![]() ![]() The next time anyone heard from Jeff, it was at the beginning of their second album, De La Soul Is Dead there, he finds a copy of the album itself in the garbage and gets jacked for it by a trio of dirtbag teenagers. The 12″ of their classic ’89 single “Me Myself And I” threw in a song-length skit as a B-side, “ Brain Washed Follower,” where a kid named Jeff interrogates them over their whole deal: If they’re rappers, then where’s their gold chains, their flashy cars, their beepers? De La’s response: They’d rather spend money on video games. This seemed so inevitable, in fact, that it became a part of their core identity in itself. And by leaning into a Day-Glo, pop-art aesthetic and putting out records heavy on lighthearted-yet-complex lyricism and an almost showoffy capability of building funky breaks from the most unlikely sources and forms, they basically ensured they’d have to wind up explaining themselves to confused onlookers for at least the next few years. They came across as more chill than intense, more funny than tough, and more personal than political - even if they could touch on all of those modes when the situation called for it. That’s because De La’s style, at least on the surface, seemed so counterintuitive to nearly every depiction of what many people expected hip-hop culture to be, both inside and outside the industry. I could do it, too.'”Īnd yet when they teamed up with Stetsasonic producer and comedically/artistically likeminded oddball Prince Paul to put their own selves out there, they had a far more difficult time getting people to accept them at face value - even if their fearlessly eclectic, stylistically innovative debut 3 Feet High And Rising became a critical darling and a modest but noteworthy commercial success. This is something that they’re doing for a job or a life hustle. “So it made you feel like, ‘Yo, I can be like them. They looked like everyday average B-Boys you went to school with,” Dave told KEXP in 2016. They didn’t look like Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, dressed in these funkateer kind of outfits. hit the scene they saw possibilities everywhere. They’d known about the culture since the pre-“Rapper’s Delight” days of bootleg live-party cassettes, and by the time Run-D.M.C. resident Chuck D - Pos had actually relocated there with his family from hip-hop origin-point South Bronx, while Dave and Maseo had moved in from Brooklyn. Putting aside the purported novelty of a rap group coming from that neck of the woods’ relative comfort - a rep that wasn’t as quickly thrown at, say, fellow L.I. ![]() ![]() They’ve actually given some perspective to where De La really stood on the precipice of hip-hop’s revered late ’80s-early ’90s Golden Era: as the geeky weirdo class clowns who skeptics struggled to take seriously until the sheer force of their creativity became impossible to deny.Ī lot’s been made about De La Soul’s origins in the suburban confines of Long Island, New York, where Jolicouer (hereafter referred to as “Dave”), fellow MC Kelvin “Posdnous” Mercer, and DJ/idea man Vincent “Maseo” Mason first got together over a shared love of hip-hop. It’s become a risible cliche to state that a recently-passed artist “taught me that it’s OK to be weird.” But what if it’s still true, not just from the perspective of an individual’s experience, but in the context of an entire culture? The reconnections people have been making with De La Soul in the last month - spurred by the near-concurrent announcement of their catalogue’s escape from sample-rights purgatory onto streaming platforms and the death of their MC Dave “Trugoy The Dove” Jolicouer at age 54 - have been more than just nostalgia trips for oldheads. ![]()
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