked sites like Ebay, music trading and purchase sites like gemm.com, musicstack.com and discogs.com which is a site where you can get album information from CD's, vinyl and even cassettes. NO ONE has or submitted information of this at all. I will not assume the pricing or the rarity as with most promotional materials, either hundreds or thousands are made only given to DJ's, music stores and in some cases, street teams who promote it by word. It's just hard to come by for regular folk like you and I. So all in all, a good find!

But... If you want a nice find of De La Soul material, try to find the Clear Lake Audiotorium EP. Only 500 were made on CD and Green Vinyl and were given out to DJ's. I made the mistake of not purchasing it on Ebay a couple of years ago when it popped up, the first and last time I've seen it on there. I regret it so much.

- Happy Thrifting! LP