De La Soul Forever
The hop-hop pioneers are finally getting their due, but it's bittersweet. Listen to the classics and spread the love.
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De La Soul deserves better than this.
The pioneering hip-hop group is being feted by peers, the media, and fans both old and new—spanning decades. Their music is, at last, being discovered by a generation that *might* have heard a few tracks thanks to video game soundtracks—but mostly only knew them as phantom legends.
“For a long time, De La Soul tracks felt like Easter eggs, littered across the landscape for only the most enterprising young rap fans to stumble across,” wrote Matthew Ritchie for NPR.
Streaming music has been the standard method of consumption for at least a decade and a half. And De La Soul’s first six albums, the vast bulk of its canon, haven’t been available on streaming services—until last week.
I won’t recount the whole long, infuriating story—but the gist goes like this: samples used by De La during the pioneering days of hiphop weren’t properly cleared with the original copyright owners, and the group’s former record label was profoundly unhelpful in working things out, even decades later.
And so, as MP3s died (CDs were already long dead), De La Soul’s music existed in limbo.
The group eventually grew so frustrated with their prolonged state of nonexistence that they gave away their entire discography for free, to anyone who wanted it, for one day in 2014. To fight for justice for their music, they even appeared as cartoons on Teen Titans GO! in 2021. (Here’s the episode’s synopsis: “The Titans must help De La Soul save their music after it is stolen by an alien.”)
The record industry is notoriously corrupt and cruel to artists. It’s also a shell of what it once was. Simply having their music finally available to the masses feels like De La Soul has earned a modicum of justice—the most minor of dues owed to them, a brief moment in the sun when their entire body of work can be celebrated at once.
And yet, it’s a moment of tremendous grief. Dave Jolicoeur, (a.k.a. Trugoy the Dove, a.k.a. Plug Two) passed away on Feb. 12 at the age of 54.
It feels like a cosmic injustice.
Questlove is one of many pop culture figures who’ve been beating the drum in recent weeks, beseeching their followers that now is the time to listen to De La Soul: “I’m buying all 6 #DeLaSoul lps 10 times over EACH. We owe it to them. & the fact that they took a stand & won their masters. For all of us complaining about the quality control in hip hop—-NOW is the time to vote with our dollar.”
“We owe it to them.”
I don’t know what I can say that’d be more meaningful than the praise they’re getting from their peers, fans, and disciples. All I can say is De La Soul opened doors for me musically and culturally, brought me tremendous joy, and even helped spawn a few real-life friendships. Music is a gift, a continuum, and a community.
De La Soul is musically adventurous. It’s melodic (I can’t think of any other rappers who sound more like they’re singing). It’s romantic, it’s socially conscious. It’s aggressive when it needs to be. It laughs at itself. Their lyrics were always wise beyond their years. They were often funny and (even more often) weird as hell. (What can you say about a group that introduces your teenage self to both A Tribe Called Quest and Steely Dan?)
They never won superstardom, but they’ve finally won respect. Let’s take a walk through their resurrected classics.
3 Feet High and Rising (1989)
Neville Hardman writes in Alternative Press:
In 1989, De La Soul helped to usher in alternative hip-hop with their debut album, 3 Feet High And Rising, which was more in line with Jungle Brothers’ imaginative jazz-rap than N.W.A’s West Coast menace. Perhaps most importantly, the trio made hip-hop profoundly weird. Like Beastie Boys sampling bong rips and Woodstock speeches on Paul’s Boutique, out that same year, De La Soul ventured even further out by mining Kraftwerk, Steely Dan, Hall & Oates and even a radio clip of NYC Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia reading the comics in the 1940s. The record was made all the more outlandish by their concepts, including absurdist skits that mimic a game show, and levity (on “Can U Keep a Secret,” the members trade off confessions in hushed voices: “Paul has dandruff/Posdnuos has a lot of dandruff/Mase has big fat dandruff”).
Parents let go, 'cause there's magic in the air
Criticizing rap shows you're out of order
Stop, look and listen to the phrase Fred Astaires
And don't get offended while Mase do-si-do's your daughter
A tri-camera rolls since our music's now set
Fly rhymes are stored on a Da.I.S.Y production
It stands for "Da Inner Sound, Y'all" and y'all can bet
That the action's not a trick, but sure 'nough a function
De La Soul Is Dead (1991)
The technicolor video for “Me Myself and I” was a huge mainstream MTV hit. The “D.A.I.S.Y. Age” imagery of the album cover got them called “the hippies of hiphop”—a label they loathed (just as they would soon hate their hit single).
