WonderCon turned the Anaheim Convention Center into pop culture nirvana over the weekend; the hip-hop old schoolers from De La Soul (pictured) are in the studio with an album financed by their fans; getting the new TV show “American Odyssey” on the air was an odyssey unto itself.
De La Soul previews its Kickstarter-funded album, 'And the Anonymous Nobody'
UPDATE: De La Soul's "And the Anonymous Nobody" is nominated for Best Rap Album at the 2017 Grammy Awards on Feb. 12.
It’s been 26 years since De La Soul came on the scene with their landmark album "3 Feet High and Rising," which introduced the world to a style that combined clever wordplay with samples from a vast catalog of funk, soul and jazz.
But it’s been 11 long years since the hip-hop trio released a full-length album. For their latest, the group is foregoing the traditional record label model and asking for help on Kickstarter. They reached their $110,000 goal in less than a day and have already tripled that goal with 25 days to go.
The band landed in legal trouble for sampling other people’s music without permission in the past, so over the past few years, De La Soul has been jamming and recording with musicians to create hundreds of hours of new music. On this new album, the group will take these new tracks and essentially sample themselves.
Let the copyright lawyers try to crack that case.
David Jude Jolicoeur and Kelvin "Pos" Mercer join The Frame from Atlanta (where the album is being recorded) to talk sampling, going without a record label and what you can expect from the new album.
Check out a short sample from the new album:
Interview Highlights:
What brought you back together to record this album?
Dave: We're always recording in some fashion. It's something that we do while we're on the road, it's something that we do while we're at home, and the time was just pressing — we had put out a couple singles here and there and a couple of mixtape projects that people were reacting to, and then we just fell into this situation with this amazing band, the Rhythm Roots All-Stars, so we figured, "Hey, this can be a great concept here. Let's pursue it and work on a true De La, studio-released album."
You're taking an interesting approach with this record. It sounds like you're creating a database of music and then sampling yourselves?
Dave: Yeah, but it didn't begin that way. It wasn't like we sat down and said, "Ha ha, this is how we combat the sampling situation." It really came creatively, just sitting down in the studio with musicians, which we've never done before, and loosely directing them to create sounds.
We had been recording at Vox Studio in L.A., an old studio that many of the greats had recorded at, and the sounds from those boards came out sounding so warm and so good. It sounded like old-school records that we would sample from.
So we were like, "Why don't we just continue to jam and jam and jam, and then we'll go back and listen to these things and see what we can get out of them?" That's where the idea came from, so we're now listening back to over 200 hours of music and sourcing samples from those sessions.
This endeavor is funded on Kickstarter, and you reached your goal very quickly. Why did you feel that crowdfunding was the best idea for this album? Did you try to go through a label?
Dave: Being away from the politics of the industry and labels was one of the best feelings in our 26, 27 years. [laughs] We didn't want to pursue anything with a label; we wanted to find a way to do this ourselves.
Kickstarter, being one of those places where entrepreneurs and creative people are, was very interesting to us. It just was the best option, instead of — I hate to put it this way, but this is the way it feels — putting our hands behind our backs and enslaving us to another corporation/record company and forfeiting our creative life.
We wanted to be able to express ourselves without having anyone stick their heads into a studio, like, "We'd like a song like this, you guys should work with these producers, we've got writers, et cetera." We've so loved being able to shut the doors, do what we do, and say, "Here, world, this is what we've got." Love it or hate it, at least we know it's coming from us.
You've been together since 1987. How have you managed to stay together as a group despite everything that life throws your way?
Pos: We've known each other even longer than that, just from going to school together since maybe sixth grade. To enter into a creative partnership as a group and learn business with each other, we're like brothers. There's days when we hate each other, but at the end of the day we love each other.
We put up with each other, we take it, and we've learned to respect each other's views. It's not necessarily work all the time, also — we're family, and that can shine through any problems we might have.
Dave, the last record from De La Soul was from 2004. How much longer do we have to wait to hear this record?
Dave: This record's coming soon. We promised people that this record will be delivered in 2015, and right now it's tentatively due for September. If we can get it out sooner, we'll make that happen. It's good that we're receiving so much love, and if we can accelerate that time and get it to fans sooner, that's what we're going to do.
