In 1991, just one album into its profession, De La Soul tried to tug off an unusually audacious transfer. The hip-hop trio’s 1989 debut, 3 Ft Excessive and Rising, was a dense however accessible bricolage of dad-rock samples and flip-it-and-reverse-it nursery-rhyme syntax, establishing the group as innovators with industrial muscle. Two years later, De La Soul publicly renounced the album, dumping the whole lot that made it an prompt basic in an act of self-nullification from which the band by no means actually recovered.
The follow-up album, De La Soul Is Useless, appears like an insecure crew taking wild swings at perceived enemies—Vanilla Ice, MC Hammer, the West Coast gangster-rap insurgency—and lacking badly. The beats are sluggish, and 3 Ft Excessive’s pattern surprises (Corridor & Oates! Steely Dan!) are absent, giving the file a skinny, attenuated really feel. It begins inauspiciously, with a skit involving a child discovering a replica of 3 Ft Excessive in a trash can, and falls additional into dispirited score-settling. Additionally it is completely too lengthy, and each jokey and humorless. And worst of all, it squanders the group’s solely alternative to chart an alternate path for hip-hop at a second when its adversaries have been poised to usurp the style.
In Excessive and Rising, his new e-book about De La Soul, the music author Marcus J. Moore unpacks this baffling resolution. De La Soul Is Useless, he argues, was a “bleak and acerbic response to the business and the band’s mounting frustrations” with music-business chicanery, and with being instructed they have been only one factor once they have been assured that they contained multitudes. Moore is a passionate defender of De La Soul Is Useless, which he feels was misunderstood and rapidly forgotten, a “ripple” crashing into the “tidal wave” of gangsta rap; N.W.A had launched the subgenre’s urtext Straight Outta Compton in 1988. He’s not unsuitable in regards to the timing of the file, however it’s the tenor of De La Soul Is Useless—its blithe disregard for 3 Ft Excessive, and its reactionary swipes on the competitors—that didn’t sit properly. It nonetheless does not.
By Marcus J Moore
3 Ft Excessive got here out of nowhere—to be extra particular, from Amityville, Lengthy Island. The 24-track gem from Kelvin “Posdnuos” Mercer, David “Trugoy the Dove” Jolicoeur, and Vincent “Maseo” Mason was conceived an hour-long prepare experience away from the middle of New York’s hip-hop tradition, and the space was essential; De La Soul might innovate in relative isolation. Working with the producer “Prince Paul” Hutson, the group reinvented how hip-hop was constructed, stacking samples and beats over, underneath, and round its intricate conversational movement, the lyrics hovering inside some golden imply between fractured fairy tales and the crazy logic of P-Funk’s George Clinton. “It felt distant but alluring,” Moore writes of the trio’s debut, “a brand new masterpiece from a bygone period of Black experimentation.”
The album additionally felt like the beginning of one thing bigger than the trio itself. Having discovered widespread floor with East Coast mavericks akin to A Tribe Referred to as Quest, Queen Latifah, and Jungle Brothers—artists who additionally fused Afrocentrism with jazzy beats and whip-smart lyrics—De La Soul introduced them underneath their huge tent. A artistic collective they referred to as Native Tongues was born. 3 Ft Excessive’s monitor “Buddy” was Native Tongues’ assertion 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 track, by which numerous members crowd the body and joyously egg each other on, felt like the primary seedling of a cultural motion.
After which, with De La Soul Is Useless, the group turned its again on the entire thing. “Right here is the D.A.I.S.Y. / watching it die, see?” Posdnuos declaimed on “Go the Plugs,” in a not-so-subtle dig on the first album’s flowery art work and the notion of De La Soul ushering in a “Daisy Age” of comity and group. (D.A.I.S.Y. was actually an acronym for “Da Internal Sound Y’all.” The second album cowl depicted an overturned pot of limp daisies.)
