Every De La Soul album is an event. Put one on, even decades after its release, and it still barrels out of the speakers, bursting with surreal vignettes, psychedelic montages of sound, and erudite bars pitched halfway between a joke and a cosmic imperative. De La Soul records grab you by the ears through sheer strength of narrative and density of ideas, as funny as they are abstract. The Long Island trio’s 1989 debut 3 Feet High And Rising, which wove kaleidoscopic samples into pop smashes like “Me Myself and I,” is credited with charting a path away from the realism of hardcore rap, beginning with the Native Tongues collective and continuing through sampledelic alt-rock, Rawkus-style backpack rap in the aughts, and the everything-goes microgenre rush of the 2010s. Hit play on any of their records and you can hear this narrative play out; a prescient idea of the future of music as told through the different eras of De La Soul.
That’s assuming, of course, that you even had access to those records. Of the group’s eight albums, six have been withheld from streaming services until this week. The reason why is both complex and not. When De La were crafting their early albums with producer Prince Paul, sampling was still a nascent art form, meaning the rigorous sample-clearing process artists know and loathe today hadn’t yet been codified. As such, they were one of the first artists successfully sued for repurposing previously recorded material, thanks to this 12-second lift from the Turtles. Mind that this is just one sample on an album composed almost entirely of them, from a discography famed for the density and invention of its sampling. Clearing all of those samples in a landscape that had evolved to monetize every microscopic lift proved too convoluted for the suits at Warner Music to stomach, so the records languished out of print.
The not-complex version: record-label bullshit. Even when De La’s former label finally announced in 2019 that their discography would be heading to streaming services, it was in a shaky legal deal that would offer only “pennies” of revenue to the group. They balked, and, after public outcry, the deal was scuppered, delaying the releases even further. Hopes dimmed. Given their legal notoriety to begin with, it seemed this last holdout on the streaming era may be permanent, a particularly cruel fate given the way their work presaged the hyperlinked, post-genre landscape of the internet itself.
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And then, in an unexpected sunburst of good fate at the dawn of 2023, it was over. All six of De La’s original Tommy Boy records were cleared for takeoff on streaming services worldwide. (Here’s the comprehensive story of how that happened, but the short version is it comes down to good, diligent sample-clearing.) So if every De La album is an event, today is six events. It’s an embarrassment of sonic riches—six hours of restless invention, originally released across a dozen years, ready to pour into listeners’ ears at a click, whenever and wherever.
There’s a bittersweet taste to all of this, and it’s not just that it took so long. Two weeks ago, after the announcement of the band’s streaming availability but before the releases actually dropped, Trugoy The Dove, one of De La’s two primary emcees, died unexpectedly at age 54. It’s an incomparable loss: our second plug into a divine idea, a rapper of uncommon heart still capable of weaving verses as playful as they are true.
Add it to the list of reasons why, if there is any justice on this earth, the entire world is about to go through a De La Soul phase. The best way to listen to their catalog, for what it’s worth, is from front to back. The first two albums, in particular, are thrillingly conceptual works, credited with inventing the “hip-hop skit” that plagued many ’90s LPs but doing it with a rhythm, humor, and clarity none of their imitators could match. But it’s also a discography that contains within it some of the most rapturous individual tracks in hip-hop history. De La works both ways, every way: headphones, long drives, deep reads, party playlists, wedding receptions, workouts, you name it. This very versatility is part of what makes them so well-suited to streaming in the first place.
And so, whether you’re coming to this discography for the first time or you’re a longtime fan ready to dive back in, here’s a guided tour of the De La-verse, arranged chronologically. If you’re mad at me for not including your favorite track, please know in advance that I probably agree with you. Let’s go!
The Stone-Cold Classics (1989-1991)
“Me Myself and I”
The highest-charting of the seven(!) singles released from De La’s debut, “Me, Myself and I” was the world’s wider introduction to their ethos, weaving together Funkadelic and the Ohio Players into a deceptively funky meditation on selfhood. From the outset, the group positioned themselves as an antidote to the conformity of other rappers while balking at the “hip-hop hippie” branding that carried them into the mainstream.
“Plug Tunin’ (Last Chance To Comprehend)”
Before it became a concept album about a game show, 3 Feet High And Rising was a concept album in which the music was being transmitted from Mars, with each member serving as another “plug,” inspiring the group’s ongoing numbered nicknames. That arc, equal parts PKD and In Living Color, is most present on “Plug Tunin’,” one of their earliest tracks, remixed for the LP by Prince Paul.
“Eye Know”
Ground zero for every aging millennial’s inevitable Steely Dan phase, “Eye Know” is one of rap’s greatest love songs this side of “The Light.” Not exactly monogamous, Pos equates the act of musical creation with biological creation (“Dolby sound will be then top-crowned / When I put the needle into your groove”), but it’s Trugoy’s verses that most eloquently embody the group’s commitment to hip-hop as a medium for beauty.
