De La Soul: A conversation with author Dave Heaton
Charles talks to the author of a new book on the legendary group
I love De La Soul, so it was a thrill to talk with Dave Heaton about his new book on the group and their continuing impact. A writer and critic based in Kansas City, Heaton offers a thorough and engaging discussion of why the group matters, why he loves them, and what their career tells us about hip-hop and popular music more broadly. Thanks to Dave for taking part, and be sure to check out his work.
CH: So let’s start with an obvious but also potentially complicated question: Why De La Soul? What was it that drew you to them and their catalog?
DH: I felt like their story wasn’t being told. This was in 2022, when the bulk of their music was not available on streaming services or part of the vinyl reissue trend. De La Soul seemed to be slipping out of the public consciousness. In hip-hop histories they would be a footnote, part of a “positive” hip-hop versus gangsta rap stroryline – a narrative that didn’t fully represent where they were coming from and what they were trying to accomplish. I wanted a book that tried to convey the full story of the group, and better place them within the history of the genre, and popular music overall. I was writing the book I wished I could read.
Biographical writing isn’t what I think of as my forte. What I enjoy most about music writing is the analytical side. If I was going to write a more straightforward biography, which was the ask from the publisher, it needed to be about a group I truly cared about and was ready to immerse myself in while researching and writing the book. De La Soul was that group. I was a teenager when I first saw the “Potholes in My Lawn” video, bought their album on cassette and was obsessed with it. They were the first group I wrote a review of, in 1993, and the first group I interviewed (briefly, in 1996). They loom large for me, for their wild creativity at the outset, and how they evolved over time. I think of De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest the way people from another era talk about the Beatles and the Stones, as the groups that mattered. Yet their story hadn’t been told in a way that was easy to access or did service to their legacy.
As I was writing the book, it became about the present moment too – with the 2023 passing of Dave Jolicoeur (RIP) and the business deal that finally brought their music back to the public at large. They say their music is of the past, present, and future at once, and that was on my mind while writing. It felt like I was trying to capture all of that in this slim book. To understand their past while keeping up with the ways their story is still changing.
CH: Early on, and throughout the book, you center the collaborative process at the core of the band’s work. (I loved your observation that their albums usually feature “the voices of friends who happened to be in the studio while they were recording.”) How did that process of collaboration define their work, and how did it change over the course of their albums?
DH: Collaboration is central to how they came to exist. They were friends playing around with music together after school, for fun, learning how to do what they saw happening around them but bringing their own interests and personalities to it. They didn’t think they were starting a group, or a career, they were just creating together. When they met Prince Paul and bonded with him over music, it was a professional step forward and like adding another brain. We talk about the Native Tongues as a collective or movement. But really they just made friends with groups they felt aligned with, and would invite them to hang out. The studio sessions were in a relaxed environment that felt like someone’s home. If anyone in the room suggested something cool, even as a joke, they’d try it out and build from there. It was an inclusive, freewheeling type of collaboration but also like a scientific process of testing and experimenting.
Many voices are built into the fabric of the first two albums. De La Soul came to view other people’s voices almost like instruments or samples, that they could utilize. You hear it clearly on the third album Buhloone Mindstate, with Shortie No Mass. She was included for what her voice would bring to their sound, how it’d expand the vocal palette of their music. By Stakes Is High and beyond, the guests are closer to the standard practice of ‘features.’ Yet the group would plan out and even write rhymes for many of the guests. It came from them listening to a track and thinking, ‘do you know who’d sound good on this?’, and then seeing if they could get that person. It’s a different sort of collaboration, more engineered or orchestrated, towards each guest’s strengths. On Anonymous Nobody, collaboration was the concept, and an act of becoming part of a whole.
CH: I was really struck by how you placed the group in the context of “nerd culture,” something that gets talked about (and celebrated) a lot these days but doesn’t often include De La Soul as part of its larger story. What do you think the relationship is between the band and, well, being nerdy, and how do you hear it on the albums?
DH: Well, the members of De La Soul, and Prince Paul, have always embraced their individuality, and they each have their own obsessive collectors’ tendencies, related to pop culture especially. The sampling on the first two albums is one way it comes across – just the wide variety of sources they pull from and the strange juxtapositions. There’s also something nerdy about their sense of humor, the way they turned inside jokes into something that sounded cool on record. They came across to listeners – partly from the way they dressed and presented themselves in videos – as outsiders; as intellectual, sensitive, odd. Questlove has talked about how his life changed when De La Soul got popular, because his bullies understood him better. They could relate his nerdiness to someone they saw on TV – ‘oh, I see, you’re like De La Soul’. Like, ‘oh, nerds can be cool.’
I will say, I think this side of De La Soul gets exaggerated or generalized as them being ‘alternative’ rap or being in opposition to their peers. They come from an era of hip-hop filled with individuals and groups that had their own personalities and styles. It was a rich time, artistically. It wasn’t as simple as the media narrative or historical narrative can make it seem. A big part of their story is De La being continually typecast, straightjacketed to a particular image by the media or listeners or the industry, and them rebelling hard against it.
CH: You trace how the group engages with the complicated relationship between art and commerce, finding ways to hear their evolving position in that story on nearly every album. That’s such a central hip-hop dynamic – it’s even near the core of the recent Drake-Kendrick Lamar beef – but De La Soul addresses it through some unique and compelling ways. What do you think De La can teach us about the relationship between creative work and commercial realities?
