"You came with a bunch of records to see if it worked or not"

March 3, 2023 3:32 AM

De La Soul is available for streaming everywhere for the first time ever. This is a bittersweet development, as rapper Dave Jolicoeur, a.k.a. Trugoy the Dove, passed away just three weeks ago. Kelvin Mercer and Vincent Mason, the surviving members of the group spoke with Ben Sisario of the New York Times [archive]. Several artists and fans who were influenced by De La Soul reflected on their legacy for the Gothamist.
posted by Kattullus (17 comments total)

For whatever reason, YouTube Music isn't listed as one of the music services the albums are available, but they're all there too.
posted by Kattullus at 3:33 AM on March 3, 2023

Their entire discography was available for free download nine years ago. (previously on the blue)
posted by knile at 4:07 AM on March 3, 2023 [6 favorites]

The band is also featured in the most recent episode (Spotify link) of 60 Songs that Explain the 90’s, which is an excellent podcast.
posted by web-goddess at 4:29 AM on March 3, 2023 [3 favorites]

I really like De La Soul. The music reminds me of the 1980s. In the best daisy way.
posted by chavenet at 5:05 AM on March 3, 2023 [5 favorites]

Oh geez, this sentence ended up as a real mess:

Kelvin Mercer and Vincent "Mason a.k.a. Posdnuos, Maseo and Prince Paul

Prince Paul was, of course, the producer on the first three De La Soul albums, not one of the three Plugs making up De La Soul. Also, I have no idea where that extra quotation mark came from.
posted by Kattullus at 5:09 AM on March 3, 2023

Happy De La Day
.
Trugoy the Dove
posted by djseafood at 6:44 AM on March 3, 2023 [5 favorites]

There are a lot of things that won't necessarily make it to the streaming services--guest spots on other people's albums, remixes and the occasional non-album track from 12" singles and EPs that may have never had their samples cleared, live releases of questionable provenance, etc., etc., etc.

This comment may have gotten away from me a bit, but here it is:

Non-album tracks (YouTube links, very incomplete list):

De La Soul - Live at the Dugout '87
De La Soul - In the Woods
De La Soul - The Magic Number (Too Mad Mix)
De La Soul - Buddy (Native Tongues Decision)
De La Soul - Ghetto Thang (Ximer Mix)
De La Soul - Ain't Hip to Be Labeled a Hippie
De La Soul - Brainwashed Follower
De La Soul - Eye Know (Daisy Bass Mix)
De La Soul - The Mack Daddy on the Left
De La Soul - Tread Water (Mr. Squire Mix)
De La Soul - The Dawn Brings Smoke
De La Soul - Stix & Stonz
De La Soul - Ring Ring (Piles and Piles of Demo Tapes Bi Da Miles)
De La Soul - A Roller Skating Jam Named 'Saturdays' (Ladies Night Decision)
De La Soul - Ego Trippin' Part Two (LA Jay Remix)
De La Soul - Stakes is High (Jay Dee Remix)
De La Soul - Stakes is High (DJ Spinna Remix)
De La Soul - Sho Nuff
De La Soul - Say 'I Gotta Believe!'
De La Soul - Live at Tramps, NYC, 1996

De La Soul f Nas - God It
First Serve - Must Be the Music
Queen Latifah f De La Soul - Mama Gave Birth to the Soul Children (Open University Mix)
Teenage Fanclub & De La Soul - Fallin'
DJ Honda f De La Soul - Trouble in the Water
Prince Paul f De La Soul - More Than u Know

Non-album/single physical releases (Discogs links, very incomplete list):

Remixes (1991)
Rarities & Remixes (1991) (not legit)
De La Remix (1992) (not legit)
Da Inner Sound Y'all 1 & 2 (2001) (not legit)
Da Inner Sound Y'all 3 & 4 (2001) (not legit)
Timeless: The Singles Collection (2003)
De La Mix Tape: Remixes, Rarities & Classics (2004)

Tribute Mixes (curated list):

DJ Platurn - So This is De La Heaven Pt. 1
DJ Platurn - So This is De La Heaven Pt. 2 (Discogs links, these two are not easy to find streaming)
DJ Friction - De La Soul Mix (Tribute to Dave Trugoy) (HearThis)
Lord Sear - De La Soul Tribute Mix (RIP Trugoy) (SoundCloud)

Bonus - De La Soul & J Dilla - 'Smell the Da.I.S.Y. (Da Inner Soul of Yancy)' (De La-produced J Dilla mixtape)
posted by box at 7:52 AM on March 3, 2023 [29 favorites]

Those first three De La Soul records are just, I mean, the greatest. Not to say the other ones aren't good as well, but I never got as fully consumed by any of them. Each of the first three re-arranged the furniture in my brain.

I was happy to pick up Three Feet High and Rising when it was briefly available on "Vinyl Me, Please" a few years back, and have wished and hoped for reissues of ...is Dead and Buhloon Mind State. So excited to get them now, straight from the source.

Between this and the announcement TODAY that Yo La Tengo is finally putting out The Sounds of the Sounds of Science on vinyl it is a golden dawn for music bores who are into critically acclaimed bands with three-word names that have "la" in the middle, lemme tell you
posted by dirtdirt at 8:03 AM on March 3, 2023 [4 favorites]

To be clear: *I* am the bore I refer to. I blew past my record budget in two minutes this morning. No regrets!
posted by dirtdirt at 8:12 AM on March 3, 2023

My favorite De La album, by far, is Stakes is High.

