A De La Soul Starter Kit

Assignments are always welcome as a writer who makes a tenuous living off ideas that can be hard, if not impossible, to get editors on board with, but there is a particular cruelty in the suggestion that, on the cusp of the release of their ninth album Cabin In The Sky, I compile a seven- to ten-song De La Soul playlist. 

De La Soul is a group that has lived many contradictory lives, from iconoclastic upstarts who literally changed rap, to mean-mugging dogmatic scolds, to venerated GOATs. The Amityville trio of Posdnuos, Trugoy the Dove and Maseo flipped styles, tones and roles several times an album, so how can any good faith translator claim to represent them with a fraction of their output?

My difficult solution is to attempt to encapsulate whole movements in their nearly four-decade-long career with songs that aren’t the group’s “best” (the big singles or personal favorite album cuts, necessarily), but tracks that may give you a sense of what a De La Soul song sounds like, or a noteworthy collaboration that defines their work.

But nothing defines De La Soul, so stick a toe in with a few of these essentials and then go listen to the entire discography front to back, over and over again.

“This Is a Recording 4 Living In a Fulltime Era (L.I.F.E.),” 3 Feet High and Rising (1989) — To me, this is the source code for this album. When you get past the prose and break down what they’re actually saying, Pos and Dove are basically just explaining what the life of a young rapper is like and what it means to them. This is the epitome of the early De La lyrical project, a mechanical beat, poet-like abuse of language that deconstructs words and ideas, forcing the listener into the role of detective and in putting them back together and considering their context, forcing us to think about each action and each idea, lending simple behaviors, gestures, and feelings perspective and profundity. 

“Say No Go,” 3 Feet High and Rising (1989) - One of the many ways Prince Paul innovated as the mad scientist behind De La is in their eclectic sample sources. But “Say No Go” also serves as an example of De La’s talent for politically conscious songs. It sounds like a cookout jam, and for many over the decades it has been, but the song is a fairly harrowing depiction of drug use in Pos and Dave’s community. It is trademark De La here — a sunny production that masks the dark, masterfully composed nature. 

“Buddy (Native Tongues Decision),” 3 Feet High and Rising (1989) — For one of the most influential crews of their era, we didn’t get nearly enough of these whole crew links from the Native Tongues collective (The Jungle Brothers, Queen Latifah, A Tribe Called Quest, Black Sheep and Chi-Ali). It’s because they were more a loose assemblage of friends than a proper outfit, New York and New Jersey kids who would randomly pop up on each other’s album sessions and every once in a while, those hours of unstructured hangouts resulted in classic collaborations. This is one of the few times they all had it together enough to consecrate this to wax, an exemplar of the posse cut remix.

“Bitties In The BK Lounge,” De La Soul Is Dead (1991) - Comedy was obviously a huge component of De La’s early success, and they brought this experience to the rap album, blurring the line between music and musical comedy throughout DLSID takedowns. “Bitties In The BK Lounge” is really three vignettes in one, with each member setting up their own scenario, accompanied by its own beat, airing frustrations they’d encountered both before and in the midst of their fame with the opposite sex. They are gifted and generous insult comedians; their scene partners score plenty, even if Dove, Pos and Mase ultimately get the upper hand.

“I Am I Be,” Buhloone Mindstate (1993) - Pos and Dove were always jazz vocalists. De La found something in the voice as an instrument, injecting melody and using words as shapes to bend around samples early in the development of rap’s modern era that straddled both genres expertly and struck a balance between the two mediums that has still never been matched. “I Am I Be” is the conceptual implementation of the album in a single song that picks up its refrain from an instrumental jam earlier in the album, Maceo Parker’s gorgeous “I Be Blowin” (probably my “favorite” song on a perfect album). You can hear the chaotic chatter of the Native Tongues as a backdrop to Pos and Dove kicking some of their most sublime, whorling slam poetry about the journey towards self definition, a complete synthesis of the lyrics meeting the smooth chaos of the production and recreating a Greenwich Village baskethouse, or a cafeteria on Long Island’s southern shore in the '80s.

“Dog Eat Dog,” Stakes is High (1996) — This is not a Greatest Hits compilation, it’s a Starter Kit, and if you want to understand De La’s narrative it’s important to understand the turn they made in 1996 with Stakes Is High, which sonically is a near-perfect representation of backpack rap in the mid-'90s. “Dog Eat Dog” is representative of the album’s end-to-end sourness. It contains a not too subtle dig at Tommy Boy, who they’d war with throughout their first decade in the industry, then defined the next 20-plus years of acrimony as one of rap’s greatest catalogues was left largely out of the streaming generation’s hands.

“More Than U Know,” Prince Paul’s A Prince Among Thieves (1999) — Sometimes I think about what might’ve been if De La and Paul never split, and I have a feeling it would sound something like A Prince Among Thieves, Paul’s tragicomic rap opera that is among the greatest concept albums ever made. De La makes only one appearance but it’s an instant return to form, like old friends who don’t talk for 6 years then pick up where they left off without missing a beat. Pos and Dave play addicts who use slang and metaphor to try and score/relate some pain and life on the song, and the wordplay is the standard blend of clever and hilarious, as was always the case whenever Paul and De La collabed.

“All Good?,” Art Official Intelligence: Mosaic Thump (2000) - This second movement of De La’s career would be characterized by an all-star roster of features, with mixed results. Yet “All Good?” is why these albums are still worth your time. It’s a soulful, vulnerable, self-effacing concept song, with a dash of Stakes Is High bitterness, as the group grapples with losing their superstar clout and how, as a result, the phony friends around them let them down. It’s a level of introspective honesty and clarity, an acknowledgement of the passage of time and the gravity of life and the heartbreak of a long creative career with ups and downs.