De La Soul Is Finally Streaming—Here’s Your Guide to Their Best Work
Every De La Soul album is an event. Put one on, even decades after its release, and it still barrels out of the speakers, bursting with surreal vignettes, psychedelic montages of sound, and erudite bars pitched halfway between a joke and a cosmic imperative. De La Soul records grab you by the ears through sheer strength of narrative and density of ideas, as funny as they are abstract. The Long Island trio’s 1989 debut 3 Feet High And Rising, which wove kaleidoscopic samples into pop smashes like “Me Myself and I,” is credited with charting a path away from the realism of hardcore rap, beginning with the Native Tongues collective and continuing through sampledelic alt-rock, Rawkus-style backpack rap in the aughts, and the everything-goes microgenre rush of the 2010s. Hit play on any of their records and you can hear this narrative play out; a prescient idea of the future of music as told through the different eras of De La Soul.
That’s assuming, of course, that you even had access to those records. Of the group’s eight albums, six have been withheld from streaming services until this week. The reason why is both complex and not. When De La were crafting their early albums with producer Prince Paul, sampling was still a nascent art form, meaning the rigorous sample-clearing process artists know and loathe today hadn’t yet been codified. As such, they were one of the first artists successfully sued for repurposing previously recorded material, thanks to this 12-second lift from the Turtles. Mind that this is just one sample on an album composed almost entirely of them, from a discography famed for the density and invention of its sampling. Clearing all of those samples in a landscape that had evolved to monetize every microscopic lift proved too convoluted for the suits at Warner Music to stomach, so the records languished out of print.
The not-complex version: record-label bullshit. Even when De La’s former label finally announced in 2019 that their discography would be heading to streaming services, it was in a shaky legal deal that would offer only “pennies” of revenue to the group. They balked, and, after public outcry, the deal was scuppered, delaying the releases even further. Hopes dimmed. Given their legal notoriety to begin with, it seemed this last holdout on the streaming era may be permanent, a particularly cruel fate given the way their work presaged the hyperlinked, post-genre landscape of the internet itself.