How De La Soul Changed the World

Marcus J. Moore, author of 2020’s The Butterfly Effect: How Kendrick Lamar Ignited the Soul of Black America, initially assumed it was too late to follow it with a book about one of his favorite hip-hop groups of all time, De La Soul. “My first thought was, ‘Oh, well, clearly I can’t do that, because there’s already been a book written,’” he says on the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now. “And then much to my surprise, there wasn’t one.” (To hear the whole episode, go here for the podcast provider of your choice, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play below).

Late last year, Moore published High and Rising: A Book About De La Soul, which combines a definitive look at the group’s story with memoiristic glimpses of his own life. But when the surviving members of De La Soul, Maseo and Posdnuos, learned of the unauthorized book, they posted on social media that they didn’t support it, hinting darkly at “legal options” — which, in turn, led to widespread condemnation of the group’s actions from journalists who felt they were acting on a fundamental misunderstanding of the publishing industry. 

“It was disappointing, because they were quite literally judging a book by its cover,” says Moore, “without having read the book.” But he came to understand the post as a “trauma response” from a group who felt battered by various industry battles — most damagingly, disputes over clearance of samples led to the exclusion of their catalog from streaming and download services until 2023. “When you’ve been fighting against an industry for 35 years,” he adds, “then naturally anybody coming along that you feel is trying to take from your legacy, you’re going to make them the enemy.”

Elsewhere in the episode, Moore and host Brian Hiatt go through De La Soul’s entire story, and make a case for all the great later albums overshadowed by the trio’s legendary debut, 1989’s 3 Feet High and Rising, particularly 1993’s Buhloone Mindstate and 1996’s Stakes Is High.

Moore also details how De La Soul’s suburban origins shaped the light, endlessly playful approach of that album. “They didn’t have the pressure of living in New York City,” Moore says. “In Amityville, you have a yard, you can sit by the water… you have more space and time to let your brain create… When you think about De La Soul, when they came out in the late Eighties, you could pretty much guess what the other music was going to sound like. It was all different, but it was all hyper masculine… Whereas with De La, quite honestly, they showed different sides of black masculinity.”

Moore suggests that much of the controversy over the group’s harder-hitting sophomore album, De La Soul Is Dead, arrived “because it didn’t appeal as openly to white listeners. I feel like the difference is quite literally between Black and white… On De La Soul Is Dead, I feel like they reminded listeners that they were indeed Black men.”

The absence of the group’s catalog from streaming was, on one level, a cultural tragedy, but Moore suggests it also had its advantages. “Mystery is marketing,” Moore says. “Indirectly, De La Soul created this sort of mixtape trading community where before the music came back to streaming, where you may know somebody who has the MP3s of De La Soul Is Dead and they’ll just kind of give it to you on the low.”

Moore emphasizes De La Soul’s artistic courage. “It’s the risk-takers that ultimately live forever,” Moore says. “And De La Soul were the ultimate risk-takers. They took a lot of bullets. They took a lot of arrows from the culture, but 30 years later here we are talking about them.”

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