De La Soul

Amityville

De La Soul came out of Amityville on Long Island. Kelvin "Posdnuos" Mercer, David "Trugoy the Dove" Jolicoeur and Vincent "Maseo" Mason became friends at Amityville Memorial High School, as did Paul Huston, the future Prince Paul, who played in Stetsasonic. Trugoy explained his name by saying that it is "yogurt" backwards and that he ate a lot of it. The three built a demo of Plug Tunin' from a live routine over the Impeach the President drum break, using a cassette deck, a Casio RZ-1 drum machine and a rare doo-wop 45 that Mercer took from his father's collection. Prince Paul heard it and took them to re-record it at Calliope Studios, and Tommy Boy signed them. Tommy Boy later offered $500 to the first person who could identify its hidden sample.

The daisy age

3 Feet High and Rising arrived in 1989 wrapped in a concept: the trio were transmitting live from Mars through microphone plugs, between skits framed as a quiz show. The skits led many to credit the record with popularizing the hip-hop skit. Its samples ran from funk and soul to doo-wop, psychedelic rock and children's music, and its sleeve, by Toby Mott of the Grey Organisation, was covered in hand-drawn flowers for the D.A.I.S.Y. Age, short for Da Inner Sound, Y'all. Late in the sessions Tommy Boy's Tom Silverman asked for a radio record, and Maseo suggested sampling (Not Just) Knee Deep, which became Me Myself and I. The singles also included The Magic Number, Eye Know, Say No Go and Buddy, the last made with fellow Native Tongues members.

Alexis Petridis of the Guardian called it a transatlantic platinum seller that spawned four hit singles. Critics in the Village Voice's 1989 Pazz & Jop poll ranked it first. The press kept calling the group hippies, a label they disliked. On their first national tour they came to dread playing Me Myself and I, and Trugoy wrote "De La Soul is Dead" over the tour dates on a whiteboard in their management's office.

Away from the daisies

De La Soul Is Dead (1991) answered with a smashed flowerpot on the cover and skits in which bullies steal and trash a cassette of the group's music. It took on drug addiction and abuse, and its lead single, Ring Ring Ring (Ha Ha Hey), was a hit across Europe. Reviews were divided, and Alexis Petridis later called it the connoisseur's album of choice. Buhloone Mindstate (1993), their last record with Prince Paul, brought in the jazz veterans Maceo Parker, Fred Wesley and Pee Wee Ellis. It was a critical success and, at the time, the group's biggest commercial failure. During early sessions for Stakes Is High (1996), the group and Prince Paul decided to part ways. The group mostly produced that album themselves, and Mos Def was introduced to a wider audience on it.

Later years

In 2000 they announced a trilogy called Art Official Intelligence. Two parts appeared, Mosaic Thump (2000) and AOI: Bionix (2001), and the third never did, amid a struggle with Tommy Boy. The Grind Date followed in 2004 on Sanctuary. In 2005 they guested on Gorillaz's Feel Good Inc., which won a Grammy for Best Pop Vocal Collaboration, their first Grammy win. A Kickstarter in 2015 passed its $110,000 goal in under ten hours and paid for And the Anonymous Nobody... (2016), which was nominated for Best Rap Album.

For years the first six albums were missing from streaming services, because their samples had been cleared only for physical media. Tommy Boy bought the catalogue in 2017 and was itself sold to Reservoir Media in 2021. After a year of sample licensing that began in January 2022, the albums reached streaming on 3 March 2023. Trugoy the Dove died on 12 February 2023, aged 54. Later in 2023 the group played the Royal Albert Hall in London with guests including Yasiin Bey, Dres of Black Sheep and Damon Albarn. Cabin in the Sky, their tenth album and first since his death, came out in November 2025 on Mass Appeal, with production from DJ Premier, Prince Paul and Pete Rock. Maseo has said the first three albums were Paul's as much as theirs.