DH: Part of why their first album is always held up as their classic is because of the creative purity to it, before they encountered as many of the realities of the industry. I was fascinated by the specifics of that creative relationship – the way Prince Paul would get them to follow any idea through to its conclusion before deciding to use it or not. My book barely scratches the surface on that approach, I’d love for someone to do a deeper chronicle of it. As you listen through the albums you can hear them becoming angry, and then cynical and jaded, about what it means to be a professional musician. And then they settle into a relationship with that, even finding some solace in the idea that what they do is work for money (see The Grind Date, where work is the concept).
I don’t know if I can sum up a lesson they teach us, exactly, because it feels more like a continual push-and-pull between unbridled creativity and commerce. They’ve said all they wanted was to hear their songs on the radio, they had no big expectations for success. But they’ve also said that money always mattered; they weren’t trying to be ‘underground’ just for the sake of it. There are specific points in their career where they felt like they were being pushed to sacrifice their art in pursuit of a hit – yet overall, they also built a discography marked by independence and continually stuck to their guns, so to speak. They’ve called out racism in the industry, the ways young Black creatives like themselves get taken advantage of, yet they still have positive things to say about the freedom Tommy Boy gave them, even after the years of contractual wrangling that certainly impacted their profits from music.
CH: Related to lessons, De La Soul also obviously has a particularly close (and sometimes) contentious relationship to technology. Advancements in sampling helped create their sound but also led to them becoming legal targets, for example, and their later absence from streaming platforms rendered them largely absent from the digital-age canon until very recently. Similar to the last question: What does De La Soul teach us about technology, particularly in the hip-hop era?
DH: Hip-hop is tied to technology, from the start – in the literal sense of using record players and stereo equipment to create a new genre of music. I am fascinated by the stories both DJ Maseo and Prince Paul tell about their primitive first attempts to DJ, as little kids. They were taking cast-off music equipment and experimenting with it in a DIY way. De La Soul’s first album grew out of these explorations of what technology can do with old records.
As technology changed – not to mention the legal ramifications of creative technology use – De La Soul modified what they were doing to match. Their music stayed as surprising and strange even as the sampling approach was more reined-in. They’ve always been a technology-aware type of group, and open to trying new things. The unfortunate thing, as you allude to, is that when it comes to digital as a music format, they missed out on entire technology eras because of the details of contracts they signed as young men, at a time when they and their label didn’t anticipate the way recording formats would change over time. It’s less about technology than the way corporate and legal forces try to maintain control over it. I don’t know that there’s one concise lesson De La Soul teaches us about technology, but their story is connected to, and was influenced by, changes in technology from start to finish.
CH: What’s your favorite De La Soul album, and why?
DH: The De La-Prince Paul collaborations (the first three albums) were original and influential, and I love them through and through. But my truly favorite De La Soul album, as a listener, is Stakes Is High. It’s talked about as their most serious or even bitter album, and it might be, but there’s still playfulness, humor, and some of their best hooks. What appeals to me most is how good they sound on it. In trying to be more direct and less obtuse, in lyrics and sound, they hit some groove that just feels so perfect, like all of the skills they had been sharpening over the years came together in a new and different way. That said, listeners new to their music should start with their first album and listen through them in order. There is an evolution that matters. That’s another reason I wrote the book, to try and capture the whole journey. A pet peeve I have is when I read a book about a musician and my favorite album is given just a paragraph, because it’s not considered one of the important ones.
CH: What’s your favorite De La deep cut, and why? What’s one track that nobody should miss when exploring their catalog?
DH: A favorite deep cut is “Ego Trippin' (Part Three) (Egoristic Mix),” from the cassette single for “Ego Trippin’ (Part Two).” It isn’t really a continuation or a remix, but its own song. It’s a gem, with nonstop rhymes back-and-forth between Pos and Dave, boasting while touching on their past, on hip-hop’s roots, on life lessons they’ve learned and haven’t. It’s sort of a prequel to Stakes Is High, in the sense that it’s produced by one of that album’s producers (Spearhead X) and has a lyric they use on that album (“De La Soul is here to stay…like racism”).
For the one De La Soul track nobody should miss, “I Am I Be” is one of the great pieces of music of the ‘90s; there was nothing like it at that point in hip-hop, and not a lot since that captures the same type of reflective spirit; personal introspection that’s also about family, community and legacy. Their music in general feels relevant still, no matter the number of years that have passed. This is one of those songs that seems especially timeless.
CH: Finally, we always like to ask: What’s one thing you’ve read recently – music-related or otherwise – that’s really exciting you or speaking to you in some way?
DH: I’m usually reading two books at a time. One will be a fiction book that’s bare-bones and fast-paced, like a hard-boiled crime novel or a horror novel. And the other will be a more thought-provoking non-fiction book about music or art or film. This summer, on and off, I read the fantastic book, Directed by Yasujirō Ozu by Shiguéhiko Hasumi. It’s an influential work of film criticism, published in Japan in 1983 but in an English translation just this year. What I love about it is how detailed and thoughtful an analysis of Ozu’s films it is – dissecting the depiction of everything from weather to house construction and the physical stances and expressions of the actors. At the same time, it calls into question a lot of the conventional wisdom about Ozu, perpetuated by Western critics who filter the films through their own cultural reference points and biases. It was a slow read for me but really powerful. The best music books I’ve read lately are Ann Powers’ remarkable Joni Mitchell consideration Traveling, which I know is on your radar, and Darrell M. McNeill’s 33 1/3 Series book on the Isley Brothers (3+3), which makes a compelling case for them as one of the great rock bands.
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