De La Soul

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Essential Albums

  • Stakes Is High
    Stakes Is High

    On their fourth album, Stakes Is High, De La Soul provide the missing link between their unconventional attitude toward ’80s hip-hop and the upcoming revolution in ’90s “indie rap”—the idiosyncratic rappers like Black Star and Company Flow that took their ball and ran with it. It marked a moment where they could have just as easily fallen off—stakes were indeed high, and they subsequently moved away from Prince Paul’s screwball energy toward self-produced boom-bap and classically technical lyricism and punch lines. “I think when Paul was leaving, it was a little scary,” Trugoy the Dove told Apple Music in 2018. “The approach, being on our own, it was scary. It was the first time we invited that many outside producers into our space.” Yearning for the days when MCs were MCs, the album is rooted in the trio’s deserved mythology as rap veterans and an undying devotion to the genre’s tenets. Raps Posdnuos, “While you others represent, I present my rep.” Naturally, its incisive bars about bars would be sampled by a phalanx of artists (Beastie Boys, Gang Starr, Jeru the Damaja, Quasimoto, Deltron 3030) and provided many through lines to the independent rap of the late ’90s: one of the first recorded appearances of Mos Def (“Big Brother Beat”), a guest appearance from Common (“The Bizness”), and a beat (“Stakes Is High”) from a little-known producer who would ultimately call himself J Dilla and change the world with his loping, human production.

  • Buhloone Mindstate
    Buhloone Mindstate

    De La Soul’s third album, 1993’s Buhloone Mindstate, is a totem of hip-hop self-expression, the oft-quoted line from “In the Woods”—“Fuck being hard, Posdnuos is complicated”—serving as something between poetic exhale and mission statement. Enjoying a sunrise after the darkness of De La Soul Is Dead, the trio (on their final album with Prince Paul behind the decks) revels in the freedoms of jazz music (Maceo Parker, Fred Wesley, and Pee Wee Ellis all provide support) and a border-free worldview. (“Long Island Wildin’” features rappers Scha Dara Parr and Takagi Kan, who rap in their native Japanese.) In the year of gangsta rap’s pop triumph, De La maintain a speed limit on the road less traveled, staying true to themselves in an age of sellouts (“It might blow up, but it won’t go pop”) and crime-infatuated consumers (“I be the in ’cause the brother holdin’ Glocks is out/I be the in ’cause the pusher runnin’ blocks is out”). “I Am I Be” is a landmark moment of diaristic rap writing, where Posdnuos talks about label woes, rent troubles, racist America, and the dissolution of the Native Tongues crew in one powerful, metaphor-filled verse.

  • De La Soul Is Dead
    De La Soul Is Dead

    On their second album, 1991’s De La Soul Is Dead, the trio returned as jaded, wizened cranks: They were fed up with the Day-Glo hippie imagery surrounding their debut and the grind that came with its success but, mercifully, kept their senses of humor intact. “We weren’t killing the brand, but killing the potential fad that could turn around and kill us if we didn’t kill it first,” Trugoy the Dove told Apple Music in 2018. “What we struggled with in hip-hop at that time, everybody was concerned about being called a sellout and being careful about how you’re being presented and the manipulation of what labels are doing to help sell this thing.” With co-producer Prince Paul still in tow, they retained an idiosyncratic sample arsenal, this time flipping the clacking percussion of ’50s jazzer Brother Bones, the dreamy soft rock of Chicago, the smoky bass of Tom Waits records, and the breezy listening of Serge Gainsbourg and Herb Alpert. The schizophrenic feel of their debut gave birth to a restless fever dream complete with everything from vivid portraits of life after fame (“Ring Ring Ring [Ha Ha Hey]”) to inscrutable interstitials (“Johnny’s Dead Aka Vincent Mason”), from giddy pop ecstasy (“A Roller Skating Jam Named ‘Saturdays’”) to a Genesis song flipped into a satirical metal blast (“Who Do U Worship?”). De La Soul Is Dead had room for “Millie Pulled a Pistol on Santa,” a child-abuse tale that’s one of the most searing reality raps of all time, as well as “Bitties in the BK Lounge,” a kazoo-filled rap battle set at the burger joint. This tangle of screams, skits, beat suites, sardonic hip-house, and offbeat raps came with a litany of complaints—the requests of their record label, people who would try to fight them on tour, Arsenio Hall, Soul Train’s anti-rap bias, the industry’s move to R&B (“You mean rhythm & blues? No, rap and bullshit!”), and whoever stole Maseo’s Pathfinder. The psychedelic softies of 3 Feet High and Rising evolve into emotive truth-tellers. The album is not just an image-killer, but proof that there were no boundaries to their style, the first of the tireless crew’s many creative reboots.

