De La Soul and the Birth of the D.A.I.S.Y. Age
How the legendary rap trio’s debut LP changed hip-hop forever
De La Soul’s classic debut 3 Feet High and Rising, released 35 years ago this week, managed to become influential and beloved, and embroiled in court as well.
Mutual friendships and respect for each other’s work led to the Native Tongues collective, a loose gathering anchored by three acts who started in the late ’80s — Jungle Brothers, De La Soul and Tribe Called Quest. There were affiliated acts, but they were the main three.
The name came from The New Birth’s 1972 song “African Cry,” a rather fitting and blatant rewrite of the John Lowdermilk-penned Paul Revere and the Raiders’ 1971 No. 1 pop hit “Indian Reservation.” The first verse ends with the lines “Took away our native tongue/Taught their English to our young.”
The three acts were Afrocentric, but didn’t approach rap in the same way as hardcore acts of the time. Their choice of samples could go farther afield, including jazz and pop culture references.
In De La Soul’s case, they came from an environment that wasn’t Compton or the projects, but more suburban Long Island. The trio — rappers Kelvin “Posdnuos” Mercer and David “Trugoy the Dove” Jolicoeur and DJ Vincent “Maseo” Mason — met each other at Amityville Memorial High School.
Prince Paul, who was a little older, had gone to the same high school and already experienced some success as a member of Stetsasonic, a spiritual precursor to The Roots in how they combined live instruments with sampling. Prince Paul was asked to produce some beats for a rapper named Gangster B, who had a DJ with him — Mason. The session was a struggle.
Mason approached Prince Paul, telling him about De La Soul. He later brought over a rough demo for the song “Plug Tunin,” which sold the producer.
VIDEO: De La Soul “Plug Tunin'”
De La Soul offered Prince Paul a wider playground to work in than he had in his group. He told Vinyl Factory in 2016: “For me, being in Stetsasonic, I was the youngest in the group and I would come up with certain ideas, but the elders at times would shut it down, like, ‘I don’t know about that’. In hindsight they were right at the time, because it fit more for De La Soul than it would have fit for them. So I was sensitive to that.”
Not only was the producer eager to implement ideas he couldn’t do in Stetsasonic, he was working with a group with ideas of their own.
“Ideas came quickly,” Mercer told The Guardian in 2014. “We were mixing three songs a day, all egging each other on.”
It wasn’t just samples, but combining and layering — dozens upon dozens of them. They managed to make the late ’80s equipment they had available work, coming up with creative ways to make samples fit the songs more smoothly.
“Using the technology of the studios, which was limited for sampling, we found ways to pitch shift, time-stretch,” Prince Paul said in 2016. “That’s how we got the horns to fit, so everything sounded natural. We had really great engineers who were musicians, so we were able to tweak it. We kept on pushing the envelope for technology, like, ‘How can we do this?’ It was cool, I never wanted to stop them from being creative, so that’s how it came out.”
“Plug Tunin’,” in its 12-inch form, with an insistent piano sample from Billy Joel’s “Stilletto,” off 52nd Street, got the group notice.
When it came time to sign with a label, Geffen, Profile and Tommy Boy showed the most interest. The former offered the most money, but wasn’t a hip-hop label. Paul, who’d experienced with headaches with Tommy Boy in Stetsasonic, wanted Profile. The three members chose Tommy Boy, feeling they’d shown the most interest.
3 Feet High and Rising opened not with a song, but with something that would soon appear on countless hip-hop albums — the skit.
The album was in the mixing stage when Paul suggested they needed something to tie the songs together.
Pos told Angus Batey on the former hiphop.com, “So we started tossing ideas around about what we could do, and once again, stupid old me said something like, ‘Heheh, yeah, we need something like a game show!’ And then Paul was, ‘Yeah! That!’ It was that simple. It wasn’t even like we went from that point and mapped it out – it was all done, right then and there.”
Engineer Al Watts was roped into playing the game show host, asking nonsensical questions about what Toosh Et Leleh Poo’ meant (‘Shut The Hell Up’ backwards, by the way), how many times the Batmobile got a flat and how many fibers are in a Shredded Wheat biscuit.
The skit set the tone that this was not the usual hip-hop album, that humor was going to be part of the equation.
For all of the skill involved, De La Soul’s members didn’t have the same life experiences as N.W.A or the quite the same political tone as Public Enemy (who got a shoutout on “Plug Tunin'”).
The first proper song, “The Magic Number,” is an example of writing what you know. All the member grew up watching Saturday morning animated programming.
Trugoy had the idea of interpolating “Three is the Magic Number” from Schoolhouse Rock, a series of educational cartoons included in ABC programming through the ’70s and ’80s. The group knew they wanted to sing the chorus. The challenge was unlocking the beat.
