De La Soul

Bio

There is a list of hip-hop albums that, if you have never heard, you should hear before you hear anything else. 3 Feet High and Rising, De La Soul's debut, came out in March 1989 on Tommy Boy Records. It is on that list.

The trio is Posdnuos (Kelvin Mercer), Trugoy the Dove (David Jolicoeur, later just Dave, died 2023), and Maseo (Vincent Mason). All three met at Amityville Memorial High School on Long Island. Their demo got to Prince Paul, the Stetsasonic producer, who agreed to work with them. The album they made together does not sound like other rap albums from 1989. It samples Steely Dan. It samples Hall and Oates. It samples the Turtles. It has skits that are jokes. It has skits that are not jokes. It has a song that is essentially a fake game show. It has rapping about how their parents are weird. It has rapping about how being weird is fine.

This was the launch of the Daisy Age, a De La term for a kind of post-gangsta, peace-positive, eclectic-sampling, dressed-in-pastels hip-hop sensibility. The Native Tongues collective (De La, Tribe, the Jungle Brothers, Queen Latifah, Black Sheep, Monie Love) formed around the same time. De La was the first to put out an album, and the first to have it explode.

Then the lawsuit. The Turtles sued De La in 1991 for sampling "You Showed Me" on "Transmitting Live from Mars" without a license. The Turtles sought $2.5 million. The case settled. The settlement, more than any other event, established the sampling-clearance regime that every hip-hop album since has had to navigate. After Turtles v. De La, you cleared your samples or you got sued.

The De La records that followed are a study in keeping a career going through a culture that decided to move on. De La Soul Is Dead (1991). Buhloone Mindstate (1993). Stakes Is High (1996). All of them have arguments for being the best in the catalog. None of them sold like 3 Feet High and Rising. All of them are great.

The real coda is the streaming-rights thing. For decades, De La's back catalog could not go on Spotify or Apple Music because of sample-clearance complexity and Tommy Boy ownership issues. The catalog finally went up in March 2023. Three weeks before, Dave died. He never got to see the streaming era catch up to him. The catalog is up now. He should still be here. He is not. Pos and Maseo carry it.