It's the first one they mostly produced themselves. It's not as playful as their previous albums, and it's not as feature-packed or rhyming-for-the-sake-of-rhyming as what came after (though Common and Mos Def are both prominent on it). It's the most serious thing they ever did, but it's also darkly funny.

Stakes is High is like Here, My Dear, except that they're getting a divorce from the materialists and studio gangsters that were the most commercially successful rappers of the era.
posted by box at 9:40 AM on March 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

Same here, box. It's not their most critically-acclaimed, but it's definitely the one that impacted me the most growing up.
posted by joedan at 1:01 PM on March 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

The latest episode of the podcast A Word … with Jason Johnson is a conversation with hip hop dj and producer Don Will about De La Soul, from their arrival on the scene to their legacy today.

In the end Don Will recommends Breakadawn off Buhloone Mindstate, and that whole album, as the best entry point into the De La Soul catalog, and I think I agree. Either way, it’s certainly the album I’ve returned to most often through the years.
posted by Kattullus at 2:34 PM on March 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

box, you are a MENSCH
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 4:16 PM on March 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

Dear Dave (De La Soul's Substack)
posted by box at 1:11 PM on March 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

Posdnuos performs the song Stakes is High with The Roots.
posted by Kattullus at 3:46 PM on March 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

The Grio: De La Soul re-enters Billboard 200 after catalog hits streaming, "The hip-hop trio's 1989 debut album, "3 Feet High and Rising," reached No. 15 on the Billboard 200 after their first six albums premiered on digital streaming platforms on March 3." [Archive link]

Variety had a lovely interview with Prince Paul because of the rerelease of the De La Soul catalog. Here's an excerpt:

I told them initially when we got together that I only wanted to do that one record. “I’m going to teach you guys how to produce and work equipment and you take it from this point on.” It’s not until they had asked me when the option for the second record came, “Hey, we still want to work with you, you’re part of the group.” I was like, “Oh!” It was one of those Kumbaya, wanting-to-cry moments.

And so it went to the next record, “Buhloone Mindstate,” and got to “Stakes Is High,” and I had to remember, I wasn’t supposed to be here anyway. And I had to really suck it up — a lot of my identity came with De La Soul, and it was hard. Gravediggaz [Paul’s next major project] didn’t do as good as I wanted it to do. So it was just one of those situations where it just seemed like it was time. And I valued our friendship and relationships more than I valued my own personal ego of wanting to control stuff or to be a part of something. It was just time and it worked out. To me, it was probably one of the best decisions I think I’ve made in my career, to let them move how they wanted to move. And I love “Stakes is High”! When my son was really little, we used to listen to that and Nas’ “Illmatic,” and so that’s the soundtrack of his childhood when he was really little.

There was never any beef. I think what caused some uneasiness, and I’ll state this for the record, is everybody saying that there was beef. And so after a while, I remember Pos called me up and was like, “Are we good? We have a problem?” And I was like, “No.” He’s like, “I didn’t think so.” It was drilled in us that the reason why we stopped working together because there was a problem. And so it was so strange — it was like, “Do we?”

Jelani Cobb wrote an essay meditating on hip hop and mortality for the New Yorker. Excerpt:

Three things of note to a particular slice of American culture occurred in recent weeks: On February 5th, the Grammy Awards, which were initially reluctant to embrace the genre of hip-hop, recognized the fiftieth anniversary of its existence. (To the extent that something as complex and sprawling as a musical genre can find a single point of origin, hip-hop was born in the summer of 1973, at a fabled party thrown by DJ Kool Herc, at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, in the Bronx.) Then, on March 3rd, the catalogue of De La Soul, a cornerstone group whose work helped define the music’s golden era but has long been trapped in a skein of legal complications, finally became available on streaming services. The celebration of that development was bittersweet, though, because just a couple of weeks earlier Dave Jolicoeur, one of the group’s three founding members, who rapped under the name Trugoy the Dove, had died of congestive heart failure, at the age of fifty-four.

There is, in this world, an ambivalent space reserved for revolutionaries who die in their beds and rappers who die of natural causes. From hip-hop’s inception, what has distinguished it from other forms of youth culture was its certain awareness of mortality. Rock music, for instance, mourns a group of heroes who died at twenty-seven: Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain. But part of the resonance of those deaths is that they came as a shock, and even acquired an aura of romance that hip-hop could never indulge. Their deaths reflected inner turmoil, most during a time of war and social violence, but the violence was not primarily directed at them. That’s not the case with hip-hop, an art form crafted in places where it was not unheard of for twenty-seven-year-olds to perish. Here was an artform largely pioneered and dominated by the demographic that is most likely to die as a result of violence in this country: young Black men.

posted by Kattullus at 4:29 AM on March 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

"Posdnuos performs the song Stakes is High with The Roots."

Also, I'd like to correct an error. I said it was just Posdnuos with The Roots, but Maseo is on the turntables, on the right of the stage. He's the one who says "thank you, Dave" at the end.
posted by Kattullus at 5:14 AM on March 21, 2023