De La Soul - Buhloone Mindstate

Charles Hughes celebrates a new reissue of an old favorite for 1993 Week

It’s hard to think of a more welcome musical development in 2023 than the appearance of De La Soul’s records on streaming and downloading services. After a long absence, which exasperated fans and created a new cohort of listeners unfamiliar with the group’s many treasures and pleasures, the official presence of their catalog is both a needed reminder of their talent and an opportunity for it to be (re)discovered in full, epic context. Allow them to reintroduce themselves. It is, of course, deeply sad that Trugoy The Dove didn’t live to see it. But there are two happier commemorations coinciding with the drop. First is the celebration of fifty years of hip-hop, an occasion that would’ve felt so empty without them. And second is the thirtieth anniversary of De La Soul’s crucial 1993 album Buhloone Mindstate. Just months after the original re-appeared, it’s now been re-upped in a birthday edition with a couple of additional tracks.

Buhloone Mindstate might not be as world-altering as 3 Feet High and Rising or as urgent as either De La Soul is Dead or Stakes Is High, but it’s my favorite of their classic run. The productions are lean and clean, eschewing the sample-heavy tapestry of the first album (for reasons both creative and otherwise) and refining the more restrained arrangements of the second to create a crisp boom-bap that allows Posdnous, Maseo, and Trugoy to bounce around the beat with their uniquely playful dexterity. They reference hip-hop colleagues like Public Enemy and Big Daddy Kane, share the mic with colleagues Biz Markie (who gets pride of place on album closer “Stone Age”) and Shortie No Mass, and gesture toward soul, funk, and jazz traditions. Even though they pull the tired “there’s no R&B in this song” thing (most directly on “3 Days Later”), the sounds tell a different and more interesting story. Tracks like “Eye Patch,” “Ego Trippin’ (Part 2),” or “Area” explode out of the speakers with a multilayered musical freshness that belies any easy genre declarations, and horns get a particularly noteworthy place as chorus and complement.

One of the most horn-centered tracks also contains the album’s thesis statement. Throughout Buhloone Mindstate, De La Soul contends with the question of crossover, then near the center of hip-hop’s commercial and cultural conversation. The album is framed by a chant of “it might blow up but it won’t go pop,” the titular “mindstate” that gets its most direct exploration on “Patti Dooke,” a funk showcase featuring contributions from Guru (the same year that his Jazzmatazz remixed the tradition), and three key JBs: Pee Wee Ellis, Maceo Parker, and Fred Wesley. Such declarations of true-school authenticity could get tiresome, even in hands as expert as De La Soul’s, but the framing clip of dialogue slamming the uneven racial geography of crossover in both theory and practice, the track’s artful critique of systemic expropriation, and the track’s segue into the instrumental Parker feature “I Be Blowin’,” keeps it grounded in sharp historical reckoning and vibrant sonic textures. Parker, Ellis, and Wesley appear again on the restless “I Am…I Be,” which adds a blues harmonica and lonesome, Eddie Hazel-style electric guitar to the group’s discussion of surviving struggles from lost loves to predatory “record exec rates.”

In the fade-out to “I Am…I Be,” Busta Rhymes can be heard announcing himself in the background, one of many signals on Buhloone Mindstate of the future then emergent. The same year that Shortie No Mass wrecked the scene on “In The Woods” and another track here, the Philadelphia-based MC appeared on The Roots’ debut Organix, the Philly collective whose sound and spirit almost seems almost to have been conjured by this album’s “Breakadawn.” And, in their warnings about record-company chicanery and their commitment to maintaining community, Buhloone Mindstate signals the central dynamics that would test and reshape the rap world in both mainstream and alternative sectors in the next five years, and probably the next fifty.

The new tracks at the end aren’t revelations, maybe, but they offer a nice coda that both new listeners and old heads will appreciate. “Sh.Fe.MC’s” is an agreeable Native Tongues super-team with A Tribe Called Quest, themselves peaking in the year of Midnight Marauders. “Lovely How I Let My Mind Float” brings both the beat and Biz Markie back. And “Mindstate” echoes with an insistent trance groove that calls back to the party-rocking grooves of hip-hop’s early days and nods forward to electro experimentations to come. Taken together, the ending trio is a brief but welcome addition to an album that remains my top pick from one of the era’s great groups. I’m so glad that it’s easier now to share it with the world and call it into my own listening life. Happy birthday, hip-hop. Happy birthday, Buhloone Mindstate.

If you like what you’re reading here, please think of subscribing to No Fences Review! It’s free for now, although we will be adding a paid tier with exclusive content soon. Also, if you’d like to support our work now, you can hit the blue “Pledge” button on the top-right of your screen to pledge your support now, at either monthly, yearly, or founding-member rates. You’ll be billed when we add the paid option. Thanks!