So De La Soul declared themselves dead (check the wilted daisies on the 2nd album’s cover) and a theme runs throughout the record’s skits that the group sold out, is irrelevant, and is surprisingly violent for a bunch of hippies (“Throwin’ chairs and they didn’t care who they was hittin’”).
This album is eclectic, complicated, and compulsively relistenable. Their parody of house music in “Kicked Out the House” is both hilarious and yet so musically compelling, it kind of makes you wish they dabbled a little more in “hip house.”
“Millie Pulled a Pistol on Santa” is a downbeat track with an infectious groove. It’s also about child sexual abuse, where the two narrators don’t believe the victim.
I’ve heard it hundreds of times and can never not be awed by its shocking, wrenching, and masterful story telling.
Macy's department store, the scene for Santa's kisses
And all the little brats demandin' all of their wishes
Time passes by as I wait for my younger brother
He asks his wish, I waste no time to return him back to Mother
As I'm jettin', Millie floats in like a zombie
I ask her what's her problem, all she says is "Where is he?"
I give a point, she pulls a pistol, people screamin'
She shouts to Dill, “He's off to hell cuz he's a demon!”
None of the kids could understand what was the cause
All they could see was a girl holdin' a pistol on Claus
Dillon pleaded mercy, said he didn't mean to
Do all the things that her mind could do nothing but cling to
Millie bucked him and with the quickness it was over
Buhloone Mindstate (1993)
A huge leap forward. Darker and more lyrically mature. Anxieties about where they stood in the record industry. Also, with “Ego Trippin’” they had a catchy single and video that 2Pac believed was parodying him (De La swears they weren’t).
It also has a distinctly jazzier sound—much like their Native Tongues brethren A Tribe Called Quest were doing on Midnight Marauders, which came out that same year, and IMHO is the greatest hiphop album of all time.
Buhloone Mindstate (“It might blow up, but it won’t go pop”) came out when I was in high school, but as a middle-aged adult I’m struck by how much of it deals with the disappointment of young adulthood, particularly the inevitable fraying of once dear friendships.
“Their Native Tongues collective—an amorphous, ever-growing posse comprised of A Tribe Called Quest, the Jungle Brothers, and basically every other rapper to ever rock a leather medallion at the dawn of the ’90s—was falling apart in the way adolescent social circles typically dissolve with time,” wrote Andrew Nosnitsky for Pitchfork.
Posdnuos seemed to confirm that on the track, “I Am I Be.”
Or some tongues who lied
And said "We'll be natives to the end"
Nowadays we don't even speak
I guess we got our own life to live
Or is it because we want our own kingdom to rule?
Every now and then I step to the now
For now I see back then I might have acted like a fool
Sadly, Dave hated this record, as he told AllHipHop.com in 2005:
I didn’t like the album because I think we were just a little too creative. And to me, you should never use the phrase ‘too creative’. But I think we took it a little too far. You know I think there was a big influence on us at the time from groups we were hanging out with. Like Tribe and so many others on the Jazz tip. I just felt it went a little to the left or who we were as people and what we were accustomed to at the time.
But Chris Rock cited Buhloone as his favorite De La record, and noted this line from “In the Woods” as a personal mantra:
Catch me breathin' on planes where the gangsta's outdated
Fuck being hard, Posdnuos is complicated
Stakes Is High (1996)
Buhloone Mindstate was brilliant, but a commercial bomb. And thus, the stakes were high for their next record to make more of a mark.
“That record was a milestone, that record was do or die… I mean the whole energy around developing that record, it was a crucial place of not knowing if we was going to continue or we going to be forced to go get regular jobs and become common folk… because we came off of Buhloone Mindstate which didn’t have much success at all,” Maseo told Okayplayer.
“This was a time when rappers were really clinging to the media and this idea of this gangster shit — this whole Mafioso thing that was happening at the time. It was like … It was heartbreaking because we’re talking about Italian mobs who don’t like Black people and we’ve got rappers adopting this Mafioso ideology.”