Moore, after first chalking up the renunciation to business frustration, throws out broader theories: The band bristled at being labeled “psychedelic rappers” within the press, and dismissed its public branding as a lure for informal hip-hop followers—in different phrases, white individuals. He develops a extra layered speculation afterward. “It’s higher to final endlessly than to exist for a minute,” Moore writes. “De La performed the lengthy sport.” By this level within the story, within the mid-’90s, the group had been reduce right down to the scale of a cult act. But it surely hadn’t wished in a single day success; it had wished a profession. Moore rightly argues that, with its second album, De La Soul was attempting to keep away from the lure that has snared so many artists who’ve needed to deal with being “held captive by the music they made as youngsters.” De La Soul Is Useless was the trio’s fast-track bid for respect as mature musicians, nevertheless it was protesting an excessive amount of, too quickly.
The second album offered properly, however not in addition to 3 Ft Excessive, and that wasn’t completely the group’s fault. It’s laborious sufficient for any common artist to pivot with out shedding listeners; tougher nonetheless for an act working inside hip-hop, a traditionally conservative style that tends to tuck its outliers into the margins. The debut had been an avant-garde file with mainstream attraction, however in keeping with Moore, De La Soul was sensible sufficient to know that its contemporary industrial sound might rapidly develop stale. So the group determined to trash it first.
Nevertheless professional the trio’s outrage might have been, it did not channel anger into efficient artwork. De La Soul Is Useless took a bulldozer to the debut’s wonderful backyard. De La Soul’s lightness of contact was muscled apart in favor of churlish criticism of hip-hop’s new flip towards vulgarity, which for the trio was a sort of minstrelsy. However as an alternative of flowing above the fray, De La Soul fell into the petty snipery of the scene—the large dis, the character assassination. 3 Ft Excessive’s Day-Glo grin had twisted right into a dyspeptic scowl. The group had given up the excessive floor, ceded the phrases of the talk to its rivals. It was Dre and Snoop’s world now, and De La Soul had sunk into it.
This heel flip not solely blew up the primary incarnation of De La Soul; it tore aside the utopian concept that hip-hop’s balkanized turf wars might be put aside in favor of artistic fellowship. The trio started to really feel rudderless, and the Native Tongues went their alternative ways. A Tribe Referred to as Quest created its masterpiece, 1993’s Midnight Marauders, whereas Queen Latifah stopped making hip-hop information after she turned a crossover celebrity.
Having thrown down the gauntlet on the toes of hip-hop’s stars, De La Soul tried calling a truce with 1993’s Buhloone Mindstate, an album that break up the distinction between goofy ebullience and acrid critique. The tracks “Ego Trippin’ (Half Two)” and “Eye Patch” hinted at a return to 3 Ft Excessive’s technicolor schoolyard. However there was additionally “I Am I Be,” which, Moore writes, confirmed De La Soul “holding [itself] and [its] collaborators accountable for letting the [Native Tongues] collective falter resulting from egos.” When Posdnuos decried the “tongues who lied and mentioned ‘We’ll be natives to the tip,’” it felt like an elegy for a misplaced trigger.
By the point De La Soul launched Stakes Is Excessive, in 1996, hip-hop had been commandeered by what Moore calls the “shiny-suit” period of Sean Combs and Infamous B.I.G., all gangster posturing and clunky, bottom-feeding beats. Stakes Is Excessive, which featured the newcomers and future trailblazers Frequent and Mos Def, acquired tepid opinions and was largely ignored, a lot to the dismay of Moore, the superfan. “Quietly,” he writes, “De La reassembled their very own imaginative and prescient of what a Native Tongues collective might seem like within the ’90s with … MCs who have been simply youngsters when the primary iteration took form.” That could be so, nevertheless it takes a nation of hundreds of thousands to acknowledge a motion, and the viewers had moved on.
The consignment of a promising musical coalition to oblivion was compounded by a tragic and deeply ironic debacle: The identical parts that made 3 Ft Excessive and Rising so revolutionary despatched the album into perilous authorized limbo. As a result of De La Soul’s label, Tommy Boy Data, hadn’t accounted for some pattern clearances and the band’s contract was outdated, the album was blocked from streaming companies. And so, within the 2000s, the group that had denounced its debut needed to spend years attempting to safe a foothold for its catalog within the digital world. That lastly occurred in 2023. 3 Ft Excessive is by far De La Soul’s most streamed album, and by any customary the band’s biggest achievement. However to hearken to it now, inside the context of De La Soul’s oeuvre, is to be painfully reminded of the street not taken—and of how a musical revolution might be scuttled from inside.
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