POP MUSIC REVIEW : De La Soul Taps Into Rap--Like the Rest

It was strange, De La Soul playing straight into the rap thing. What was missing from its show at the Hollywood Palladium on Wednesday night was the smart-kid ironic distance that once seemed to separate it from other rap crews.

The gentle, hip sensibility of the Long Island trio’s 1989 debut album was the most appealing shift in hip-hop since Public Enemy introduced noise into the mix. But the playfulness that worked so well on CD never really translated into the group’s earliest stage shows, which nearly always came across as sullen and perfunctory.

Perhaps weary of being the rappers that white college students like best, out-groovied by Deee-Lite and not nearly as esoteric as the new school of “knowledge-dropping” Muslim rappers, the group set its recent “De La Soul Is Dead” album down on the hard-core side instead, and got the kind of intramural respect it had never had before. You even hear it blasting out of Jeeps.

Wednesday, De La Soul signaled its resubmergence into the rap mainstream by so closely following the time-honored rap-show cliches that at times you weren’t sure if you were seeing a show by it, or by, say, Whodini. There were no daisies, no stage set, no wacky costumes . . . well, maybe DJ Mase’s propeller beanie. At least De La Soul was interacting with the crowd.

De La Soul asked audience members to throw their arms in the air; it urged women to say “ owww-owww “; it chanted “make money-money, make money-money-money” as if it were playing a house-party in the Bronx instead of a Hollywood club.

The two rappers, Posdnous and Trugoy, dressed in neat street clothes, nervously paced the stage and bellowed aggressively as KRS-One used to do before he learned how to control the mike, one number sounding exactly like the next.

The songs were stripped down to the barest essentials of rhyme and beat, pumped up even on gentle songs, such as “Potholes in My Lawn.” Trugoy’s trademark Bullwinkle-style delivery was too sublimated into the mix.

De La’s show wasn’t subtle, or even all that entertaining, but it did what it was supposed to do: place the group squarely in the hard-core rap mainstream.

Opening acts included Brand Nubian, whose album last year was subtle, complex and politically astute but who onstage was just a bunch of guys yelling at the same time, and Leaders of the New School, whose lightweight brand of danceable pop-rap was kind of fun.