Amityville, NY · hip-hop · alt-rap

De La Soul

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Native Tongues cornerstone — sample-collage hip-hop that made room for humour and colour, '3 Feet High and Rising' still a genre-widening document.

Posdnuos, Trugoy the Dove and Maseo formed De La Soul while still in high school on Long Island, and a demo tape of the song "Plug Tunin'" caught the attention of producer Prince Paul, who shaped the dense, playful sampling of their 1989 debut, 3 Feet High and Rising. The single "Me Myself and I" became a major hit, and album art by the Grey Organisation added to the record's distinct visual identity.

The album introduced the group's "D.A.I.S.Y. Age" concept, a phrase for their outlook that got them wrongly typed as hippies, a label that frustrated members who saw their music as always changing. A sample used on the track "Transmitting Live from Mars" led to a lawsuit from the Turtles, an early example of the clearance disputes that would follow the group's catalogue for decades.

Their second album, De La Soul Is Dead, arrived in 1991 with cover art of a broken daisy flowerpot, marking a harder, more critical turn that still kept room for humour, on singles including "Millie Pulled a Pistol on Santa" and "Ring Ring Ring (Ha Ha Hey)." The group were founding members of the Native Tongues collective alongside A Tribe Called Quest and the Jungle Brothers, and in 2006 they won a Grammy for their feature on Gorillaz's "Feel Good Inc."

Across ten studio albums and one live record, their catalogue stayed off streaming services for years because of the sample clearances that shaped their sound in the first place, finally arriving digitally in 2023. Trugoy the Dove died in February of that year.

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hip-hopalt-rap