Listen to the audio to hear the full interview with De La Soul.
Check out more classic De La Soul:
WonderCon wrap-up: Convention moving to Los Angeles as female fandom grows
Hordes of super fans descended on the WonderCon comic convention over the weekend in Anaheim. From the same people behind the annual San Diego Comic-Con, WonderCon's the kid brother, but it still draws big crowds — around 60,000 fans compared to Comic-Con's 130,000. It was officially announced Monday that the convention is moving next year to Los Angeles.
L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti alluded to the possibility of other events in a statement, referring to Comic-Con in general after specifically addressing WonderCon.
"We look forward to establishing a long-term partnership with Comic-Con International, the presenter, and helping them establish a home-base in L.A." Garcetti said. "We anticipate the show to be highly attended and to set the precedent for future successful Comic-Con events in L.A."
For now, the new location is only set for one year, but there's a lot of money in a convention that draws fans from around the world — according to the city, WonderCon 2016 is expected to have a $32 million economic impact, and San Diego Comic-Con's impact has been estimated to be around five times that. They've long wooed the convention, trying to win it away from San Diego, and with a contract coming up soon, here's L.A.'s chance to show the organizers of the nonprofit convention that they can provide what's needed.
It comes at a time of greater diversity in fan culture, which has often been male-dominated, with both the convention and the creators providing more diverse content. For the first time this year, WonderCon launched a separate fan culture programming track. It included topics in areas that reach to areas beyond what's traditionally been covered at conventions, including body image, fashion, fitness and more.
While statistics weren't available, there appeared to be more female fans that ever in attendance at WonderCon. While they're largely drawn by the same things as everyone else, the large number of costumed fans (cosplayers, as they're known) included a lot of women dressed up as the leads from more female-centric series — those dressed as the star of Marvel's new series Agent Carter were particularly abundant. The comics have also recently swapped some of their major characters, with a new African-American Captain America and a female Thor, as well as introducing new more diverse characters, such as cult favorite Ms. Marvel.
The films are taking a bit longer for female leads to have as large an impact in genre movies, but TV has proven open to the idea. "iZombie" is the first show from DC Comics in years with a female lead, and star Rose McIver tells KPCC that one of the things she loved about the show is that it gave her a chance to play a character who wasn't what you always see in women's roles.
"We get to see men playing lots of different looks. And women, it's like, you're either really glamorous or you're broken. That's about all we see, and that is not all that there is," McIver said.
There's still plenty of room for the more traditional fare — the largest movie presentation of the weekend was the Warner Brothers panel for two testosterone-fueled upcoming films, "Mad Max: Fury Road" and "San Andreas." People had been hoping for Warner to surprise with a new trailer for next year's "Batman v Superman," but they were left wanting — the closest they got was a reunion panel with the cast of the late '70s and early '80s Superman movies directed by Richard Donner.
Fans are left on the edge of their seats to see what's next, with women in fan culture — and where they'll be gathering in the years to come.
The Frame's digital producer and KPCC's resident pop-culture expert, Mike Roe, spoke with John Horn about the shift to attract more female fans, as well as some of the highlights of the convention.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
On what's changing in the world of fan culture:
There's been a lot more outreach to female fans. They have a new fan culture track at Comic-Con and at WonderCon that targets female fans. They talk about fitness, they talk about crafts, and various things that sort of make this whole fan lifestyle.
And at this convention, I saw more female fans than I think I've seen at any one of these previous conventions. It's definitely, I think, working.
For a long time, comic book TV shows have been about big bad superheroes, but now there's 'Agent Carter,' a female lead from Marvel Comics. There's 'iZombie,' which is a female lead character from DC Comics on the CW [television network].
And I had a chance to talk to some of the stars of 'iZombie' over the weekend at the convention, and they were talking about how great it is that they have this opportunity to reach out into that source material and comic books and be able to do this finally.
On the upcoming TV shows and movies featured:
This year the big, new things they were promoting were [the film] 'San Andreas.' They had a panel for that.
San Andreas trailer
[The FOX television show] 'Last Man on Earth' did a big panel. One thing that's interesting about [WonderCon] being sort of the little brother of Comic-Con is that at the 'Last Man on Earth' panel they showed an upcoming episode of the show but they actually asked everybody, 'Please don't tell anybody about this.' It was one of those things, like they think they could get away with it because they're small.
