Today, we’re hopping into our time-bending DeLorean with De La Soul’s Plug One to recount the creation and legacy of the group’s fourth LP, ‘Stakes Is High’…

Our story starts in 1993. bioengineered dinosaurs were chewing up the box office, was taking an 18-hole intermission from basketball, and rap was morphing into modernity. For starters, launched, giving hip-hop the high-fashion treatment. Meanwhile, was selling albums at a pace that Domino’s could only dream of matching with its deep-dish pizzas.

and A Tribe Called Quest battled it out to see who could drop the most transformational album on November 9th of that year (cough, ‘Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers’ and ‘Midnight Marauders’). But most importantly, Long Island trio De La Soul dropped their weird, wonderful album ‘Buhloone Mindstate’: a swampy hivemind of elastic rhymes, jazz-drenched beats and boundless experimentalism.

Ask any hip-hop aficionado today, and they’ll sing the record’s praises. Hell, named it the eighth best album of 1993, the same year dropped their swansong ‘In Utero’ and unveiled her self-titled tentpole ‘Janet’. ‘Buhloone Mindstate’ is an undeniable cult classic. Keyword: – it didn’t sell shit. The album failed to go Gold, with sales falling short of De La Soul’s previous two records. “Even though it’s become what it is today, at that point, the album wasn’t doing well,” says De La Soul’s (aka Plug One), speaking to CLASH from a swanky Stateside hotel room. “They’re not trying to put any more money into this ‘Buhloone Mindstate’ album.”

In the years that followed ‘Buhloone Mindstate’, De La Soul’s creative output began to fray. It’s easy to see why. By then, , Dave “Trugoy the Dove” Jolicoeur and were navigating fatherhood, a changing industry and the strange experience of becoming elder statesmen before they’d even hit 30. “We just started having these conversations like, ‘Yo, man, we’ve got to address what we feel as fathers,’” Posdnous recalls. “We were young dudes, but the way this environment in hip-hop moves, we were already considered older dudes. We were only in our late 20s, but we were like older statesmen.”

Seven years prior, De La had introduced themselves with ‘3 Feet High and Rising’, a playful, kaleidoscopic debut that helped establish them as hip-hop’s lovable outsiders. Now, the trio had grown up, and the genre they helped reshape was beginning to look very different.

As a result, De La Soul entered the studio for ‘Stakes Is High’ with a chip on their shoulders. With no longer at the production helm, Maseo stepped up his work behind the boards, sharpening his skills as the group recalibrated its sound. In a June 1997 interview with Hip Hop Connection, the late, great summed up the frustration driving their creativity: “The artform itself is more or less dying a little bit. People are out there trying to make a dollar, instead of making music. […] People just want to get paid.”

It was time to raise the stakes. “‘Stakes Is High’ was the first album where there was a true mission statement,” says Posdnous. “Every album up until that point was more free-flowing. Even on our second album [‘De La Soul Is Dead’], you could have something as cool as ‘A Roller Skating Jam Named ‘Saturdays” next to something serious like ‘Millie Pulled a Pistol on Santa’.”

And so, with a revised production setup, a crystalline mission statement and two future hip-hop Hall of Famers under their wing in Yasiin Bey (then Mos Def) and the late J Dilla (then Jay Dee), the trio crafted one of the greatest hip-hop albums of the 1990s – RapReviews awarded the LP a perfect score. Musically, ‘Stakes Is High’ retains shards of De La Soul’s earlier, flowery tonality, but their signature petals are weathered by trenchant drum breaks (‘Big Brother Beat’), crates of jazz and funk (‘The Bizness’) and even a Portuguese bossa nova flip on ‘Supa Emcees’, which samples Walter Wanderley’s 1966 recording of ‘Summer Samba’.

In the years since, De La Soul have continued to leave their mark on hip-hop, from the Grammy-winning ‘Feel Good Inc.’ collaboration with Gorillaz to the blue-collar brilliance of 2004’s ‘The Grind Date’ and 2025’s spritely ‘Cabin in the Sky’. They’ve also endured the tragic passing of Dave in 2023, whose absence looms large over the group’s legacy. 

Released on the 2nd July 1996, ‘Stakes Is High’ celebrated its 30th anniversary earlier this year. Now, the group’s revisiting their landmark album with a vault-digging reissue – unearthing deep cuts including soundtrack gems ‘Chanel No. Fever’ and ‘I Can’t Call It’, alongside J Dilla’s elusive reimaginings of the album’s title track (long cherished by collectors and 12-inch vinyl bandits) Posdnuos sits down with CLASH to reflect on the turbulent road to ‘Stakes Is High’, three decades on.

’ is such a distinctive album title. Where did it come from?

We felt we had to address what was going on in rap at the time. That’s how our mission statement began to take shape. Dave’s cousin Fudge, God bless the dead, was with us. He said, “Yeah, man, I know y’all can do it, ’cause it’s crazy out here. The stakes is high.” Right then, we knew. We told him, “That should be the name of the album.” We didn’t even correct it to proper English. 