I'm sick of bitches shakin' asses
I'm sick of talkin' 'bout blunts, sick of Versace glasses
Sick of slang, sick of half-ass awards shows
Sick of name-brand clothes
Sick of R&B bitches over bullshit tracks
Cocaine and crack, which brings sickness to blacks
Sick of swoll'-head rappers with they sickenin' raps
Clappers of gats, makin' the whole sick world collapse
The facts are gettin' sicker, even sicker, perhaps (Sicker, perhaps)
I Stickabush to make a bundle to escape this synapse
After Stakes Is High, the group reunited with Prince Paul (their mentor and producer of the first three records) for a one-off track on Prince Among Thieves. It’s not on Spotify, but it’s a lot of fun.
Art Official Intelligence: Mosaic Thump (2000)
A long layoff after Stakes Is High brought the first of what was supposed to be a trilogy called Art Official Intelligence. For reasons still not fully explained, the third record never came out.
This one’s a mixed bag, though I love the “Ghost Weed” skits—where a person in a blunt rotation smokes a certain kind of weed that makes them sound like Phife Dawg or Pharoahe Monch when they rhyme (a clever way of sliding cameos onto the record).
My personal highlight is “The Art of Getting Jumped,” which features a really bizarre Brazilian tropicalia sample as its main bed.
It's schematically plotted out to break hearts and bodies
And ya best believe we came to party
Don't cause trouble but still can find double the crew
Against you and your peeps and leap-like-frogs on ya
For reasons, like, not in the right part of town
Actin like you wore a crown
Some occasions long and mean to earn the right
To throw signs wearin' only one color scheme
And bein' positive is no exclusion
That's an illusion, you can still catch contusions
Art Official Intelligence: Bionix (2001)
The last of the original six. It came out shortly after 9/11, and though it’s highly unlikely that day of infamy is directly referenced, a line in “Held Down” always struck me as oddly prescient (and devastating).
The biggest supressor could be your own ego lookin for an excuse
To plant roots, in a field of self-sorrow
To sprout and follow the first thing you feel
Nourishes your hunger to be respected, it gets hectic
And when I'm watchin the news, and my daughter walks in
And choose to ask, "Why were all those people on the floor
Sleepin, covered in red?" I told her
That they were lookin for God, but found religion instead
And the album’s kicker, “Trying People,” has this heartbreaker of a verse from Dave, which feels all the more powerful now that he’s left us:
Am I just another lost in the pack?
We Horshack shit, you know, laugh it off
Years just blow by
My eyes stay fixed, but the picture's kind of out of focus
I cry a lot, but admit to it
Enjoyin' life now, but I've been through it
Sometimes I wish that I can go back
No bills, no kids, just gettin' tore back
I want a wife, I love women
How could I front like I don't be in love with 'em?
A lil' man that I can teach
A lil' sand, but not the beach
I figure excess'll only bring an excessive amount of fuss
So when I'm gone, make sure the head stone reads, "He did it for us"
It only seems right to end with the chorus from the final track on De La Soul’s final album, 2016’s …and the Anonymous Nobody.
It's the years that we own and we earned them
See the bridges we built now are burned down
Even though a few friends just returned them
Shit and shit there we affirm them
But the pattern has always been righteous
We know darkness
So we wipe dust
From our eyes, no surprise when the broom come
We do night like the honor, the moon, sun
People think we are linked to the solving
Of the problem that's revolvin'
Around music today but it's not true
We just do it our way cause we're not you
But we know you
We embrace you like brothers, bestow you
With an outro that's also an intro
For the east, and the west, and the central
“We know darkness / So we wipe dust / From our eyes, no surprise when the broom come.”
I’m overcome with emotion when I hear this line. The guys in De La have roughly a decade on me in age, but I’m still well into the stage of life where mortality and meaning are frequently close to the front of my mind.
This is the beauty of great art, particularly music. It’s a love language. It’s interpretative, it’s universal, yet somehow personal.
If you’re of the generation that’s only getting the chance to know De La Soul now, I hope you’ll listen. Buy the records with actual cash money if you can. Tell anyone who doesn’t already know what they’re missing.
De La Soul is good news from a time of musical revolution that’s both long gone and could be resurrected. Spread the love.