An Excerpt From Chapter 1 in 'De La Soul' by Dave Heaton
The graffiti writer tells his DJ friend that their art is about living for today: “Tomorrow’s a long way off, man. When I’m writing trains or when you’re mixing sounds, making people dance, that’s everything. We’re alive!”
That’s a scene from the movie Beat Street. Released in the summer of 1984, the same weekend as Ghostbusters and Gremlins, it was one of Hollywood’s first attempts to make mass entertainment (money) out of the New York City scene that by that point was the means of expression among young people living in the city and its surroundings—and had started spreading to urban youth across the United States. Beat Street was the Hollywoodized capitalization on Wild Style, the first hip-hop film. Filmed in ’81 and ’82, and released theatrically in ’83, that low-budget film was closer to the scene in every sense—starring real-life participants in the music, graffiti, and breakdancing scene of the time.
Hip-hop as a musical and cultural phenomenon is considered to have started in August 1973, with Kool Herc DJing his sister Cindy Campbell’s house party in the Bronx. A decade later, the country overall was waking up to its existence and turning it into a commercial proposition. In the early eighties, breakers were showing up in movies (Flashdance, Breakin’) and in TV commercials for products as big as Pepsi and McDonald’s. Breakers were treated as a novelty, but also represented a visual manifestation of the youth culture that had taken over New York City, the nation, and eventually the world.
About seven minutes in movie time after the “we’re alive” conversation, Beat Street’s graffiti writer character, Ramon “Ramo” Franco (played by Jon Chardiet), dies a tragic death on electrified subway tracks. The movie’s climax is a New Year’s Eve party turned memorial tribute for Ramo, with an atmosphere of both mourning and joy. The DJ character proclaims, “It’s not gonna be a funeral, it’s a celebration.” The scene was set and filmed at a club that the real musicians and breakdancing crews in the movie (Afrika Bambaataa & Soulsonic Force, Treacherous Three, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Rock Steady Crew, New York City Breakers) knew well: the Roxy, which was located in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. The movie version of the club is the setting for a joyous memorial celebration. Blue-and-silver-robed gospel singers, led by Bernard Fowler, turn the club into church. The film’s main characters stand within a crowd on the stage. They laugh, hug, and dance through their tears.
March 2, 2023, a real-life event has a similar mixture of celebration and grief. Vincent Mason Jr., a.k.a. DJ Maseo of the rap trio De La Soul, is on stage at Webster Hall, in the East Village of Manhattan, about a mile and a half from where the Roxy once stood. Maseo is struggling to find the words to sum up how he feels, eighteen days after the death of fellow De La Soul founding member David Jude Jolicoeur, who went by Trugoy the Dove and then simply by Dave. “My emotions are very displaced,” he says. “My man is gone . . .”
That night Mason was surrounded on stage by friends: Kelvin Mercer a.k.a. Posdnuos of De La Soul, Prince Paul, Queen Latifah, Monie Love, Dres of Black Sheep, Common, Talib Kweli, Busta Rhymes, comedian Dave Chappelle, and more. Those individuals represented the sweep of De La Soul’s career and success, from their early singles in the late eighties through their status as influential mentors for a younger generation of artists.
The event was planned before Jolicoeur’s death at age fifty-four from heart failure shocked the hip-hop world. The night labeled the D.A.I.S.Y. Experience was intended to be sheer celebration. De La Soul’s first six albums were finally appearing on a music streaming service, that night at midnight, after two decades of legal and contractual battles eliminated the chances that new listeners would find their way to the group’s most significant recordings. The New Year’s Eve–style countdown was to a new era of availability, a world where De La Soul’s music had reemerged from the void.
It wasn’t easy for the now-duo of De La Soul—Mercer and Mason, Posdnuos and Maseo, Plug 1 and Plug 3—to get in a celebratory mood for the occasion. In a July 2023 video interview with Lyndsey Parker of Yahoo Entertainment, Mason gave Mercer credit for pulling him out of his funk and convincing him that the show must go on. “He came up with the greatest idea that I thought was perfect. ‘He was our Ramon. . . . We need to celebrate this, like the New Year’s Eve party in Beat Street.’”
In the week leading up to the D.A.I.S.Y. Experience, it was reframed as a tribute to Dave: “Join us to celebrate the life and legacy of Dave aka Plug 2 and De La Soul.”
Dave’s death, and the De La Soul streaming launch, came during a commemorative year for hip-hop: nominally the fiftieth year of the genre, counting back to Cindy Campbell’s house party. The first public, or at least televised, celebration was February 5, 2023, at the Grammy Awards, seven days before Dave’s passing. Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson of the Roots organized a fifteen-minute roller-coaster ride through the genre’s history, from Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five to Lil Uzi Vert. Each artist had thirty seconds or less to perform one of their classic songs.
Somewhere in the middle of the segment, soon after Public Enemy left the stage—at just about the right time chronologically—the backdrop turned to bright, fluorescent flowers and Posdnuos emerged in front of them, performing about twenty seconds of De La Soul’s “Buddy” before passing the mic to Scarface. It was a meaningful inclusion for a group that was getting ready to emerge from a state of semi-invisibility. Both Dave and Maseo missed the event for health reasons. Before that was public knowledge, theirs was a glaring absence for such a long-running unit.
How many musical trios can you think of that stuck together for over thirty years with no public breakups or squabbles? Take the odds against that type of longevity, and add to them the risk factors of youth, the newness of their genre, and the historical inequities of the music industry—the sheer number of young Black artists taken advantage of by corporations, across genre and era.
In that light, De La Soul has carried the aura of an indestructible force bonded by friendship, creative freedom, eccentricity, and loyalty. It started with kids in school finding common ground in their exploration of a still-new musical art form, so new that at first it wasn’t even thought of as a genre. They navigated overnight success, high-profile lawsuits, industry shenanigans, media stereotyping, the grind of exhaustive touring, and many other challenges. They grew De La Soul into a rock-solid partnership with a unique artistic legacy.
Dave Heaton has written about music for over thirty years, including for PopMatters, The Big Takeover, and his own website Erasing Clouds. He lives in Kansas City, Missouri, with his wife and two children.
Find the book here at J-Card Press, a new independent publishing company with one focus: to produce short biographies of the best alternative, indie rock, hip-hop, and riot grrrl groups of the past twenty to thirty years.