The death of David Jude Jolicoeur – aka Trugoy The Dove, Plug Two, or Dave – could scarcely have had a more tragic timing.

De La Soul, the band he formed with in high school with friends Kelvin Mercer and Vincent Lamont Mason Jr – Posdnous and Maseo, or Plug One and Plug Three, respectively – were about to finally get their due.

After years of bitter contractual wrangling, they had regained rights to their classic run of albums from the late 1980s to the early 2000s, and these records were just about to hit streaming services and get full deluxe vinyl reissue treatment.

There’s every sign that these could do well, maybe even give them their biggest success yet.

Nineties revivalism continues to be a strong cultural force, and the appearance of their classic “The Magic Number” at the end of Spider Man: No Way Home in 2021 caused a buzz across younger pop culture fans.

With their albums a kind of lost treasure, they’ve got both legendary status and the thrill of something new for a fresh audience.

Sadly Jolicouer’s health had been failing for some while, and he won’t get to see what happens – but there are crumbs of comfort that he at least got the vindication of knowing his works were going to get the respect they deserved at last.

This reissue programme will hopefully, in fact, cement De La Soul’s position as one of the very greatest hip-hop groups of all time.

Formed in Long Island, the trio revolutionised rap – and music more widely – with their debut album 3 Feet High And Rising.

It was a joyous explosion of sound and colour, sampling left right and centre from pop culture across decades (part of the reason for their contractual wranglings was the hundreds of samples involved): one of the true great 20th century works of collage.

Its psychedelic goofiness misled some in the mainstream to thinking that they were somehow making a soft or gentrified version of rap culture.

But as hip-hop founding father DJ Red Alert said at the time: “They’re not the hippies in hip-hop, they can be considered the new funk – the new Parliament, the new Funkadelic."

They were in a deep tradition of mischievous, subversive, physically funky African-American culture.

Or, as Posdnous said himself: “We don’t think that we’re so different, it’s just that everyone’s trying to be the same.”

In this simple phrase, he expressed how radical they were.

He was also noting how they provided a model of what “rappers” could be – subverting all kinds of media and cultural stereotypes of Black masculinity, while still, in fact, rooted very, very deeply in Black American culture.

This became very clear as they followed up 3 Feet High.

The albums that followed showed their beat-making abilities – whether with their original producer, Stetasonic’s Prince Paul – or by themselves as on 1996’s Stakes Is High.

These were no fluke, but showed a deep understanding of the groove and the discombobulating power of collage.

Their lyricism and performance too proved again and again to be technically hyper-adept and mind-frazzlingly complicated, without ever entering the too-many-syllables tedium of so much alternative rap that would imitate them.

That lyricism was not just goofy, but rooted deeply in the funk – and also in various kinds of Black nationalist esoteric philosophy like The Five Percenters and the The Nuwaubian Nation.

This could be on occasion problematic but De La Soul were always intelligent and self aware enough to not get bogged down in doctrine.

And it was this “knowledge of self”, as The Five Percenters put it, that would help them ride out the initial wave of hype and stick out the creative long haul.

That, and the fact that everything they did was rooted in live performance.

De La Soul never lost the sense of bouncing off one another lyrically and rhythmically on stage, which kept an extraordinary musicality to the meshing of words and beats, and also stood them in good stead for longevity on the international festival circuit.

After a brilliant run of album releases from 1989 to 2004 – almost unparalleled in hip-hop, certainly for a group – De La Soul’s industry hassles kept them from releasing much until 2016’s crowd-funded, guest-packed And the Anonymous Nobody…

Yet, through all that time they maintained their positions as godfathers of leftfield rap and beloved performers in the music scene more broadly.

Their staying power is just extraordinary – and whether they keep performing as De La Soul in the wake of Jolicouer’s death or not – their reputation and legacy is only going to grow now new generations have access to their glorious catalogue.

With that in mind we present this playlist of some of their gems – and if this floats your boat, we suggest you dive into the rest of the catalogue with alacrity.

Cover: Matti Hillig

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Writer | Joe Muggs

Joe Muggs is a writer, DJ and curator of many years standing, covering both mainstream and underground. His book 'Bass, Mids, Tops', covering decades of UK bass music, is out now via Strange Attractor / MIT Press, and you can subscribe to his newsletter at tinyletter.com/joemuggs.