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Austin McCoy, assistant professor in the Department of History in the West Virginia University Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, first saw De La Soul’s “Me Myself and I” video when he was 8. He’s been a fan ever since.
McCoy’s book, “Living in a D.A.I.S.Y. Age: The Music, Culture, and World De La Soul Made,” traces the group’s influence on hip-hop and pop music, folding in a bit of his own history alongside theirs. Here, he speaks to WVU Stories about what De La Soul has meant to him and how the group changed American music.
Q: What sparked this book?
McCoy: I’ve always loved De La Soul. I’ve taught hip-hop history at West Virginia University and Auburn University, and I’ve been a fan of hip-hop culture and rap music forever.
It was February 2023, my first year teaching at WVU, when I learned David Jolicoeur — Trugoy the Dove — passed away. I was very sad to learn the news. I don’t think I did much planning for class the next day — I just sat and listened to De La Soul for the rest of the night, and tweeted about it.
A week or two later, a publisher reached out and asked to meet because they were trying to publish a book about De La Soul.
Once I agreed to do it, my history training kicked in. Because I had a one-year deadline to write it, there was not much time to do interviews and try to hunt down people. That meant gathering as many primary sources as I could. I hunted down interviews that the group had already done on YouTube. I still had a bunch of issues of my Source magazines from when I was a teenager and all the music on CDs. I was gathering as much stuff as I could and reading about the history of rap music, the history of Black literature, and Black politics.
Q: What makes De La Soul special?
McCoy: De La Soul is in a category with Prince, the Jacksons, Marvin Gaye, and Earth, Wind & Fire. That is because, like those musicians, the artists behind De La Soul were astute students of Black music, and music generally.
In the 1980s, there was a stereotype that rappers and rap producers weren’t as creative because they weren’t playing any traditional instruments. Some accused rappers and producers of “stealing music from other people.” Some Black radio DJs refused to play rap.
But listen to De La Soul’s first album “3 Feet High and Rising,” and you realize the album is an archive of past music, whether pop, jazz or doo-wop.
Posdnous, Trugoy, and Maseo are constantly evolving, experimenting with various styles. They employed jazz artists like Maceo Parker, Pee Wee Ellis, and Fred Wesley to play on “Buhloone Mindstate,” their third album.
Pop music in the United States was very far away from jazz music in the 1990s when “Buhloone Mindstate” came out. De La Soul did not care.
Q: You weave your personal biography into the book. Was that always the plan?
McCoy: As a historian, I’m trained to study a topic from a distance.
But when I started to write my proposal for this book, I thought of the first time I watched De La Soul’s “Me Myself and I” music video when I was 8 years old. I started recounting how I felt, watching these three guys who looked very different from other rap artists.
At that time, most rappers styled themselves like LL Cool J or Run-DMC — Adidas tracksuits, Kangol hats, big glasses, and especially big gold chains. But in De La Soul’s “Me Myself and I” video, Pastenous, Trugoy, and Maseo walk into a classroom wearing colorful shirts, African medallions, and peace signs. They have what was considered at the time very weird haircuts.
They set themselves apart visually, and musically too — De La Soul did not sound like Run-DMC or KRS-One.
That was the first time when I thought, “I like this. I think this is for me.”
Once I had written down that experience, it made sense to keep going. There have been other people who have written books about De La Soul and rap music. But I’m this historian who’s coming out of nowhere, publishing this book about De La Soul. I wanted to make sure that readers, journalists, and music critics understand my relationship to the group.
Q: What was De La Soul’s clash with Tommy Boy Music about, and why does it matter today?
McCoy: In 1989, on their debut album, De La Soul sampled The Turtles. Sampling had been growing in popularity among hip-hop artists throughout the decade, but a dispute emerged between De La Soul and their label, Tommy Boy Records, about whether De La Soul reported the sample. The sample was not cleared, and that led The Turtles to sue De La Soul in one of the most famous lawsuits around sampling.
Then Biz Markie faced a similar lawsuit, and that changed rap’s sound in the ’80s and ’90s. Sample-dense albums like “3 Feet High and Rising,” Beastie Boys’ “Paul’s Boutique,” and Public Enemy’s “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” became way too costly to produce.
Rapid changes in music technology raised questions about ownership. If you can pay a low monthly subscription fee to have almost all recorded pop music in your pocket, who’s getting paid? And who should incur the most risk if samples aren’t legally cleared?
In the 2010s, that became a new point of contention between De La Soul and Tommy Boy. The record label wanted to put De La Soul’s music on streaming, but they wanted De La Soul to earn only 10% of the streaming revenue while being financially responsible for uncleared samples.
De La Soul argued that they produced the music and made the albums, and that others had been profiting from their labor for the last 30 years.
This is where artists like Taylor Swift come in. De La Soul laid down a blueprint for artists like her to embark on creative ways to take back control of their recordings. De La Soul thought: If we produce the music, we should own the music and profit from it.
For 24 hours in 2014, De La Soul gave away their music for free, launching a public media campaign against Tommy Boy and Warner Brothers and communicating with fans directly over email. Their efforts set up a blueprint for artists that may not have ever listened to a De La Soul album but engage fans similarly.
The group’s battles with music streaming are historic in the context of the exploitative contracts that artists, especially Black artists, signed unknowingly throughout the 20th century.
Ultimately, though, De La Soul’s fight against exploitative streaming contracts means that one of the biggest rap groups of the ’90s had disappeared from streaming for years. Before their catalog finally hit streaming platforms in 2023, my students couldn’t buy or stream De La Soul albums unless they had already bought physical copies. The best they could probably do was find a way to download them somewhere or watch videos on YouTube.
Yet De La Soul remained a musical touchstone.
Q: What would you want your students to learn from De La Soul’s story?
McCoy: De La Soul was at the cutting edge of creativity in music and pop culture. They were willing to experiment at a time when it wasn’t safe for rappers to experiment. And they wanted total artistic and creative control over what they produced.
Rapping, music production, and performing were their whole identity, their way of understanding the world around them: It was their ethos.
“Me Myself and I” was their biggest hit, but they recorded it only at Tommy Boy’s insistence, and they spent a long time trashing the song in their concerts. They developed this oppositional approach to pop music, though they became really good at producing popular rap music. It’s a tension few artists have ever replicated. De La Soul was always about trying not to get swept up in the mainstream, even during the times when they defined the mainstream.
Their albums create whole worlds, are self-contained stories — fantastical, surreal, but based on their own experiences and real cultural moments: David Koresh and the Branch Davidian compound, the federal Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, the Million Man March, the murder of Tupac Shakur.
Many of Drake’s albums and much of J. Cole’s work or Nicki Minaj’s music wouldn’t exist without “3 Feet High and Rising.” It’s hard to imagine where that imagination comes from without De La Soul.
Interview by Katie Short / WVU Stories.
