I’ve been reading and listening to a lot of De La Soul recently, which means I’ve been thinking a lot about the creative process. Since 1987’s “Plug Tunin,” and I’d guess even longer before that, for Kevin Mercer, Vincent Mason and Dave Jolicoeur, it's been automated, instinctual work. They inhale air like the rest of us, then exhale art. It is impossible to understand how their body of work came to be, and equally impossible to imagine where rap would be if they hadn’t made their immense contribution. They were anathema to the commercial explosion of rap that they lived through, yet hard to see that explosion happening without them emerging just before the art form went pop. Some artist(s) had to introduce the style and ideas De La injected into the medium. We are all fortunate to live in the timeline where we got the best, brightest, strangest version of that messenger.
The narrative arc of De La Soul is just a series of left turns, each album a reaction and movement away from the last, a series of contradictions, which extended to their identity as individuals and a collective. They were blue-collar guys from Long Island who thought like conceptual artists and treated language like postmodern, deconstructionist poets, jazz-loving Dadaist hippies who would squabble up if you overstepped. Humble dudes who were just happy to be there, getting paid for their art, but also sneering, disdainful of their peers making inferior music, who lacked their courage, vision and talent, which was everyone. They were gentle humanists and New York gobshites. It’s little wonder that a paradigm-shifting rap magazine dedicated to a blend of wholehearted love of culture and ball-knowing insult humor was named after a De La song (perhaps quoting Ultramagnetic MCs, perhaps quoting Nikki Giovanni, or just quoting themselves).
You can ding them for the exact thing that makes their work so unique and powerful in my mind. To keep it a buck, they were kids from Long Island when they got on. Dave once said he drew his inspiration from life, but what life experience can possibly inspire a 19-year-old from the suburbs to produce 3 Feet High and Rising? The answer is largely that the song is in the singing. Dove and Pos could make working at Burger King engrossing and did it by warping language, with rap as layered as their impossibly dense production, injecting melody into their flow without sacrificing the pocket in a style that was as indebted to William Carlos Williams as it was The Last Poets or Gil Scott. The lawn is the rhymes, the potholes are the lyrics being bitten. It’s just yogurt spelled backwards, because I like yogurt, obviously.
But then also, crucially, there was so much in the Seinfeldian “nothing” (/everything) they contributed. The bored, Black, eclectic dorks, an LIRR ride away from the purported melodrama of the inner city, othered before anything else by the place they emerged from, who didn’t care their sense of fashion was out of step, odd and dictated solely by what was cool to them, because the social order wasn’t as militantly enforced in their enclave. The curious teens were exposed, and didn’t know they weren’t supposed to mess with weird records from blue-eyed soul to Schoolhouse Rock to the Turtles (who they perhaps should’ve left alone), as well as skateboards and exotic drugs (or white artists who were into them). They brought all this into hip-hop’s fold when it needed that perspective to rescue it from descending into exclusively dire exploitation cinema and urgent political diatribe. We needed funny weirdos, crying clowns who didn’t get much closer to the intensity of Criminal Minded than a view from a park bench, or a bedroom window, or the wayward sibling found in every family. They shared wholly unique perspectives and experiences a greater swath of America could relate to, which opened up the world of rap for the Tongues that would follow behind them (along with, to give credit where it's due, the Jungle Brothers).
Greg Tate once said rap can’t be “alternative,” that there can be no alternative to music that had been forcefully dug out of a cash register, to a people’s history of art. In his brilliant book, High and Rising, Marcus J. Moore pushes back because of course there is, and his life as a smart Black kid from Maryland, existing largely outside rap’s narrative at the time, toeing the line between “down” and “nerd”, was indelibly shaped and inspired by the emergence of De La and their introduction of another style of young Black masculinity, as it was for many others. De La once hated performing the song Tommy Boy asked them to tack onto their first album because the powers that be felt they needed a conventional radio hit, but there’s a reason their lead single was about being an iconoclast and making your own rules, the personal freedom and courage to stand apart, the knowledge and acceptance of the self.
Starting with their second project, De La established themselves as a group that would summarily reject any form of stagnancy, or music that came easily to them. They would rather quit than repeat themselves and staked their careers on that principle several times. It was the opposite of trend-chasing rebrands but instead was an organic maturation, pulling off a succession of high-wire act sonic transformations that challenged the listener at every turn. De La Soul Is Dead is a 74-minute rebuke of the notion that these guys were fucking hippies. There is very little, if any, free love at all in this album about the pressures and aggravations of fame. Like great artists before them and great artists who came after, they loathed being defined as any one thing by anyone, so they went electric, or in this case, from front to back, even in some of that album’s most sonically gorgeous work like “Keepin’ The Faith”, it’s profoundly cynical and acerbic. The Source understood what was so special, so brave in that creative impulse and awarded the group a perfect rating. Few others understood, including critics and their public.
But you can view DLSID as a purely reactive work. It takes on much of the same structure, made in the same style as 3 Feet High and Rising, and flips both its tone and messaging. I would argue Buhloone Mindstate is their best album, and one of the most original “great” albums in any genre of music made in the past half-century, because it throws everything out. A pervading theme in De La’s career would be stressing originality and using their lyrics as critiques of other artists. In this case, though in a few songs the lyrics contain the same clutch of material critiques, what makes the album stand apart is the music. They are displaying for the rappers, who they constantly take to task, what pure unbridled dedication to their own vision looks like. Emphatically, that they would rather “blow up” than “go pop.” So it’s not just sampling jazz loops, but fusing jazz and rap in a way that had never been attempted before, ceding precious album time to Maceo Parker and Fred Wesley for a gorgeous instrumental jam, and space to Japanese artists Scha Dara Parr and Takagi Kan that entranced the group when they found them on tour in Tokyo by spitting in a language they couldn’t understand with an energy they did.
