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De La Soul VibeZ (R.I.P Trugoy the Dove)

Trugoy the Dove died in February 2023, weeks before De La Soul's catalogue finally reached streaming after a fifteen-year legal deadlock. Thirty-one tracks, and a difficult kind of timing.

Rest in peace, Dave

David Jude Jolicoeur — Trugoy the Dove, later just Dave — formed De La Soul in Amityville, Long Island with Posdnuos and Maseo. Their 1989 debut 3 Feet High and Rising, produced with Prince Paul, remains one of the most inventive records in the history of the genre: dense with samples from Steely Dan to Johnny Cash to French language instruction tapes, funny, formally strange, and entirely uninterested in the postures rap was expected to strike.

The consequence of that invention was a curse. The sample clearance landscape changed after Gilbert O'Sullivan sued Biz Markie in 1991, and De La Soul's early catalogue — built on hundreds of uncleared fragments — became legally impossible to license. For roughly fifteen years, their most important albums were unavailable on any streaming service. The situation was finally resolved and the catalogue arrived on 3 March 2023.

Trugoy died on 12 February 2023, sixteen days before.

What to listen for

"Me Myself and I" is the hit, built on Funkadelic, and the record that made them famous while announcing they were tired of the hippie framing the press had imposed on them.

"Eye Know" uses Otis Redding and Steely Dan and is one of the sunniest things in rap.

The later collaborations show the range. "It Runs Through Me" with Tom Misch is genuinely lovely, "Drawn" with Little Dragon is the strangest, and "Memory of..." with Estelle and Pete Rock is the most soulful.

"Greyhounds" with Usher and "Whoodeeni" with 2 Chainz show them working comfortably across generations, and "Right Back" with Slum Village connects them to Detroit and to J Dilla's world.

"Trying People" and "Pain" with Snoop Dogg are from and the Anonymous Nobody..., the crowdfunded album they made from live band recordings specifically to avoid the sample problem.

Go deeper

3 Feet High and Rising (1989), De La Soul Is Dead (1991) and Stakes Is High (1996) are the three essential albums, and all of them are finally, easily available.

Prince Paul's production catalogue — including the Handsome Boy Modeling School project represented here — is one of rap's great bodies of work.

And for the movement they belonged to: the Native Tongues — A Tribe Called Quest, the Jungle Brothers, Queen Latifah, Black Sheep. Between them they made rap a place where it was permissible to be curious.

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