  • 3 Feet High and Rising
    3 Feet High and Rising

    “We was just three spaced kids who felt like we was doing something special,” Trugoy the Dove (Dave Jolicoeur), one-third of pioneering Long Island rap trio De La Soul, told Apple Music in 2018. “It felt good to stand out, but we were immersed in what hip-hop was at that time—the culture, the music, everything.” The fact that Trugoy passed away in February 2023, mere weeks before De La Soul’s catalog finally became available on streaming, dampened what should have been a celebration decades in the making. Transmitting live from Mars—or, more specifically, the Long Island suburbs—De La Soul emerged fully formed and casually bugged-out in 1988 with “Plug Tunin’,” a 12-inch of “naughty noise” that mixed off-the-wall wordplay (“Answering any other service/Prerogative praised positively I’m acquitted”) with a kitschy arsenal of the most off-kilter samples hip-hop has ever seen. On their subsequent debut album, 1989’s 3 Feet High and Rising, the group—Trugoy, Posdnuos (Kelvin Mercer), and DJ P.A. Pasemaster Mase (Vincent Mason)—and deliriously twisted producer Prince Paul laid out a 63-minute blueprint for rap’s odd future, a playful, quirky masterwork that popped the balloon of hip-hop formalism. They were outcasts before Outkast, the roots of The Roots, the big brothers to Little Brother. De La were alternative-nation thought-leaders doing for hip-hop what contemporary weirdos like Jane’s Addiction, Sonic Youth, and the Pixies were doing for rock. What started as a trio of rap misfits making leftfield funk ultimately evolved into the most consistently great catalog in New York hip-hop history. Afrika Bambaataa famously combed the corners of Planet Rock looking for the perfect beat, but De La’s genre-agnostic outlook to crate-digging imbued hip-hop with alien moods and new textures. Their tools weren’t just blips of James Brown and Funkadelic (though the latter’s rubbery melody would drive “Me Myself and I,” the band’s lone moment in the Top 40). De La Soul and Prince Paul’s playground included Schoolhouse Rock!, Steely Dan, learn-to-speak-French records, the Parliament song with the yodeling, Eddie Murphy, Johnny Cash, a Liberace cassette they found in the studio, loads of ’60s soul, and psychedelia-adjacent rock groups like The Turtles. (The latter group sued the trio that year, the first major sampling lawsuit, a historic moment for a historic album. The necessary work to clear all the samples from a career of creative copyright infringement helped keep the bulk of De La Soul’s catalog off streaming services for years.) “Everything we did on 3 Feet High and Rising was based off ideas we had been putting together since we were 15, 16,” said Posdnuos. Lighthearted skits and interludes filled the album with wacky accents, inside jokes (“What does, ‘Tuhs eht lleh pu’ mean?”), and whispered silliness. “Stand by Me” is looped for a 56-second song about body odor. Loopy slang words (either invented or inherited from fellow members of the Native Tongues crew) create an insular universe where sex songs are about “buddy” and “jenny,” something good is “strictly Dan Stuckie,” and your MCs for the evening are “Plug One” and “Plug Two.” Their freewheeling poetry—what they called a “Change in Speak”—broke sentences apart into expressionist clouds that ranged from pure poetry to inspired nonsense: “When that negative number fills up the cavity/Maybe you can subtract it/You can call it your lucky partner/Maybe you can call it your adjective.” Proudly eccentric and preaching their message of self-expression while dressed in African medallions instead of fat gold ropes, they became the bohemian model for years of alternative-minded rappers. “We was trying to take it to the next place, letting people know there’s individuality here,” Trugoy said. “Not all of us have to wear Adidas; you could wear Le Coq Sportif. There’s so many other things we could do.” You can hear, and see, their influence in the spiritual verses of Arrested Development and P.M. Dawn, underground lyricists like Common and Mos Def, and even pop polyglots like Gorillaz, Black Eyed Peas, and Beck.

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About De La Soul

When Long Island hip-hop trio De La Soul arrived in 1989 with their debut album, 3 Feet High and Rising, they sounded like nothing else. Their patchwork production and clever, goofy humor made De La Soul an inventive and gentle presence in a rap landscape largely defined by aggression. Their output throughout the '90s was formative for hip-hop on the whole, with works like 1991's De La Soul Is Dead and 1996's Stakes Is High providing inspiration that entire generations of other artists would build on. After 2004's The Grind Date, De La Soul went on hiatus, but returned in 2016 with the crowd-funded And the Anonymous Nobody. In 2023, after years of legal battles over rights and ownership, De La Soul finally regained access to their back catalog and made plans to finally get some of their classic albums released on streaming services for the first time.

ORIGIN
Amityville, NY, United States
FORMED
1987
GENRE
Hip-Hop/Rap

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