Trugoy the Dove

Bio

David Jude Jolicoeur went by Trugoy the Dove for the first thirty years of his career and just Dave for the last fifteen. The story behind both names is the same story, told different ways. Trugoy is "yogurt" backwards. He loved yogurt as a kid. "Yogurt the Dove" sounded ridiculous, so "Trugoy" it was. By the early 2010s he had grown out of the in-joke and asked everyone to use his actual name. So: Dave.

He was born in Brooklyn in 1968 and raised in Amityville, Long Island. He, Kelvin Mercer (Posdnuos), and Vincent Mason (Maseo) formed De La Soul in high school. Prince Paul produced their demo. They got signed. 3 Feet High and Rising came out in 1989. Dave is the second voice on most De La songs. He is the verbose-funny one. He is the one most likely to land the punchline. He has the most range, vocally, of the three.

The arc of his post-3-Feet career is the arc of all the post-3-Feet careers. They kept making good records. The records kept getting less attention than they deserved. Dave's verses on "Eye Know," "Tread Water," "Stakes Is High," and "Itzsoweezee (HOT)" are the record of an MC who could do basically any register the song needed. He could be silly. He could be serious. He could be sad. He had a great rasp and an unimpeachable sense of timing.

In the 2000s he became a Jehovah's Witness, which is the religious shift that prompted the name change away from Trugoy. He kept rapping. He kept doing De La shows. Then, in the 2010s, his health started to decline. He developed congestive heart failure. He was open about it. He kept performing through it.

On February 12, 2023, Dave died. He was 54. He had spent the last several years of his career fighting to get De La's back catalog onto streaming services, after decades of sample-clearance disputes had kept it off. The catalog finally went up in March 2023, three weeks after Dave died. He did not get to see the streaming numbers.

If you want to know what Dave sounded like at his best, listen to "Stakes Is High," the title track from De La's 1996 album, where he and Pos take turns being the most clear-eyed voices on a record about how dumb the late-1990s rap industry had become. Dave's verse is the one most people quote. It still works.