Stone Age: De La Soul’s Buhloone Mindstate Turns 30

Looking back on the rap trio’s most creative album

September 21, 2023February 19, 2024 Ted Miller 0 Comments 1993, Biz Markie, Buhloone Mindstate, De La Soul, DJ Maseo, Hip-hop, Maceo Parker, Maseo, Posdnuos, Shortie No Mass, Trugoy The Dove

De La Soul Buhloone Mindstate, Tommy Boy Records 1993

By any reasonable standard, De La Soul had nothing to rebel against, not least their own selves.

And it’s not that Maseo, Posdnuos, and the dearly departed Trugoy don’t take pride in their output. It’s just that, well, if one of rap’s most imaginative and innovative groups could be seen as antagonistic in any way, they’ve spent a lot of time trying to shed their skins.

Once 1989’s Pazz & Jop Critics’ Poll-winning debut 3 Feet High and Rising established them as giddy weirdos (“the new wave to Public Enemy’s punk,” Robert Christgau put it), the group wasted no time shedding their day-glo “D.A.I.S.Y. Age” image. First was 1991’s more esoteric and morose follow-up De La Soul Is Dead, retaining a special cult among rap bloggers, which was in turn retconned once again for 1993’s playful, groovy Buhloone Mindstate, an album that foregrounded live instruments and has its own somewhat different subset of megafans.

As the terminology for their specific demographic shifted from “alternative hip-hop” to “conscious rap” three years later, the group’s sound took on its starkest, most minimalist configuration yet on Stakes Is High, which was most notable for the breakout contributions of Jay Dee, who’d later take on iconic status towards the end of his life under the more well-known metonym J Dilla.

Fed up with the boxes these minor legends were continually being put in, they presented their most pop-ready material ever with the two volumes of the aborted Art Official Intelligence trilogy in 2000 and 2001, sampling “Wonderful Christmas” blatantly and making their last gasp on the charts with more party-hearty fare featuring Redman and Chaka Khan.

The group released a couple more albums very sporadically without making much of a splash to anyone who doesn’t treasure their MF DOOM collections on their own. With Gorillaz in 2005, they had their biggest hit ever, though, “Feel Good Inc.,” the fitting pinnacle of a weird and bittersweet career cut probably short this year when Trugoy d.b.a Dave Jolicoeur passed in February, followed merely weeks later by the tragically belated event of their legally complicated and innumerably sampled music finally hitting Spotify after years of limbo.

De La Soul seem like level dudes, and they’re some of the all-time sanest and most regular guys in rap music, but they’d be forgiven for always having a chip on their shoulder if you view all these metamorphoses as an inability to settle into a comfortable identity. Pathologically not wanting to be pigeonholed is a serious artist’s prerogative even if women like Sinead O’Connor and Miley Cyrus have been mocked for constantly 180’ing in particular.

It’s just remarkable through these phases how many different kinds of cult rap that De La Soul have revealed existed in the first place. Prankish, silly inside-joke rap at the height of their of their alliance with the Native Tongues (Jungle Brothers, Queen Latifah, A Tribe Called Quest). Inside-baseball meta-rap with a dark, industry-subverting undercurrent. Tribe-like jazz-rap incorporating live musicians. Beats with little more than bass and deep-crate dust on them. Future-funk meeting the younger generation’s mainstream halfway. Hyper-eclectic collab-happy kitchen-sink rap.

The best of these efforts by far, for my money, is Buhloone Mindstate, which turns 30 this week. It’s as playful as 3 Feet High with palpably more experience and wisdom under its belt. It’s as sophisticated and ambitious as Is Dead without the dour subtext. It’s as beatwise as Stakes but so much more musical. Buhloone highlights pleasure above any other quality, including legible subject matter, so even when you don’t know what the boys are on about, you’re feeling their back-and-forth. This doesn’t really make it pop music, even if the sproingy guitars on the lead “Eye Patch,” the Mediterranean tweedling on “Ego Trippin’ Pt. 2,” and the wistful Michael Jackson flip on “Breakadawn” could pass for hooks.

VIDEO: De La Soul “Breakadawn”

But it’s certainly music, with a capital M. Famed James Brown saxman Maceo Parker is granted five whole minutes to verify the title “I Be Blowin’” which is sequenced back-to-back with 90 seconds of non-English rapping. My Digable Planets-esque personal favorite “In the Woods” and the squawking “3 Days Later” (“mercy!”) continue flipping through the funky-bebop playbook, with the former bestowing perhaps the greatest verse on any De La album (“fuck being hard, Posdnuos is complicated”). “Stone Age” puts a bow on it with Biz Markie’s filtered beatboxing. The guys bring new friends into the fold who add possibility to their own limitations: Japanese MCs Scha Dara Parr and Kan Tagaki hurtle through their own native tongue on “Long Island Wildin’” and the charismatic Shortie No Mass at 4’11 gives the record throughout a crucial jolt of gender parity missing from too many of their other strong efforts.

The stream-of-consciousness rapping flows so agreeably that I didn’t even realize how gnomic and mysterious it was until Pitchfork’s retrospective review made the case for its strange codes as some kind of proto-Supreme Clientele. This go-with-the-flow strategy isn’t terribly different from pop songsmithing giant Max Martin’s “musical math” just towards different ends (the closest thing the title has to a meaning: “we might blow up but we won’t go pop” — thing did neither). Like tongue-twisting contemporaries Das Efx or Fu-Schnickens, this was rap as scat vocalizing, molding words so the meaning is the groove itself, or burying them in throwback references too deep for this moderately educated dilettante.

Only these pros gave their excursions quite the polyrhythmic listening experience to match. The stately “I Am I Be” is the closest thing in this slippery bunch to some kind of center or underlying thesis or statement of intent, with Posdnuous kind of shockingly touching on both his heritage as a descendant of slaves and his progeny, slipping in a hint that the Native Tongues were no more. In its way, it’s his own “Welcome to the Terrordome,” though you’d never know it from how chill it plays. One of the most fascinating things about Buhloone Mindstate is how often it attempts to disturb its own groove and fails; whatever it tries to throw at the listener is merely subsumed by the kaleidoscopic tsunami of history and euphonious swing. That’s how its weirdness just sneaks right past anyone nodding along.

Buhloone Mindstate album art (Image: De La Soul)

Of course, critical love didn’t mean their third full-length sold shit, and the group later said “We being real blatant now” as a result, with Trugoy going as far as to say he “hated” Buhloone Mindstate for a heartbreaking reason dyed-in-the-wool De La fans might want to close their eyes for: “I think we were just a little too creative.” Hence the chip on their shoulders.

There’s something to be said about seekers who still haven’t found what they’re looking for, but looking back as we are, I hope they can be proud of staking out such unknown territory. Even if it was just a little too high.