Our Spilt Milk: De La Soul's Cartoon Fans, Cub, and Framing Amy Winehouse?

Teen Titans meet De La Soul (Cartoon Network)

Our favorite things this week include Teen Titans Go!, Cub, Amy Winehouse and the Britney Spears documentary.

A recent trip to Soundcloud sent me down a De La Soul hole. I found mixes by British DJ Chris Read that focused on Three Feet High and Rising, De La Soul is Dead, and Buhloone Mindstate, in each case mixing the tracks that supplied the signature samples from each of the albums with the De La Soul tracks that employed them. Three Feet High and Rising and The Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique made an art form of sampling, but although Three Feet High and Rising came out in March 1989 four months before the release of Paul’s Boutique that July, The Beasties get all the credit these days. Why? Because you can hear their album, whereas the De La Soul’s debut lives on search lists.

Problem #1: Not all the samples were cleared on the album, and De La Soul and Tommy Boy Records’ Tom Silverman disagree over whose fault that is. (I interviewed Mase about this in 2014). A lawsuit over one uncleared sample resulted in a $2.5 million lawsuit that was settled out of court for $1.7 million. When Silverman signed over Tommy Boy to Warner Brothers Records to settle his debt to the label, Warners looked at the dodgy paper trail around De La Soul and washed its hands of those records, so they’re now out of print.

Problem #2: The albums aren’t on streaming services either. De La Soul and Tommy Boy are locked in a bitter struggle over digital royalty rates, and De La Soul have asked their fans not to buy or play or stream those albums when they have found their way back into circulation because the group wouldn’t see a penny of it. In 2014, they briefly made the albums available for free download from their website, but if you missed that, the albums that made De La Soul’s rep can only be heard on YouTube, on torrents, or in mixes like those that Wax Poetics posted on Soundcloud.

All of which makes a recent episode of the cartoon Teen Titans Go! inexplicable. The episode titled “Don’t Press Play,” features a space monster stealing De La Soul’s music, with the Teen Titans coming to their rescue. Pos, Trugoy, and Mase voice themselves in this very thinly veiled allegory. When the monster sucks all the music out of De La Soul’s studio, Pos shouts, “That thing stole our music, man.” Trugoy cries, “Our fans won’t be able to hear any of it, ever again!”

There are countless Easter eggs for fans including the discovery that the monster is transmitting their music from Mars—a reference to the song at the center of their lawsuit—and it serves as a primer in intellectual property and royalties. When De La Soul offer to split the royalties with the monster, it refuses and evilly laughs, “Your music is mine!”

As an episode of Teen Titans Go!, it’s a little clumsy. The Titans fill in Starfire and likely 90 percent of the show’s audience as to who these guys are with the cartoon version of the band’s Wikipedia page, and since he show couldn’t use any of the music from these albums, viewers have to take Cyborg and Raven’s word for how cool and influential they are. But as an act of fandom on the part of the show’s creators, it’s awesome as they turn over their platform to a good cause, even if it’s hard to imagine how it could be more obscure or quixotic. (Alex Rawls) 

Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black still delivers the combination of power and fragility that it did 14 years ago when released. At the time “Rehab” was received as a sarcastic attempt to deflect her addiction struggles, but after Winehouse’s untimely death due to alcohol poisoning in 2011, the track now leaves listeners yearning for her to have said, “Yes yes yes.” 

The recent release of the documentary Framing Britney Spears made me think about the way the public treated Winehouse, whose Back to Black came out in 2006, a year before Spears’ Blackout and while Spears dealt with the pressures of growing up in the paparazzi’s lens. She sings in “Piece of Me,” “I’m Miss American Dream since I was seventeen / Don't matter if I step on the scene / Or sneak away to the Philippines / They still gon' put pictures of my derriere in the magazine / You want a piece of me?” 

Although Winehouse’s struggles were different, our cultural detachment from their obvious issues is disturbing. How did the press and the public fail these women in their cries for help? The newfound awareness of Britney’s public shaming gives Back to Black an even more haunting sound years later as we reflect on Winehouse’s death and the part the media could have played on that. She sang about her addiction, and fans booed her offstage when she was too drunk to perform. The news outlets weren’t begging Winehouse to get help, though. Instead, they fueled the public’s fixation on her personal life and the cycle of destruction. It makes me wonder, had Amy’s fans taken her addiction problems more seriously and the media didn’t create such a narrative of self-destruction, would she still be here today? (Jillian Fontana)

I can't recall a more innocent band than Cub. The Vancouver trio blended the twee pop and riot grrrl movements in the ‘90s, though "twee" doesn’t adequately capture how sugary Cub's music is. Atop stripped-back punk instrumentals, lead singer Lisa Marr sounds like a Powerpuff Girl, and her lyrics center on crushes, picnics, dancing, hanging out, and all manner of the feel-good. Cub’s cartoonish cutesiness strikes me as the product of a time when artists could put out such friendly-faced music without getting panned for not being subversive enough. But even if cuddlecore would have a hard time dominating the music world in 2021, I’m glad the microgenre found a seat at the table. 

The best way to experience Cub is through its 24-song debut, Betti-Cola. Most are under two minutes; most are in the key of A. Songs this straightforward are best consumed like the candy you binge on on Halloween night, so packing 24 songs on the album makes the best of Cub's appeal. Each listen rewards you with more chuckle-worthy lines that you missed on the last listen, like "I had a spider monkey and his name was Bob / He had a nice smile and I liked him a lot" and "The grass is green and the sky is blue / Got a basket and a bicycle / We've got rainbow popsicles.” Reinforcing the music's cartoon-like aesthetic is the Archie-style cartoon cover art of Cub on stage, drawn by Archie's very own Dan DeCarlo. No other cover artist could be more appropriate. (Andreas Jahn)