De La Soul enlarged ‘cultural tent’ of hip-hop
Delayed by record industry disputes, trio’s timeless innovations debut digitally at last
Before De La Soul, says Hank Shocklee, “‘beautiful’ and ‘rap’ weren’t two words that went together.”
Shocklee would know: As a founding member of Public Enemy’s production team, the Bomb Squad, he’s as responsible as anyone for shaping the blaring, dissonant, pugnacious sound of hip-hop in the mid- to late 1980s, when the music “was almost like a football game — just smacking you upside the head,” as the producer puts it.
Yet less than a year after Public Enemy released the pummeling “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” — and N.W.A. dropped the furious “Straight Outta Compton” — the three middle-class misfits of Long Island’s De La Soul dropped 1989’s “3 Feet High and Rising,” a lush and whimsical debut that “wasn’t abrasive or agitated or in your face,” Shocklee says. Intricately assembled by De La Soul and their producer, Prince Paul, from dozens of samples of far-flung tracks by the likes of Steely Dan, Liberace and Hall & Oates, the LP showcased a more playful and melodic idea of hip-hop, with the rappers musing on identity and friendship and lust in a coded language over welcoming, lightly psychedelic grooves riddled with hooks.
“It gave rap a different sonic texture — a mushrooms-and-daisies kind of vibration,” Shocklee says of “3 Feet High and Rising.” “Rap at that time was all about confrontation, and it was pretty much all yelling. You wanted your voice to be heard, so you were shouting it out. But these guys had a different take. It was very, very laidback. And, man, it was just beautiful.”
The album was an instant success with listeners and tastemakers, topping the Village Voice’s annual Pazz & Jop critics poll and spawning a No. 1 hit on Billboard’s R&B chart with the ebullient “Me Myself and I,” which went on to earn a Grammy nomination for rap performance. (Young MC’s “Bust a Move” ended up winning over both “Me Myself and I” and Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power.”) Longer-term, the innovations of De La Soul — Kelvin “Posdnuos” Mercer, David “Trugoy the Dove” Jolicoeur and Vincent “Maseo” Mason — “enlarged the cultural tent of what hip-hop could be and who saw themselves in it,” says author and professor Dan Charnas, making room for future risk-takers like Outkast, Kanye West, Lil Yachty and Tyler, the Creator.
“If you wanna talk about hip-hop and its 50th anniversary” — as many are this year, half a century after DJ Kool Herc rocked a back-to-school party in the Bronx in 1973 — “one of the reasons that hip-hop could grow and mature as much as it did,” Charnas adds, “is De La’s aesthetic and musical expansionism.”
For all its influence, the group’s music has been frustratingly hard to hear in recent years, the unhappy result of a series of record industry disputes that kept much of its catalog off streaming platforms, including Spotify and Apple Music. But that finally changed recently with the overdue digital arrival of De La Soul’s first six LPs, which in a tragic twist came just weeks after Jolicoeur’s death Feb. 12 at age 54.
In an Instagram tribute to his late bandmate, who
spoke about his struggles with congestive heart failure, Maseo wrote, “On one end I’m happy you no longer have to suffer the pain of your condition but on the other hand I’m extremely upset at the fact that you’re not here to celebrate and enjoy what we worked and fought so hard to achieve.”
Why precisely De La Soul’s classic albums took so long to make it to streaming — in addition to “3 Feet High and Rising,” the release included 1991’s “De La Soul Is Dead” and 1993’s “Buhloone Mindstate,” among other titles — is a complicated story involving sample-clearance issues and disagreements over money between the trio and its longtime label, Tommy Boy Records. The sale in 2021 of Tommy Boy to the music company Reservoir Media for a reported $100 million is
apparently what unstuck the deal, according to Dante Ross, who signed De La Soul and worked as the group’s first A&R rep before going on to shepherd the careers of Brand Nubian, MF Doom, Busta Rhymes and others.
“But it had always seemed inevitable that it would happen one day because of public demand,” Ross says.
To dive back into De La Soul’s early music today, when the phrase “information overload” gets you about halfway to the experience of scrolling through TikTok, is to marvel at the prescience of the madcap sonic approach — the anything-goes flattening of old hierarchies of taste — at play in a song like “The Magic Number,” which mashes together bits of Syl Johnson’s “Different Strokes,” Led Zeppelin’s “The Crunge” (via a
mid-’80s Double Dee & Steinski track) and the soundtrack from the kid’s TV special “Multiplication Rock.”
“In rap, you always knew where you were gonna get your samples from, and at that time it was funky, hard-driving R&B,” Shocklee says. “Then there were areas you didn’t really go into — more folky things, for instance. But (Prince) Paul used Johnny Cash, and he used the Turtles. He sampled things that weren’t our first impulse when we were going to look for a sample.”
Will the music’s availability on streaming foster a connection with a new generation of fans? The group’s most recent album, 2016’s “And the Anonymous Nobody...,” made a minimal impact (though the trio remained a reliable live draw through last year). And nobody in
hip-hop right now really sounds like De La Soul, which of course is a sign of the genre’s health — of its persistent dedication to the kind of change De La Soul embodied from the beginning.
Yet the group’s legacy can be felt, even if indirectly, in rap’s increasing emphasis on melody and in its everwidening emotional bandwidth; more important, the trio’s classic material can still stop you in your tracks, as when “The Magic Number” cropped up in 2021’s blockbuster “SpiderMan: No Way Home.”
“It remains to be seen whether the music will translate to the youth,” Ross says. “But anyone who makes smart, cerebral music within the idiom of hip-hop — whether or not they know it — they owe something to De La Soul. I don’t think that’ll ever change.”