De La Soul is... Dead?

Trugoy the Dove has flown

In the noughties, as a young, white hip-hop fan, I heard two types of scepticism. The first was simple bemusement, the foundation of which, I think, was a belief that a white guy’s “love” for hip-hop could only ever be an affectation.

The second type was more intense: a belief that I was culturally trespassing. Hip-hop was borne of particular circumstances of which I knew nothing, the argument went, and my enjoyment of it somehow diminished its emancipatory power. Or something. This part was never adequately explained to me.

Perhaps they were clumsily gesturing to the long and serious history of white theft, appropriation and financial exploitation of black artists, but in my case, this muddled and condescending protectiveness of hip-hop – and I heard it more than you’d guess – found as its subject my simple enjoyment of the genre.

It was a perverse expression of white guilt, I thought: treating hip-hop as a monolithic phenomenon that we, as respectful white folks, should help by ignoring. It’s theirs after all. Never mind that the Golden Age of hip-hop was characterised by its promiscuous sampling – its hungry openness to other music – and its splintering of sounds and philosophies. Never mind that Nas told stories about New York’s slums, just as Woody Guthrie once sung about the Okies and the abjections of the Dust Bowl. Never mind that an artist might be grateful for my money, or appalled that a potential audience were turning their backs out of some confused sense of racial propriety. Never mind that De La Soul were sampling Steely Dan, listening to Pink Floyd and collaborating with Teenage Fanclub.

Music is political, sure, but this protectiveness, I thought, perversely flattened hip-hop into a fuzzy artefact of distant ghettos, rather than a variety of sounds that had a variety of ambitions and which might simply confer pleasure. It’s one thing to be sensitive to the cultural context of music; it’s another to forget entirely that it’s still music.

Curiously, jazz never seemed to inspire the same kind of white protectiveness back then. And while I’m speaking purely anecdotally here, and grand generalisations now make me nervous, I feel fairly confident in saying that this kind of anxious policing of a white person’s taste in hip-hop has long since evaporated – coincident with it long becoming one of the planet’s most popular genres of music.

But back then it was just a subject of political anthropology, and never did my scrutineers consider the fundamental, life-altering enjoyment I felt – but nor did I consider telling them, so embarrassingly obvious and simple did it sound.

I should have. I should have told them how, in the mid-‘90s, I set my alarm every Saturday night so that I could tune into the hip-hop/underground dance show “Gettin’ Hectic” that was broadcast between 11 and 1 in the morning on Perth’s community radio station RTRFM, a station which, almost a decade later, I would broadcast from myself. (And where I was thrilled to be able to play some of the music the station’s DJs had introduced me to years before.)

On those Saturday nights, blank cassette tape ready, I would record the show, stopping when a song failed to grab me and carefully rewinding the tape back to the end of the previous song that I wanted to keep. The reception was dodgy, and so the songs were dusted with static, and my editing out of the back announcements meant that I sometimes didn’t know the names of the artists responsible for my favourite tracks. I had no internet to check with then, and Shazam wouldn’t be available in app form for another twenty years.

I did all of this in the darkness, and with the volume down low, lest I wake my parents. They despised my music, and I had internalised this in some strange way, so that the quiet, scrupulous recording of an obscure radio show could feel faintly shameful to me.

But, Christ: I cherished that show, as I cherished those tapes. It was how I discovered Lord Finesse, KRS-One and Pete Rock & CL Smooth, say, and how I heard the latest singles from my heroes De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest. The DJs – I can remember at least two names, Rok Riley and Dan the Man, because I would watch them play in clubs later when I was old enough – would also slip obscure remixes into their show that I still struggle to find in the online cornucopia.

(I’ve written the word “obscure” twice already, and am aware of two things here: a) the sometimes insufferable, comically inflated pride the ‘90s music fan enjoyed in “unearthing” the obscure, and b) how little that word means today in a world where, for a monthly subscription fee that’s less than the cost of a CD in ‘97, you can play almost every song ever recorded on your phone. There’s something else to be said about how notions of musical “authenticity” and “selling out” defined so much personal and tribal identity 20+ years ago, but would now seem curiously anachronistic to younger Millennials or Gen Z – but that’s for another time.)

* 

There’s a bum-note of self-pity to this piece, I think, but that’s because I’m really thinking about the news: De La Soul’s Trugoy the Dove, aka David Jude Jolicoeur, has died suddenly at 54.

This one hurt. As lame and regrettable as I think so much modern fandom is – armies of para-socially fixated stans on Twitter, mobilising against the faintest encroachments upon their beloved’s reputations (I’m thinking of political leaders here, by the way, and adult stans) – it would also be lame and false to pretend that the premature loss of a favourite artist doesn’t sting. Especially one whose enchantments were felt when I was so young.

Trugoy the Dove is dead.