On WonderCon's move to L.A. next year:
They've announced just one year in L.A. They haven't announced plans beyond that. L.A, for a long time, has wanted to land San Diego Comic-Con, so this is their opportunity to show that they can handle it.
You know, L.A's a bigger place, but it may not have all the same advantages that San Diego has.
'American Odyssey' took over 3 years to get to the small screen
Until only a few weeks ago, the new TV series “American Odyssey” was simply called “Odyssey” — a modern day play on Homer. Just as people assumed Odysseus died in the epic poem, in the NBC drama the same assumptions are made about an American soldier (Anna Friel) who is captured and presumed killed in Western Africa.
“American Odyssey” tells the vast story of a global conspiracy that reaches deep into Wall Street and Washington, and the development of the show itself could be told as a “vast story.” It was in the making for 3-and-a-half years before it made its premiere Sunday night on NBC.
When co-creators Adam Armus and Kay Foster came by The Frame recently, we asked them about recent changes in television programming, the history of their female protagonist and some of the criticism directed towards the show's portrayal of the Muslim world.
Interview Highlights:
Is it typical for a show to be in development for three-and-a-half years?
Adam: It's not typical at all. Generally speaking, the pilot seasons lasts for about three months, and by the end of those three months you know if you're going on the air, and a few months after that you're doing your pilot and you're making your series. For us, it was a series of, "We love this script, but it's so risky. Can NBC do this?" And we said, "Of course!" [laughs] But for NBC, it took a little while for them to get on board.
What happened in the larger universe of television that made "American Odyssey" less of a risky idea?
Adam: For a long time, television was under the impression that you had to dumb things down for the audience. But with the advent of cable television, especially premium cable, I think people are realizing that people want sophisticated television as well. With the success of shows like "Homeland," "Breaking Bad" or "The Sopranos," those shows were groundbreaking in that they told rich stories with complex characters, so NBC said, "We have to get into that business."
The character that's arguably the lead character is played by Anna Friel. From the beginning of this story, was your protagonist a woman?
Kay: That's such an interesting question, because we wish we could take credit for that, but we really can't. We took the idea of doing a modern-day telling of "The Odyssey" by Homer to Russell Rothberg at the studio, and we said that we wanted to write something on spec. And Russell said, "Why don't you make it a woman?" We said, "Wow! That's kind of cool." It opened it up for us, and we looked into females in the service and found this soldier, which is a female engagement team soldier who actually goes along with the special forces troops and helps manage the women in areas where—
Adam: There are language and cultural issues. A lot of our soldiers are working in the Middle East and North Africa right now, and in those areas Muslim women don't approach men at all. So our special forces needed to figure out how to engage with these people if they wouldn't engage with us. They brought women along, and these women were brought into very, very hostile areas, they had to learn to fight the way special forces fight, and Friel's character is a linguist — she knows Arabic and she speaks Arabic throughout our series — and she's the one who reached out to the locals.
The reviews have been split a little bit on the way the Arab world is depicted. One review from our partners at Vulture.com reads, "The symmetry represents a particular, very popular American worldview, granted (see Fox News's reduction of the former Ottoman Empire to basically Muslim Mad Max), but it's an exhaustively cartoonish one." How do you approach depicting the Arab world, and how do you react to that kind of criticism?
Kay: I don't really have a reaction to the criticism specifically. We come from our own point of view and we tried to be as fair-handed as we could. We also depict bad people who are American, bad corporations who are America. I don't think we saw the world as black and white at all; we have some very lovely characters who are Muslim and a great respect for Muslim culture and people.
Adam: I think if you just watch the pilot of our show, you may come out of it feeling like, "Well, they sort of treat the Muslims like we all do, like they're all terrorists," or something like that. First thing is that that's not true, because we meet Aslam, who's a 14-year-old, independent thinker. Second of all, as you watch our series you're going to meet many Muslim characters who come from all different perspectives. Some are freedom fighters, some are terrorists. We have one character who turns out to be Aslam's uncle, who is a transvestite with a talk show in Bamako, Mali. We have characters from every aspect of the culture, and we're actually quite proud of that.