“Pease Porridge”
After the success of 3 Feet High, De La Soul became part of a new vanguard of soulful, supposedly more “positive” hip-hop. Ever-rebellious, they named their sophomore LP, 1991’s De La Soul Is Dead, with their signature flowers smashed on the cover and a newfound focus on the underside of success. But the music was as joyful as ever: “Pease Porridge,” with its delirious woodblock beat and stuttering verses, is De La versus the haters in a cartoon explosion of early-rap discourse.
“A Roller Skating Jam Named Saturdays”
De La poked a lot of fun at pop-rap, R&B, and house music, but absolutely caught air on this disco barnburner. Q-Tip’s voice pops up on a bunch of De La records, but he’s deeply infused to the success of this track, like everyone in the room got geeked on the same shared memories of roller-rink romance. It’s contagious.
“Pass the Plugs”
Part of the thrill of listening to these records in sequence is tracking their increasing tonal complexity. Here, Paul turns trilling, wistful guitars into the base for a cipher so compelling even he and Mace had to take turns at the mic.
The Slept-On Also-Classics (1993-1996)
“Patti Dooke”
Released in 1993, Buhloone Mindstate was the group’s most adventurous album yet, playing more explicitly with live jazz and experimental song structures. The LP sold poorly, and Trugoy has distanced himself from it, but it holds up today as an iconoclastic triumph, showing both emcees settling into their individual grooves and serving as a swan song for the group’s long history of collaboration with Prince Paul. The almost six-minute “Patti Dooke,” produced alongside a murderer’s row of jazz greats, is a great case in point.
“Ego Trippin’ Pt 2”
This one’s notable for what might be the most absurd hook in history: a banshee howl layered over itself repeatedly. (Sing it with me, preferably to wake up a sleeping roommate: “HYEAGH! HYEAGH! HYEAGH! HYEAGH!”) It’s something of a mission statement for a group determined to blow up but not go pop, which they exaggerated in a video that riffed on Tupac’s “I Get Around” and tipped off an unlikely, years-long beef with the rapper.
“I Am I Be”
De La’s career-long criticism of broader hip-hop culture only worked because they had such a distinct idea of who they were and what they offered. “I Am I Be” is an evolution of “Me Myself and I,” with a dreamlike assemblage of guests and verses in which each emcee declares a sort of fidelity to decency. Posdnuos’s verse is noteworthy for containing an early allusion to the broader falling-out among the Native Tongues collective, but it’s lines like “I cherish the twilight / I maximize, my soul is the right size” that make it one of the most memorable in their catalog.
“The Bizness”
Stake Is High was the group’s first album without Prince Paul, and they quickly dispelled any notion that they couldn’t succeed without him with tracks like “The Bizness,” featuring a young Common. The record is absolutely lousy with tracks like this: tuned-up low-end, analog jazz tones scattered minimally over top, and dazzling, long-playing verses, with no skits in sight. When I reach for a De La record, it’s usually this one.
“Dinninit”
“Dinninit” somehow nails two of the record’s tones simultaneously: a warm, barbecue-friendly boom-bap with an undercurrent of late-night melancholy. Lines like “I’m pourin’ out these rhymes for them kids who ain’t here / Stakes is high, but we gonna try to have fun this year” suggest these sublime songs come at a cost.
“Stakes Is High”
Produced by an emergent Jay Dee, this is the most intense track in De La Soul’s catalog: the sound of a trio who believe deeply in the transformational power of language and music—of hip-hop—and see it on life support. Stakes were indeed high for the group after the commercial failure of their previous two LPs, but over Dilla’s insistent snare-clap and layered horn blasts, the bars sound like intergalactic war.
The AOI Experiment (2000-2001)
“My Writes”
De La Soul started the new millennium with ambitious plans for three LPs in one year. They ultimately only released two installments in the AOI trilogy, and it took 16 months, lending an air of defeat to the whole affair. It was definitely a transitional period for the group, but there are interesting De La takes on millennial hip-hop, including this track, which toys with Timbaland-style polyrhythms before locking in with bars from Tha Alkaholiks and a then-ubiquitous Xzibit.
“View”
The back half of the first AOI record has a handful of tracks, including “View,” where De La trade verses over rocksteady in-house production that seem to take cues from Dilla. Honestly, across everything they released between 2000 and 2001, there’s a really solid dozen or so tracks like this that would work as a low-key mid-period release. (Someone please make this as a playlist and share it with me.) You have to admire the group for gunning it as hard as they did during this era, when hip-hop at large was still sorting out what “mainstream” and “underground” meant.
“Simply”
Look, there are probably better tracks off of Bionix, the second AOI record, to close out with here, but you gotta shout them out for transforming the world’s worst Christmas song into a watery, psychedelic tribute to Nice & Smooth. They’d take three years before bouncing back with The Grind Date—which found them settling in as elder statesmen over production from Madlib and 9th Wonder—and the cranky, brilliant Kickstarter comeback And the Anonymous Nobody. Hopefully that doesn’t end up being their swan song, but if so, there’s a lifetime of pleasure to be found in the work they released. Thank goodness we finally have access to it now.
