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De La Soul’s Mistake and Hip-Hop’s Lost Opportunity

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › books › archive › 2024 › 11 › de-la-souls-mistake-and-hip-hop-lost-opportunityi › 680690

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In 1991, only one album into its career, De La Soul tried to pull off an unusually audacious move. The hip-hop trio’s 1989 debut, 3 Feet High and Rising, was a dense but accessible bricolage of dad-rock samples and flip-it-and-reverse-it nursery-rhyme syntax, establishing the group as innovators with commercial muscle. Two years later, De La Soul publicly renounced the album, dumping everything that made it an instant classic in an act of self-nullification from which the band never really recovered.

The follow-up album, De La Soul Is Dead, sounds like an insecure crew taking wild swings at perceived enemies—Vanilla Ice, MC Hammer, the West Coast gangster-rap insurgency—and missing badly. The beats are sluggish, and 3 Feet High’s sample surprises (Hall & Oates! Steely Dan!) are absent, giving the record a thin, attenuated feel. It begins inauspiciously, with a skit involving a kid finding a copy of 3 Feet High in a trash can, and falls further into dispirited score-settling. It is also entirely too long, and both jokey and humorless. And worst of all, it squanders the group’s only opportunity to chart an alternative path for hip-hop at a moment when its adversaries were poised to usurp the genre.

In High and Rising, his new book about De La Soul, the music writer Marcus J. Moore unpacks this baffling decision. De La Soul Is Dead, he argues, was a “bleak and acerbic response to the industry and the band’s mounting frustrations” with music-business chicanery, and with being told they were just one thing when they were confident that they contained multitudes. Moore is a passionate defender of De La Soul Is Dead, which he feels was misunderstood and quickly forgotten, a “ripple” crashing into the “tidal wave” of gangsta rap; N.W.A had released the subgenre’s urtext Straight Outta Compton in 1988. He’s not wrong about the timing of the record, but it is the tenor of De La Soul Is Dead—its blithe disregard for 3 Feet High, and its reactionary swipes at the competition—that didn’t sit well. It still doesn't.

3 Feet High came out of nowhere—to be more specific, from Amityville, Long Island. The 24-track gem from Kelvin “Posdnuos” Mercer, David “Trugoy the Dove” Jolicoeur, and Vincent “Maseo” Mason was conceived an hour-long train ride away from the center of New York’s hip-hop culture, and the distance was crucial; De La Soul could innovate in relative isolation. Working with the producer “Prince Paul” Hutson, the group reinvented how hip-hop was constructed, stacking samples and beats over, under, and around its intricate conversational flow, the lyrics hovering within some golden mean between fractured fairy tales and the loopy logic of P-Funk’s George Clinton. “It felt distant yet alluring,” Moore writes of the trio’s debut, “a new masterpiece from a bygone era of Black experimentation.”

[Read: The untold stories behind Hip-Hop’s greatest albums]

The album also felt like the start of something larger than the trio itself. Having found common ground with East Coast mavericks such as A Tribe Called Quest, Queen Latifah, and Jungle Brothers—artists who also fused Afrocentrism with jazzy beats and whip-smart lyrics—De La Soul brought them under their big tent. A creative collective they called Native Tongues was born. 3 Feet High’s track “Buddy” was Native Tongues’ statement of intent, a pass-the-mic celebration that included verses from Tribe’s Q-Tip and (on the remix) Queen Latifah. The video for the song, in which various members crowd the frame and joyously egg one another on, felt like the first seedling of a cultural movement.

And then, with De La Soul Is Dead, the group turned its back on the whole thing. “Here is the D.A.I.S.Y. / watching it die, see?” Posdnuos declaimed on “Pass the Plugs,” in a not-so-subtle dig at the first album’s flowery artwork and the notion of De La Soul ushering in a “Daisy Age” of comity and community. (D.A.I.S.Y. was in fact an acronym for “Da Inner Sound Y’all.” The second album cover depicted an overturned pot of limp daisies.)