It is criminal we have come this far without mentioning Paul Edward Huston. Prince Paul went from the kid in the room with his first group Stetsasonic, to the adult trying to foster a true creative democracy in the studio. He is always deferential when discussing De La and his hand in making their classics these days, always “we,” never “I,” quick to accredit those who brought what record or concept into the session. But, from his own account, he might not have been as successful in fostering that egalitarian spirit as he wanted to, which may have contributed to their eventual dissolution.
In his series of sit-down conversations with Open Mike Eagle, as the inaugural guest on Mike’s podcast What Had Happened Was, Paul describes his participation in the projects as exponential decay, beginning as the band conductor behind the boards in 1987 and ending as more of a consultant and engineer than producer by 1993. When sessions began for the album that would be Stakes Is High, Paul came with the same style of spaced-out, goofy conceptual ideas to overstuff the album with, the increasingly bitter and disillusioned group had moved firmly into a different headspace, and eventually, the old friends and collaborators would part ways.
Throughout their early career, De La Soul made their art for the “right” reasons, entirely divorced from external pressures. It was the music they were into that they wanted to make, rather than what they thought had strong commercial prospects or served any purpose other than scratching their creative itch. Perhaps for this reason, and their own suburban backgrounds, they were always sensible about money and their careers, waiting for the other shoe to drop and their fame to wane. They anticipated music made with such personal intent and appeal couldn’t last. They were both right and wrong. We still are thinking about, discussing and debating, and regularly spinning De La records today, while some of their more conventionally successful contemporaries have been forgotten. But making music for yourself is not typically the most direct route to mainstream appeal and a particularly lucrative career, as they soon learned.
This may be why one of the great pet subjects of the second half of their career, that impossibly begins to be gestured at as far back as Buhloone Mindstate, is the fickle nature of fame and recognition, and what it feels like for an individual to perceive themselves gradually losing their position at the center of culture, moving in gravitational loops to the distant periphery. Starting with Stakes Is High, Pos and Dove’s flows would simplify, their language and message becoming more direct and accessible, and what begins to shine through is their humanity, struggles, and anxieties for both the game they love and themselves as they fear they are slipping from memory. This was partially a byproduct of the simple passage of time and the trends and styles that change with them, and partially the label drama that defined this century for the group.
There is some poetic logic to the tragedy that befell De La Soul for two decades, the unwitting hippies of rap who never got along with the machinery of the rap business being embroiled in its most egregious, long lasting predatory label beef. The group saw the direction hip-hop culture was headed in and the great potential of the digital era in music, yet they were bound and gagged by red tape and powerless to capitalize on prophecy as they watched it come to pass. It can’t be understated how big of an impact their inability to land on streaming may have cost them. I can’t imagine how it must feel to be De La Soul and think about the time and opportunities lost that could have come from a new generation being exposed to their classics a few years sooner. It obviously would have meant everything to Dave.
Outside of the material concerns of the group members and the livelihoods they were deprived of over the years, I can’t help but feel, from an old fan’s perspective, how almost appropriate how long we had to wait to finally access them on our phones. It was one last zag in a career full of them. De La were always destined to be cult figures, always a porchlight that resonated with the curious nerds throughout rap history who were into the homework, who relished seeking out every sample and lived for the discovery of digging, the effort you had to exert to simply figure out what Dove and Pos were trying to say. They produced a body of work that actively resists skimming. It’s why I’d argue even if their lag making it into this era of music consumption was the product of a grave injustice, it still fits their narrative.
On the Stakes Is High solo Posdnuos standout “Wonce Again Long Island” he says, “I made brown girls' eyes blue, until my ass was no longer mass appeal.” The song found him worrying about his crew’s relevance and popularity on an album that would prove to be relevant and popular at what was a fraught moment in rap history. Only now, De La Soul is “popular” again, literally, with the impending release of Cabin in the Sky….. on Mass Appeal Records. The album name is pure De La, derived from a 1943 Vincent Minelli musical featuring Lena Horne, Louis Armstrong and Mantan Moreland about a Black man who is shot in a dice game, fighting for his immortal soul while Lucifer works actively to drag him down into Hell to spend eternity with him. At the time of writing this, I haven’t heard the album yet, but allegedly Prince Paul is back behind the boards, and recently De La hosted a listening party that was mobbed. Cabin In The Sky, releasing nearly 40 years after 3 Feet High and Rising, featuring verses from Dave, is one of the most anticipated albums left on the slate this calendar year.
In spite of their well-documented fears and anxieties, De La Soul’s history has shown that their fervent support has never wavered. In 2016, they turned to the internet to crowdfund an album that became The Anonymous Nobody, raising $110,000 on Kickstarter in mere hours and $600,874 in a month from 11,169 backers. When their full catalog finally hit streaming in March of 2023, they racked up 12.5 million streams the first month. This is an inexact science because obviously they’ve had music available to stream for far longer than just the albums with Tommy Boy (including over 2 billion streams alone for “Feel Good Inc”) but De La currently sits at 3 billion total streams as a group with nearly 25 million monthly listeners on Spotify alone.
That their cultural footprint persists with all the mess they’ve gone through is a testament to the lasting brilliance of the work. They never blew up. They never went pop. They never had to. Eternal love to Plug 2 and Trugoy the Dove, and R.I.P. the great Dave Jolicoeur.