Then everything fell into place. We were still working with Paul, going to his house and making music, but he was doing that zany Paul stuff, looking for us to embrace his ideas. We were on a different mission. After those first few sessions, Paul saw that and bowed out. I know he’s said it differently, including to me, but he was already doing his thing with Gravediggaz and moving around with RZA.

Stylistically, ‘Stakes Is High’ feels more serious and pointed than the daisy-themed optimism of ‘3 Feet High and Rising’ or the cartoonish experimentation of ‘Buhloone Mindstate’. Was that tonal shift deliberate, and how did collaborators like Zhané, Truth Enola and the Jazzyfatnastees come into the fold?

Not really. One thing we learned from Paul was that even if you set goals for a song, never miss the chance to work with someone who wasn’t originally supposed to be in the room. See how it works. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t.

With [the R&B duo] Zhané, especially Renée, we’d become close. For that particular song, I knew I wanted somebody to sing on it, and I thought they’d be dope. Sometimes it wasn’t even about the right person, but whoever happened to be around at the right time. We’d say, “Yo, let’s try something.” That’s how a lot of those people ended up on the record.

I like how you describe the album sessions as a revolving door of experimentation. Musically, ‘Stakes Is High’ also feels like a return to basics.

Yeah, I agree; it was back to basics. That was all Dave, though. We only learned years later that Dave had been quiet about certain directions he wanted to take on ‘Buhloone Mindstate’. Paul taught us to let everyone’s ideas be heard, so we all agreed on this jazzy feel. Turns out Dave wasn’t really on board, but he let it happen anyway. With Dave taking the artistic lead on ‘Stakes Is High’, it probably felt like a very different record from ‘Buhloone’.

When Dave was inspired, he could write rhymes incredibly quickly. He produced the majority of ‘Stakes Is High’ and brought us back to basics, saying, “Fuck all those horns. Fuck all this.” He’d play me tracks that became ‘The Bizness’, ‘Long Island Degrees’ and ‘Dog Eat Dog’. We loved what he was bringing to the table.

Talk to me about the title track. You mentioned that you wanted ‘Stakes Is High’ to feel almost biblical and commanding. How did J Dilla’s production on the title track bring that vision together?

I’d already written rhymes for an earlier version, but I felt the music needed to sound like commandments being thrown down from a mountain. I was at Q-Tip’s house, around the time they were making their ‘Beats, Rhymes and Life’ album, and I heard a bunch of Jay Dee beats, including what became ‘Stakes Is High’, I called Dave right away and said, “Yo, I’ve got the record. Jay Dee did it.” Dilla was out of this world, but Dave was key to making that song what it was. His verse inspired my final one, which begins, “People go through pain and still don’t gain.” Dave was talking about stuff from an industry standpoint, while I was talking about life.

Mos Def was still a relatively young artist at the time, fresh out of working with his sibling group, UTD (Urban Thermo Dynamics). His track ‘Big Brother Beat’ was one of his earliest high-profile appearances. How did he become involved in the sessions, and what did he bring to the record?

Mos was a real cheerleader man. He’d become really close with Maseo, who brought him around. Mos would be rhyming in the corner, and it would make me reconsider the flow of something I’d already written – that’s how inspiring he was. We were like, “Yo, you’ve gotta get on something.” Skeff Anselm produced this record for us, and it became ‘Big Brother Beat’. It wasn’t even called that originally; Mos named it.

My favourite track on the album is actually the last song, ‘Sunshine’. What do you remember about the session for that song?

That was something Dave put together. When I heard it, I was like, “Yo, this is so dope. Can I add something to it?” I asked him what he wanted the song to be about, and he said, “Yo, it just feels like sunshine.” I suggested adding The Commodores’ ‘High on Sunshine’ at the beginning, and we adapted the chorus from Mantronix’s ‘Fresh Is the Word’. It was me, Dave, Common, Truth Enola and my younger brother Luck singing together. Luck later produced [the 2001 De La Soul track] ‘Trying People’. 

With ‘Stakes Is High’ receiving a 30th-anniversary vinyl reissue, and De La Soul’s early catalogue only arriving on streaming in 2023, what do you hope a new generation of listeners takes away from the album, particularly those discovering the group through it?

Man, obviously, I hope they love it. I know what it’s like to be a music lover and, even at my age, discover old music I never knew existed. You find a record and think, “Where was this in my life? I needed this.” Even my 20-year-old son and his friends are like that. They love discovering music from the past. They almost feel cool knowing about what came before them.

It’s dope when people like Tyler, The Creator or Earl Sweatshirt tell us, “Yo, that was our first introduction to De La.” They discovered us through ‘Stakes Is High’ and went back to explore the rest. I’ve been blessed to be part of this group, and I know what it’s like to meet artists like Stevie Wonder and gush over them. To have somebody feel that same way about me is crazy. 

I hope people feel inspired to listen to more De La Soul. Our music holds a special place in hip-hop history because we stuck to our creative guns. We always tried to contribute something to the culture, to writing and storytelling, without getting stuck in one place. We weren’t afraid to go out on a limb, be brave and have fun.

)’ is out now.