The album covers, left to right, of “3 Feet High and Rising” and “De La Soul Is Dead.” (Reservoir Media)

Moore, after first chalking up the renunciation to industry frustration, throws out broader theories: The band bristled at being labeled “psychedelic rappers” in the press, and dismissed its public branding as a lure for casual hip-hop fans—in other words, white people. He develops a more layered hypothesis later on. “It’s better to last forever than to exist for a minute,” Moore writes. “De La played the long game.” By this point in the story, in the mid-’90s, the group had been cut down to the size of a cult act. But it hadn’t wanted overnight success; it had wanted a career. Moore rightly argues that, with its second album, De La Soul was trying to steer clear of the trap that has snared so many artists who have had to contend with being “held captive by the music they made as teenagers.” De La Soul Is Dead was the trio’s fast-track bid for respect as mature musicians, but it was protesting too much, too soon.

The second album sold well, but not as well as 3 Feet High, and that wasn’t entirely the group’s fault. It’s hard enough for any popular artist to pivot without shedding listeners; harder still for an act working within hip-hop, a historically conservative genre that tends to tuck its outliers into the margins. The debut had been an avant-garde record with mainstream appeal, but according to Moore, De La Soul was wise enough to know that its fresh commercial sound could quickly grow stale. So the group decided to trash it first.

However legitimate the trio’s outrage may have been, it failed to channel anger into effective art. De La Soul Is Dead took a bulldozer to the debut’s glorious garden. De La Soul’s lightness of touch was muscled aside in favor of churlish criticism of hip-hop’s new turn toward vulgarity, which for the trio was a kind of minstrelsy. But instead of flowing above the fray, De La Soul fell into the petty snipery of the scene—the big dis, the character assassination. 3 Feet High’s Day-Glo grin had twisted into a dyspeptic scowl. The group had given up the high ground, ceded the terms of the debate to its rivals. It was Dre and Snoop’s world now, and De La Soul had sunk into it.

[Read: Did the decline of sampling cause the decline of political hip-hop?]

This heel turn not only blew up the first incarnation of De La Soul; it tore apart the utopian idea that hip-hop’s balkanized turf wars could be set aside in favor of creative fellowship. The trio began to feel rudderless, and the Native Tongues went their different ways. A Tribe Called Quest created its masterpiece, 1993’s Midnight Marauders, while Queen Latifah stopped making hip-hop records after she became a crossover superstar.

Having thrown down the gauntlet at the feet of hip-hop’s stars, De La Soul tried calling a truce with 1993’s Buhloone Mindstate, an album that split the difference between goofy ebullience and acrid critique. The tracks “Ego Trippin’ (Part Two)” and “Eye Patch” hinted at a return to 3 Feet High’s technicolor schoolyard. But there was also “I Am I Be,” which, Moore writes, showed De La Soul “holding [itself] and [its] collaborators accountable for letting the [Native Tongues] collective falter due to egos.” When Posdnuos decried the “tongues who lied and said ‘We’ll be natives to the end,’” it felt like an elegy for a lost cause.

By the time De La Soul released Stakes Is High, in 1996, hip-hop had been commandeered by what Moore calls the “shiny-suit” era of Sean Combs and Notorious B.I.G., all gangster posturing and clunky, bottom-feeding beats. Stakes Is High, which featured the newcomers and future trailblazers Common and Mos Def, received tepid reviews and was largely ignored, much to the dismay of Moore, the superfan. “Quietly,” he writes, “De La reassembled their own vision of what a Native Tongues collective could look like in the ’90s with … MCs who were just kids when the first iteration took shape.” That may be so, but it takes a nation of millions to recognize a movement, and the audience had moved on.

The consignment of a promising musical coalition to oblivion was compounded by a tragic and deeply ironic debacle: The same elements that made 3 Feet High and Rising so innovative sent the album into perilous legal limbo. Because De La Soul’s label, Tommy Boy Records, hadn’t accounted for some sample clearances and the band’s contract was outdated, the album was blocked from streaming services. And so, in the 2000s, the group that had denounced its debut had to spend years trying to secure a foothold for its catalog in the digital world. That finally happened in 2023. 3 Feet High is by far De La Soul’s most streamed album, and by any standard the band’s greatest achievement. But to listen to it now, within the context of De La Soul’s oeuvre, is to be painfully reminded of the road not taken—and of how a musical revolution can be scuttled from within.