Their debut 3 Feet High and Rising – a heady brew of Prince Paul’s fiercely original sample-heavy beats and the trio’s joyously charismatic bars – was an instant classic, one of hip hop’s first global-smash albums, but that was only the beginning.
With a timeless debut and its distinct, flower-powered aesthetic, the group had seemingly stumbled upon a formula for success alarmingly quickly. Audaciously charismatic rhymes over super playful, funky beats that had the same warmth as ‘60s psychedelia, with a generous helping of comedy on the side. Critics dubbed them the hippies of hip hop. But the last thing that the inventive Long Island trio wanted to do was to fit neatly into a box and joylessly churn music out to a formula.
Time and time again, De La Soul reinvented themselves – to them, transforming together was as beautiful as creating together. First, they shook things up with the state-of-the-nation De La Soul is Dead, then the oddball jazz-rap , before once more turning left into the era-defining .
Before the core trio were Trugoy the Dove, Posdnuos, and Maseo of De La Soul, they were David, Kelvin, and Vincent at Amityville Memorial High School.
The seeds were sown when Trugoy and Pos met in elementary school. Pos had just moved out to Long Island from the Bronx, and initially became close to Trugoy’s brother Michael, before really hitting it off with Dave a little later. The duo were both musically minded and shared a fervent enthusiasm for hip hop – then, a fledgling genre that was just beginning to reach people beyond the New York City limits.
After spending some downtime experimenting with cassettes together, the rap-obsessed Trugoy and Pos brought in Mase, a schoolmate who was already spending his nights DJing and B-boying. With the magic number reached, De La Soul was born. Soon, a demo tape followed, then some shows, and eventually a debut – all before Pos, Trugoy, and Mase were old enough to drink in their home city.
The trio would go on to become one of the most influential and acclaimed rap groups of all time, but something that is crucial to the De La Soul story is that the trio’s relationships began with close friendships first. The musical partnerships came afterwards.
Speaking to Posdnuos about his life, through the songs that mean the most to him, his deep love of music is there for all to see. But so is the deep familial love he has for his bandmates in De La Soul, particularly Dave, Trugoy the Dove, who passed away in 2023 – “our life partner”, he calls him when discussing the posthumous album Cabin in the Sky, “we honour our brother with everything we do now.”
De La Soul’s most recent album was, by any standards, a tearjerker, as Pos and Mase elected to “keep Dave alive” with his posthumous contributions. It’s no surprise that the title track, “Cabin in the Sky”, is among the Nine Songs picked out by Pos. Here, it is a conduit: not only for the grief he felt losing a close creative partner, but for the joy, too, at spending a lifetime creating with a musical soulmate.
Pos’ other choice from his own work will be even less of a surprise to the real heads – to anyone that has really listened and loved to the De La Soul back catalogue. “Stakes Is High” is, for many, the defining song of a group for whom reinvention and regeneration was a way of life. The title track for that difficult fourth album – the follow-up to the fraught cult-classic third – is De La Soul’s “Triumph”, a defiant rap gutpunch, atop some incendiary beats by a young J Dilla.
at large is the album that Pos remembers most fondly – it’s his favourite of all De La’s records – for this very reason. “It was a critical point in our career,” Pos tells me. “ had come out at a weird time. Wu-Tang had just dropped, and Tribe had dropped an amazing ass album, and we didn’t know where we stood. So Dave – God bless him – felt he was too quiet on , and he really took the driver’s seat on , and his determination allowed it to become the album it became.
“We just expressed ourselves,” Pos continues. “We had fun doing it. is a beautiful album, honestly, and it’s the De La album that I can listen to from beginning to end the most.”
Elsewhere, his selections call back to very particular times and places. Often musical threads start in one decade, and maze through to the next in an unexpected way. “Three is the Magic Number”, an educational song from US kids’ TV institution , would later resurface as De La Soul’s mantra, while the same snare-and-kick samples that distracted teenage Pos from his high school girlfriend on “The Bridge” would go on to be a defining sound in his career.
“The Message” – as is often the case in hip hop – begins the thread that runs the longest. For Posdnuos – as with many artists of this generation, including late musical partner Trugoy – Grandmaster Flash hit “like a meteor”. This is why it’s touching – no, devastating – when you play back Cabin in the Sky. The Posdnuos-penned title track segues into the Supa Dave West-produced closer “Don’t Push Me”, which features Trugoy’s last words on record, fading to black atop heavenly harp soundscapes.
“Don’t push me over the edge,” he emotes, half-rapping, half-singing: “I’m trying…”