How De La Soul created one of the most radical albums of all time
David Jolicoeur, who has died aged 54, changed the face of rap music. As a member of hip hop trio De La Soul, he released the 1989 album 3 Feet High and Rising – a record that altered the course and perception of the genre thanks to its novel message of radical positivity.
Hip hop music in the late 1980s was dominated by the violent and confrontational sub-genre known as gangsta rap. Los Angeles-based N.W.A. had caused widespread moral panic in 1988 with their album Straight Outta Compton, which contained the track F-ck the Police, while rapper Ice-T’s debut album Rhyme Pays contained the song 6 ‘N the Mornin’, about being woken by a knock on the door by the L.A.P.D (gun shot blasts follow). Gangsta rap was hardcore, it was brutal and to mainstream listeners it was incendiary and dangerous.
But De La Soul radically changed the game with 3 Feet High and Rising. Their debut album was a gloriously sunny and psychedelic slice of hip hop that featured fluorescent cartoon daisies on the front. Swimming against the gangsta rap tide like a day-glo eel, the album contained an array of pop and funk samples – including Hall & Oates’ I Can’t Go For That (on Say No Go), Bob Dorough’s Three is the Magic Number (The Magic Number) and Funkadelic’s Not Just Knee Deep (Me Myself and I).
Famed US critic Robert Christgau compared its sound to the arrival of synth-heavy new wave music after the angry snarl of punk. “Musically mutinous” was how writer Dan Charnas neatly summed it up in The Big Payback, his comprehensive history of hip hop. Even the album’s name, a pun on Johnny Cash’s 1959 song Five Feet High and Rising, pointed to a band looking beyond established rap boundaries. The album spawned the phrase Daisy Age hip hop. In its own way, 3 Feet High and Rising remains one of the most revolutionary records of all time.
De La Soul comprised three high school friends from Long Island: Kelvin Mercer (known by the stage name Posdnuos), Vincent Mason Jr (Maseo) and Jolicoeur (Trugoy the Dove). They’d formed in 1988 with a plan to do things differently. They wore floral print shirts and peace medallions. “Nothing about this group looked or sounded anything like the popular rap of the day. Even their name spoke of the exotic,” Charnas wrote.
More influenced by jazz than run-ins with the police, De La Soul became the leading lights among an Afrocentric group of musicians that also included A Tribe Called Quest, the Jungle Brothers and Queen Latifah. These rappers formed a loose collective called Native Tongues with an emphasis on spreading “positive vibes”.
Native Tongues were themselves inspired by South Bronx DJ and producer Afrika Bambaataa, who in the late 1970s headed a group of socially and politically aware rappers, artists and break dancers under an umbrella known as the Universal Zulu Nation. “We had a natural love for the art and a natural love for each other… Bottom line, it was just having fun,” Jolicoeur said of Native Tongues in 2014.
The music was dizzyingly adventurous. While gangsta rap (which was a largely West Coast genre) used plenty of samples of other people’s music, De La Soul cast their net in unexpected directions. Hall & Oates, for example, were the kind of Billboard-friendly pop stars, and arguably has-beens by the late-1980s, that you’d least expect to find on a rap album.
The beats were less hard and the music was more expansive than in other rap of the time. Produced by Prince Paul from the group Stetsasonic, the 3 Feet High and Rising had that all-elusive crossover appeal to mainstream rock audiences. The band’s A&R man at Tommy Boy Records was an energetic young white kid from New York’s Lower East Side who had been friends with the Beastie Boys, and so he understood that rock fans were open to hip hop. Thanks in part to Ross’s efforts, De La Soul became MTV regulars. The album quickly sold half a million copies in the US. In the UK, it spent 26 weeks in the Top 40. It peaked at number 13 in early 1990, wedged between arch-mainstream fodder Rod Stewart and Wet Wet Wet.
The Daisy Age didn’t last long. Perhaps jaded by the unrelenting positivity, De La Soul’s second album in 1991 was a more sombre and serious affair. Its title De La Soul is Dead said it all. The group also got in hot water due to their sampling. One of the tracks on 3 Feet High and Rising was a skit called Transmitting Live from Mars. It featured a 12-second uncleared sample of a song by the Turtles, who sued the band for $2.5 million. Peace and love clearly didn’t extend to the copyright courts.
But with 3 Feet High and Rising, De La Soul undeniably took rap into a radical new direction, however briefly. Jolicoeur introduced hip hop to a new audience for a second time a decade and a half later when he co-wrote and appeared on the Gorillaz track Feel Good Inc. with Damon Albarn. The song – an exuberant crossover of pop and rap – won a Grammy, reached the top ten in 15 countries, and remains a staple in the encore of Gorillaz’ live shows. His death is a huge loss. “This one hurts bad,” wrote rapper Busta Rhymes.
There is a sad irony about Jolicoeur’s death. Years of legal wrangling over their prodigious sampling meant that De La Soul’s first six albums remained unreleased on streaming platforms. But the group announced in January that their entire catalogue would finally be available on streaming services from March 3, taking Daisy Age hip hop to a whole new audience. “Alexa, what’s the magic number? Full catalog [sic] release 3.3.2023,” the band teased on Twitter at the start of the year. It’s a bitter blow that Jolicoeur will not be around to witness a whole new generation falling for the joyous charm of his unforgettable music.
