Rapper Trugoy of 'De La Soul' R.I.P.
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ASPartOfMe
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Joined: 25 Aug 2013
Age: 66
Gender: Male
Posts: 34,668
Location: Long Island, New York
13 Feb 2023, 8:20 pm
De La Soul’s Trugoy Is Dead, and With Him Goes One of Music’s Greatest Groups
Quote:
David Jolicoeur, better known to music fans as Trugoy the Dove, Plug Two, or most recently simply Dave, died on Sunday at age 54. It was shocking news that meant that we had just lost one third of De La Soul, one of the great American musical groups of the past 50 years, and losing one third of De La Soul feels an awful lot like losing De La Soul itself. He is survived by fellow group members Kelvin “Posdnuos” Mercer and Vincent “DJ Maseo” Mason, but right now it is impossible to imagine the group continuing in any recognizable way without the man who first introduced himself to the world 35 years ago with the memorable lines “Dazed at the sight of a method/ Dive beneath the depth of a never-ending verse/ Gasping and swallowing every last letter/ Vocalized liquid holds the quench of your thirst.”
It’s hard to overstate the impact that De La Soul had on hip-hop music and particularly what would come to be known as “alternative” hip-hop music, a category that De La has a decent claim to having straight-up invented. De La Soul debuted in 1988 with “Plug Tunin’,” an esoteric and striking single that was recorded when all three members were still teenagers and that was produced by Prince Paul, an erstwhile deejaying prodigy previously best known as a member of Stetsasonic. In March 1989, De La Soul released their debut LP, 3 Feet High and Rising, an astonishingly creative album full of weird characters, invented lexicons, surreal skits, and brilliantly left-field samples. It was a work that, in the landscape of late 1980s hip-hop, seemed to arrive both completely out of nowhere and utterly fully formed.
3 Feet High received rave reviews from the press and became an unexpected commercial hit, reaching No. 1 on the Billboard R&B Albums chart and winning the top spot in Village Voice’s annual Pazz & Jop critics’ poll. At a time when hip-hop had become a lightning rod for controversy, De La’s self-effacing eccentricity presented itself as something entirely different from the envelope-pushing provocations of N.W.A and the political militancy of Public Enemy.
The success of 3 Feet High and Rising was a blessing and a curse for the four guys who’d made the album. Their label, Tommy Boy Records, ran a shrewd ad campaign that clearly aimed to promote the record as rap for people who don’t think they like rap. Some of the positive reviews were laced with a similar sort of condescension: Hey, these guys are great! Nothing like those other rappers. De La Soul quickly began to chafe at their image as cuddly, quirky hippies.
De La Soul’s follow-up to 3 Feet High reflected their growing unease with this image, clearly evident in that album’s title. De La Soul Is Dead was released in 1991, and arrived as a sprawlingly ambitious, scabrously funny work, full of sharp edges and darkened corners while still maintaining the exuberant adventurousness that defined 3 Feet High. It didn’t sell as well as its predecessor but is, to my ears, a better album.
De La Soul Is Dead felt like a reset and a revitalization of the whole De La Soul project, and it liberated the group to return in 1993 with their best album yet, Buhloone Mindstate. At 30 years old, Buhloone Mindstate remains one of those sui generis masterpieces that defies categorization or even easy description: There’s live instrumentation to go along with Michael Jackson samples, righteously indignant songs about the injustices of the record industry mixed in with extensive ruminations on area codes. It’s the best album De La Soul ever made and one of the best hip-hop albums of the 1990s.
In 1996 they returned with Stakes Is High, an album that saw them embracing a new role as hip-hop elder statesman (despite all still being in their 20s). It was an album that looked back on their own career and surveyed the landscape of hip-hop as a genre, past and present, in ways that were sometimes nostalgic and sometimes critical but always forged with love. After a four-year gap, they followed that up with 2000’s Art Official Intelligence: Mosaic Thump, the most uneven album of their career that included one of their best-ever singles, the Redman-featuring “Oooh.”
Much of the magic of De La Soul’s best music came from the interplay of Posdnuous and Trugoy.
It’s hard to overstate the impact that De La Soul had on hip-hop music and particularly what would come to be known as “alternative” hip-hop music, a category that De La has a decent claim to having straight-up invented. De La Soul debuted in 1988 with “Plug Tunin’,” an esoteric and striking single that was recorded when all three members were still teenagers and that was produced by Prince Paul, an erstwhile deejaying prodigy previously best known as a member of Stetsasonic. In March 1989, De La Soul released their debut LP, 3 Feet High and Rising, an astonishingly creative album full of weird characters, invented lexicons, surreal skits, and brilliantly left-field samples. It was a work that, in the landscape of late 1980s hip-hop, seemed to arrive both completely out of nowhere and utterly fully formed.
3 Feet High received rave reviews from the press and became an unexpected commercial hit, reaching No. 1 on the Billboard R&B Albums chart and winning the top spot in Village Voice’s annual Pazz & Jop critics’ poll. At a time when hip-hop had become a lightning rod for controversy, De La’s self-effacing eccentricity presented itself as something entirely different from the envelope-pushing provocations of N.W.A and the political militancy of Public Enemy.
The success of 3 Feet High and Rising was a blessing and a curse for the four guys who’d made the album. Their label, Tommy Boy Records, ran a shrewd ad campaign that clearly aimed to promote the record as rap for people who don’t think they like rap. Some of the positive reviews were laced with a similar sort of condescension: Hey, these guys are great! Nothing like those other rappers. De La Soul quickly began to chafe at their image as cuddly, quirky hippies.
De La Soul’s follow-up to 3 Feet High reflected their growing unease with this image, clearly evident in that album’s title. De La Soul Is Dead was released in 1991, and arrived as a sprawlingly ambitious, scabrously funny work, full of sharp edges and darkened corners while still maintaining the exuberant adventurousness that defined 3 Feet High. It didn’t sell as well as its predecessor but is, to my ears, a better album.
De La Soul Is Dead felt like a reset and a revitalization of the whole De La Soul project, and it liberated the group to return in 1993 with their best album yet, Buhloone Mindstate. At 30 years old, Buhloone Mindstate remains one of those sui generis masterpieces that defies categorization or even easy description: There’s live instrumentation to go along with Michael Jackson samples, righteously indignant songs about the injustices of the record industry mixed in with extensive ruminations on area codes. It’s the best album De La Soul ever made and one of the best hip-hop albums of the 1990s.
In 1996 they returned with Stakes Is High, an album that saw them embracing a new role as hip-hop elder statesman (despite all still being in their 20s). It was an album that looked back on their own career and surveyed the landscape of hip-hop as a genre, past and present, in ways that were sometimes nostalgic and sometimes critical but always forged with love. After a four-year gap, they followed that up with 2000’s Art Official Intelligence: Mosaic Thump, the most uneven album of their career that included one of their best-ever singles, the Redman-featuring “Oooh.”
Much of the magic of De La Soul’s best music came from the interplay of Posdnuous and Trugoy.
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