Mase suggsted the opening loop sample on Double Dee and Steinski’s “Lesson 3”, taken from Led Zeppeln’s “The Crunge.” Throw in some pitch shifting on the sung vocals and the package to wrap around Pos’ and Trugoy’s deft rhyming was complete.
VIDEO: De La Soul “The Magic Number”
The album’s title appears in the song, coming from a sample from Johnny Cash’s “Five Feet High and Rising,” a record in Trugoy’s dad’s collection. The “three feet” lyric was used because the group had three members.
The lyrics referenced the D.A.I.S.Y., standing for “Da’ Inner Sound Y’A’ll,” of Daisy Age. The idea was an approach that wasn’t a repudiation of rap’s harder edges, but simply a different approach with a degree of optimism.
That’s not to say De La Soul was fluff. The crack epidemic of the time certainly made its impact in Long Island as well. The group’s response was to turn part of the chorus of Hall and Oates’ hit “I Can’t Go For That” into the hook for the anti-drug song “Say No Go.”
The backing is laced with other recognizable samples — the “Oh!” coming from the Emotions’ “Best of My Love” and the guitar intro from the Detroit Emeralds’ “Baby Let Me Take You (In My Arms)” sped up.
Both Trugoy (“‘ll tell the truth so bear my witness/Fly like birds of a feather, drugs are like pleather/You don’t wanna wear it”) and Pos (“In his fashion class once an A now an F/The rock rules him now, the only designs left/Were once clothes made for Oshkosh/Has converted to nothing but stonewash”) get their point across.
“Ghetto Thang” looked at poverty and the problems that result from it. De La Soul had the song for a while before they found the right beat and keyboard for it.
The infectious “Eye Know” was a song about love (or at least trying to get some) and another testimonial to well-placed samples. Primarily built around parts of the Steely Dan hit “Peg,” the song also mixed in other bits — the drum opening to Lee Dorsey’s “Get Out of My Life Woman,” the guitar and horns’ intro to the Mad Lads’ “Make This Young Lady Mine” and Otis Redding’s whistle from “Sittin’ On the Dock of the Bay.”
VIDEO: De La Soul “Eye Know”
Pos’ dad’s record collection was also represented, as various elements of Maggie Thrett’s single “Soupy,” (about a cat) were turned into “Jenifa Taught Me (Derwin’s Revenge),” about that point where a couple of kids start exploring unkidlike things with each other in that innocent, nothing major happens kind of way. Oh, and Paul threw in a break sample of Liberace playing “Chopsticks,” just to add a little more out of left field.
The smooth groove of “Buddy” came from Mase, who used the Commdores’ “Girl, I Think the World About You.” The song is most assuredly not about friendship, as it would have been more accurately called “Body.”
It’s noteworthy for being as close as we got to a full-on Native Tongues record. De La Soul had played a show with A Tribe Called Quest and Jungle Brothers the night before the recording session. It wasn’t planned, but the Jungle Brothers and Tribe’s Q-Tip were all at the studio the next day, adding to the verses.
VIDEO: De La Soul “Buddy”
George Clinton’s ’70s work was always enticing to hip-hop acts. Mase and Paul were no different, as they used Funkadelic’s “(Not Just) Knee Deep,” along with the Ohio Players’ “Funky Worm” to build one of 3 Feet High and Rising’s classics –“Me, Myself and I.”
Self-determination and self-confidence are themes that appear throughout 3 Feet High and Rising, nowhere more so on “Me, Myself and I,” a smart manifesto to make you move.
VIDEO: De La Soul “Me, Myself and I”
The playfulness reappears on “Tread Water,” utilizing a sped-up sample from The People’s Choice’s “I Likes to Do It” and a looped drum break from Duke Erickson and the Extremes’ “Chinese Chicken.” The whole thing unfolds like an animated hip-hop fable.
“It’s like a children’s story. Paul was always instigating our foolishness,” Trugoy told Rolling Stone. “When we started talking about meeting Mr. Crocodile, his eyes just lit up. He was like, ‘Yeah, you talk about Mr. Crocodile, and you talk about meeting Mr. Rabbit.’ So blame that one on Paul.”
Boasting was already a well-established hip-hop tradition by this point. “Potholes In My Lawn,” a metaphor for subpar rappers who bit from their rhymes, is De La Soul’s bragfest over sample of War & Eric Burdon’s “Magic Mountain.”
Sure, the musical decisions (that Parliament yodel and jews harp on the chorus of “Potholes On My Lawn”!) were a big reason that 3 Feet High and Rising was beloved then and now.
But the skills of Trugoy and Pos, both in their writing and delivery, were just as critical. Check their flow on “This is a Recording 4 Living in a Fulltime Era (L.I.F.E.)”, where the raps take center stage over the music.
