No one has repeatedly subverted and expanded the hip-hop
vocabulary quite like producer and comedic raconteur Prince Paul. From
his teenage days as DJ for Stetsasonic (the original hip-hop band) and his unparalleled collaborations with De La Soul, to his later, highly unsettling solo LPs Psychoanalysis (What Is It?) and A Prince Among Thieves,
Prince Paul has a body of work that resembles no other. Throw in Paul’s
stint as a sickle-swinging member of hip-hop supergroup Gravediggaz and
his production role on Chris Rock’s Grammy-winning comedy album Roll With The New, and the subject of this exhibit is the very thing he’d be slow to admit: a living legend.
Paul Huston was born in 1967 in Queens, New York, and raised in suburban Long Island. It was the heyday of Parliament/Funkadelic, and Paul grew up idolizing P-Funk’s chief prankster, George Clinton. Then, as hip-hop took shape in the boroughs around him, Paul started spinning records at neighborhood parties.
One night at a party the scrawny teenager was approached by two leather-clad men. Paul assumed they were going to beat him up. Instead, the pair introduced themselves as Daddy-O and Delite of Stetsasonic, and invited DJ Paul to join their group. Such scarifying weirdness may have been expected by a kid who lived not far from the Amityville horror house. But it was another local building, Amityville High School, where Paul met three fellow students with whom he’d change the face of popular music.
As the hip-hop timeline zooms further away from the creation and release of De La Soul’s first three, Prince Paul-produced albums, it becomes easier to overlook their initial impact. Three Feet High and Rising, De La’s 1989 debut, sold a million copies by offering something completely different. While Trugoy, Posdnous, and Pacemaster Mase delivered their skewed suburban stories, Paul provided a soundtrack hand-stitched from unexpected sources like Steely Dan, Flo & Eddie, even a French language-instruction record. (As technicolor sampling fantasias go, only Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique can compare.) If that wasn’t enough, the album also introduced to the world perhaps Paul’s daffiest invention, the hip-hop skit.
Under Prince Paul’s patronage, De La Soul promulgated a decidedly non-gangsta alternative they dubbed The D.A.I.S.Y. Age. The acronym stood for Da Inner Sound Y’All; nevertheless the group was labeled hip-hop hippies, and they snapped back with their sophomore LP De La Soul Is Dead. Around the same time, Paul clicked with 3rd Bass, Def Jam’s pale-faced replacements for the Beastie Boys. With a chip on their shoulder the size of Manhattan, 3rd Bass delivered the Paul-produced “The Gas Face” — still one of the funniest, foamiest dis records ever.
In 1993, De La Soul birthed Buhloone Mindstate, their most mind-expanding Prince Paul collaboration of all. In a genre where two decent songs an album was considered permissible and shelf lives are often on par with open jars of mayonnaise, Buhloone stands tall on the short-list of all-time front-to-back hip-hop classics. Simultaneously singalong-ready and defiantly anti-commercial (“It might blow up but it won’t go pop” goes one memorable chant), Buhloone Mindstate‘s soul-swabbed boom-bap remains one of Prince Paul’s most indelible achievements.
Productive partnerships seldom dissolve at the appropriate moment, but Paul and De La Soul parted ways at their peak. While De La waded into the mainstream with Stakes Is High, Paul paddled further into uncharted waters. Offered his own label by Def Jam mogul Russell Simmons, Paul insisted it be called Dew Doo Man Records (much to Simmons’ chagrin). The label disappeared quickly. Rap, meanwhile, was bigger than ever.
Since Paul started out with Stetsasonic, hip-hop had grown into a big business. And in business, the almighty dollar is king. This particular Prince never ascended to the throne of his overpaid peers. Instead Paul rallied with wordy cronies Fruitkwan and Too Poetic, as well as a not-yet-famous RZA, as the demented supergroup Gravediggaz. Their 1994 album Six Feet Deep, labeled “horrorcore” by critics, was equally a tribute to the campy, semi-scary movies like Blood Sucking Freaks that Paul had grown up loving.
As RZA went on to worldwide adoration with Wu-Tang Clan, Prince Paul descended into madness. On record, anyway: Paul’s 1996 solo treatise Psychoanalysis (What Is It?) was a portrait of a producer for whom laughter was his sole link to sanity. Alongside an album cover collage that would’ve made Freud flinch, Paul’s claim “Alfred E. Neuman got nuttin’ on me” seemed all too true. But could a madman have created a cohesive masterwork like 1999′s Prince Among Thieves? The album’s featured guests included Chubb Rock, Big Daddy Kane, Kool Keith and Everlast. Blaze magazine thought it sounded like if “Jonathan Swift smoked a blunt with Rodgers and Hammerstein, then invited the Juice Crew over.” Swift, presumably, would not have protested much.
Paul subsequently adopted the pseudonym Chest Rockwell, cigar-chewing martini-swilling majordomo of Handsome Boy Modeling School, a recording project that resulted in two deservedly acclaimed, gut-busting albums. Not bad for what had begun as a private joke with fellow producer Dan The Automator.
Most revolutionaries end up before a firing squad, but somehow Prince Paul has survived. The shifting tides of the rap game have occasionally set the producer adrift, but Paul has displayed an uncanny knack for surfacing with the goods. Witness the new on-line series Scion A/V Presents Prince Paul: Musician Impossible, where the producer travels to far-flung locales in an attempt to reinvigorate his own interest in making music.
Appropriately, this brings us to the Project Museum exhibit you are about to enter. A clinical assessment might deem Prince Paul a pack rat, but it’s history’s good fortune that Paul is in fact a minutiae-minded archivist who has held onto a wealth of memorabilia from throughout his career. Here, Paul takes us on the guided tour of a selection of artifacts from his personal collection that have never before seen the light of day. So whether you’re a long-time Prince Paul devotee or a new jack just starting to dig the great man’s tracks, there’s something here to delight, affirm and inspire.
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