Disco de Del Tha Funkee Homosapien: “11th Hour [DVD]”

For some reason, Amazon's including reviews of the dvd with the album, despite them being two totally different things. This review is for Del's dvd, The 11th Hour, and not the album, which is just music. So keep that in mind for this review. But a few years ago, I remember hearing about Del getting his own dvd, and that got me pumped. He's one of my top 5 rappers, and it was good to hear he was getting some kind of dvd all to himself, regardless of what was on it. It's still hard to recommend this to anyone because it's not really worth buying, but for any hardcore Del fans, it's worth at least one viewing.

The dvd is a combination of footage from some of Del's performances (mostly Delton tracks), footage of him at home, and footage of him on tour with Hieroglyphics doing radio interviews and just messing around on his scooter. This isn't some kind of in-depth interview or anything like that, it's just a lot of footage of Del doing his thing. And while that is pretty cool to see him being himself, there's not a lot of focus on anything. It's called The 11th Hour, after his album that was coming out around the same time, so you'd think that'd be the main focus, but there's only a few segments showing the troubles Del's having with writing new rhymes and coming up with new music. He even goes and gets some big music books and learns the fundamentals of writing music in an attempt to make progress. The guy's hard at work, and you can tell he's really frustrated. We also see that Del, even with being a famous rapper, isn't that rich. When he goes home, everything's a mess, and he spends most of his free time playing GameCube and ps2 games. It's interesting to see all of this, but you'll forget a lot of what's here.

The best parts were probably the performances and footage of Del going to the grocery store. I love Deltron 3030, and it was a treat seeing him perform some of those tracks live, especially when they'd be remixed with other tracks like 'Help is on the Way' by the Whatnauts. When he goes to the store, Del gets excited when they have his favorite candy, and goes into a few stories about the area. Again, nothing big, but it's showing you that he's normal just like you and me. Something I think he shouldn't have overlooked though was revealing his AOL Instant Messenger screen name on here without blurring it. As soon as I finished watching this, I added him to my friends list, and sure enough, he showed up online. I thanked him for everything he's done and said I couldn't wait for Deltron 2 since I was sure it'd be great. His response- 'I'm glad you think so'. 'sounds like he's having trouble again.

Sadly, the video and audio quality both suck. The picture is often muddy and when the camera zooms in on something, it gets very blocky. I wasn't expecting this to be in 720p or anything, but this is pretty bad. The audio's even worse- you'll be turning the volume up and down constantly while watching this. Some concert parts are very loud while others get super soft, and the same goes for the other segments. It got annoying having to adjust the volume constantly. Otherwise, things are usually clear.

There's a decent amount of special features on here, mostly extra bits of Del talking about different subjects, and a few extra concert performances. My favorite was him talking about working with Gorillaz and how he didn't expect the song to get big, and how he actually forgot about it until someone called him up to tell him it was a huge hit.

The 11th Hour is probably one of the lesser music-related dvds I've bought, and I wish I'd known more about it before buying (I bought it before it even had a page here on Amazon). But you know, it was nice getting to see Del be a person and not a famous rapper like people might expect. If you're looking for something to introduce friends into Del's music, I highly recommend any of his albums over this. This dvd is only for his biggest fans, and even then, it's hard to say if they'd really like it because of how everything's presented. Still, give it a shot.