“D.A.I.S.Y. Age” ended the album proper with one last statement of purpose, as Trugoy finished off the final verse, saying “Nearer to the goal line, forget about the rose vine/The Soul will let you know it’s time and it’s a D.A.I.S.Y. age.”
That original version of “Plug Tunin’,” with its different rhymes and sample structure, was a worthy bonus track.
The skits were full of in-jokes as De La Soul amused themselves. “A Little Bit of Soap” samples the Jarmels’ 1961 hit of the same name while relying more on one of Ben E. King’s “Don’t Play That Song (You Lied).” It’s all in service of a 57-second joke that replaces the original’s heartbreak to basically say, “You smell. Take a bath.”
“Do As De La Does” starts as an old-school call-and-response track with in-studio guests that descends into intentional silliness.
Of all things, it was an interlude without jokes that came back to bite the group. Early on, the concept for the album was that it was music being sent back to earth by a trio of numbered microphone plugs representing each member of the group — Plug One (Pos), Plug Two (Trugoy) and Plug Three (Mase).
“Transmitting Live From Mars,” lasting all of 73 seconds, was a goofy remnant of the idea. The entire thing has three components — a sample of a French language lesson record,a drum track and, crucially, a loop of 11 seconds of the “You Showed Me,” the 1969 single that was the last of the Turtles’ nine Top 40 hits.
There were over 60 samples on the album. The group’s label cleared the majority of them, but didn’t complete the task because of a desire to get the album out. The Turtles were never approached.
Paul told Batey, “But that was their fault – Tommy Boy’s fault. They decided not to clear the sample.
We gave them every lick, every sample that we used, and it was their decision. I remember clearly them saying, ‘Oh, this is obscure, don’t worry about this.’ Hall & Oates they had to clear. ‘This? We don’t have to worry about this.'”
The song, it should be noted, was written by the Byrds’ Gene Clark and Roger McGuinn. It wasn’t released until its appearance on the compliation of the band’s early material, Preflyte, in July 1969, months after the Turtles’ version became a hit.
There’s no way that version would have been sampled. The Turtles’ arrangment slowed down the tempo and added strings, resulting in a hit ballad that peaked at No. 6 on the U.S. pop charts.
Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan (aka Flo & Eddie) the Turtles’ leaders, weren’t happy when they realized they’d been sampled. Tommy Boy’s idea of negotiating was to offer a flat $1,000 fee.
The pair responded with a suit, asking for $1.7 million. Their lawyer at the time told SPIN, “This isn’t just a financial objection. Flo and Eddie are genuinely upset with the way De La Soul chopped up and mutilated their song.”
Neither Clark nor McGuinn sued.
An undisclosed settlement was reached and the interlude remained on subsequent reissues.
The case did lead to a couple of misconceptions. While it certainly raised awareness of the need for sample clearance, already widespread, it was the Biz Markie case a couple years later that cemented clearance as required practice.
In Biz’s case, he’d recorded a song called “Alone Again” for his 1991 album I Need a Haircut. As with De La Soul, his label didn’t clear the sample of Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again (Naturally).” O’Sullivan was as litigious as the lead Turtles and he won his case in court.
Secondly, there was a school of thought that 3 Feet High and Rising was absent from streaming services for a long time solely because of sample clearance issues. This was only partially true.
The samples were only cleared for physical product, not streaming. In addition, De La Soul was unhappy with their proposed revenue cut from their songs appearing on digital services.
The group held firm in wanting a better deal from Tommy Boy (which had acquired the digital rights in 2017) for streaming. This meant none of their first six albums was available on any of the services until a deal was worked out.
It wasn’t until Tommy Boy was sold in 2021 that De La Soul got control of their masters. Then, there was some additional sample clearance which needed to take place, and in some cases, re-recording or slightly tweaking a few things when a sample couldn’t be cleared.
Those albums finally reached digital last March, a bittersweet moment as Trugoy had passed away after years of health problems 19 days earlier.
3 Feet High and Rising was a critical and commercial success, going platinum.
There was backlash in some circles, with the dayglo cover art and general air of positivity and humor leading to misguided criticism of De La Soul as “soft” or “a bunch of hippies.”
The group’s response was 1991’s De La Soul is Dead. From its cover art of a broken flowerpot with dirt and flowers spilling to its contents’ humor tending towards the more cynical side, things had changed.
The album had plenty of bright spots, like “A Rollerskating Jam Named Saturdays,” and they still sounded great. De La Soul was still alive, but clearly altered.
As deservedly respected as the group remains to this day, 3 Feet High and Rising is their high water mark. Influential on any number of future hip-hop artists, it standsout with its irrestible grooves, interesting construction and the stellar dual threat words and flow of Pos and Trugoy.
Relentlessly creative, it remains as listenable and fresh as it did upon its release– an unassailable hip-hop classic and one of the most assured debut albums in any genre.
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