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While De La Soul will always be defined by 3 Feet High and Rising, Trugoy and his fellow bandmates were constantly pushing the boundaries of rap throughout their stellar careerThirty five years after its release, De La Soul’s debut album is firmly ensconced in the pantheon of unimpeachable classics, and Me Myself And I is a fixture on mainstream classic radio. So it’s easy to forget what a shock 3 Feet High and Rising represented on release. It was, gasped one US critic’s review, “unlike any rap you or anyone else has ever heard”. If that wasn’t entirely true – 3 Feet High and Rising certainly had antecedents, both in the easygoing humour of Biz Markie’s style and in the beat-digging, fast-cutting, eclectic sound of old-school DJs, as wont to play Dizzy Gillespie or the Monkees’ Mary Mary as James Brown and Funkadelic – it wasn’t far off the mark. The album certainly didn’t sound like anything else that was around at the time – even those by their friends in the Native Tongues rap collective.That album sounded like it existed in its own world, De La Soul presenting as rap’s weird kids running amok in the back of the classroom. It was uninterested in the genre’s standard brash posturing. As if to underline that fact, Dave Jolicoeur rapped under the name Trugoy the Dove: “trugoy” is “yogurt” backwards (“I eat it a lot,” he explained). Rather than using the same slang as everyone else, Trugoy and fellow MCs Kelvin “Posdnuos” Mercer and Vincent Lamont “Maseo” Mason Jr invented their own: their rhymes were “a phrase called talk”, a rapper they admired was a “public speaker”, if something was “Dan Stuckee”, that meant it was great; rather than using the epithet “ho” to besmirch a girl’s reputation on Jenifa Taught Me, Trugoy opted for the more decorous suggestion that “she became known as a garden tool”. Their lyrics frequently sounded like riddles: “Vocal in doubt is an uplift and real is the answer that I answer with,” offered Trugoy on the trio’s debut single Plug Tunin’. The whole thing was bound up in a concept involving both a quizshow and the idea that the trio were transmitting their music from Mars, in the process earning the dubious distinction of singlehandedly inventing the hip-hop skit. Continue reading...