That stage-name, by the way, is “yogurt” spelled backwards – which alone gives you a sense of how hard De La leaned into dorky self-effacement, and how bold their silliness was when you consider the context: the year of their first single, 1988, was also the year of NWA’s earth-quaking gangsta opus Straight Outta Compton, which pledged bloody vengeance against cops and attracted the formal disapproval of the FBI. On their third album, Trugoy’s colleague would rap: “Fuck being hard, Posdnuos is complicated.”

These three middle-class teens from Long Island, New York, alongside fellow eccentric Prince Paul, released their debut Three Feet High and Rising in 1989, and it became a phenomenon – and their highest-selling record. Even though their three successive albums were all better, sales declined after that – in inverse relation, I’d argue, to their quality.

Three Feet High… was fresh, joyously inventive and undeniably influential, but my personal and unpopular view is that it’s (slightly) overrated. There’s the all-time jam “Eye Know”, which remains just as gorgeous today, but the album’s canonical status, I think, has much more to do with its considerable influence at the time than with the timelessness of the music. Its biggest single was “Me, Myself and I”, which I can barely listen to now, and of which De La themselves would later confess to hating.

After the great success of Three Feet High…, De La’s introspection, flowery motifs and bemused irritation with hip-hop’s machismo soon had them stuck with the label “hippies of hip-hop”, which flattened their complexity and rightly pissed them off. After all, their big point was about not pigeon-holing rappers with cliched expectations. They contained multitudes, they told us, but now, in not being “gangsta”, they were stamped as “hippies”.  

And so they rebelled again, and became musically better by doing so. They called their second album De La Soul is Dead (1991), and its cover featured a smashed flower pot. The album still had its quirky skits, kaleidoscopic sampling and, in “A Roller Skating Jam Named ‘Saturdays’”, a bright and radio-friendly single (friendlier still was their sardonic “Ring, Ring, Ring (Ha Ha Hey)” about aspirational rappers hassling them for endorsements). But they now had their own success and knowledge of the music industry to sceptically riff on, and the album was lyrically and musically more ambitious. And darker. “My Brother’s a Basehead” was about drug addiction, while “Millie Pulled a Pistol on Santa” told the story of a child shooting dead her sexually abusive father. The album confounded a few critics, and repelled more than a few fans. But in time, there was a critical revision.

If I think Three Feet High… might be slightly overrated, their fourth album Stakes is High (1996) is shockingly under-appreciated. It might be my favourite. The great Prince Paul, who had produced the first three albums and whose influence on them is often forgotten, was dismissed. They brought in 21-year-old producer Jay Dee, later known as the late, great J Dilla, but mostly they produced it themselves. There were no skits, less fluorescently dense sampling, and the bass was aggressively turned up.

Here was De La’s angriest, most articulate album yet, and its title didn’t solely refer to the state of hip-hop or black communities – a recurring theme of the record. No, after precipitous declines in sales, the group feared that this might be the last chance they had to even exist.

On the title track, they famously take aim:

“Got the solar gravitation so I'm bound to pull it,
I gets down like brothers are found duckin' from bullets/
Gun control means usin’ both hands in my land,
Where it’s all about the cautious livin’”

The “hippies” were now grizzled veterans discouraging punks from their lawn, sharp and exasperated critics of the violent, narcissistic posturing of hip-hop:

“I’m sick of talkin’ about blunts
Sick of Versace glasses
Sick of slang
Sick of half-ass awards shows
Sick of name brand clothes”

Lyrically, the track is molten lava. Actually, no. Let me revise: it’s molten lava that’s been cooled and sharpened, and its mix of righteous anger and precision still impresses me today.

There were several albums after this, but the magic dimmed. 2000’s Art Official Intelligence: Mosaic Thump was meant as the first record of a high-concept trilogy, and while it gave us one of their best singles – “Oooh” with Redman – it was their patchiest album yet. Part two was only slightly better, and they never released the third.

There was a collaboration with Damon Albarn’s Gorillaz, the mostly ignored The Grind Date in 2004, and then a self-funded album, twelve years later, which was musically playful and stuffed with celebrity guests. There was fairly constant touring, and their consensus induction into hip-hop’s pantheon.

But if you had heard anything about De La Soul in the past decade, it was likely their business hardships. After their bitter split from their original label, Tommy Boy, there were long, complicated and oppressive disputes with the subsequent owners of their catalogue. That’s another story, but it has meant that the vast bulk of De La’s catalogue – including those first four albums – have never been available on any streaming service.

Trugoy the Dove died three weeks from when they would. March 3 is the release date, one that had been painfully negotiated by the group for years. It’s also a date I’ve been counting down to, and one that it was hoped might spur a new generation’s interest in the group.

Trugoy’s death changes things. March 3 might now seem more like a wake, I guess, but hopefully a noisy and joyous one. And all that this obscure hack can do is affirm, and be grateful for, the pleasure. That pleasure was – and remains – immense.

Update: March 3 came, and so did their full catalogue to streaming. For those who haven’t heard De La, here’s a personal, patchy introduction — listed chronologically.