Happy De la Day

The original copyright strike

De La Soul’s catalog is, as of today, available for the first time on streaming. I’m gonna talk about it. And why I’m happy about it. And why I’m still a little sad about it.

There are plenty of amazing books about the birth of hip hop in the 70’s in The Bronx (and a couple songs that spurious claim it actually started in Queensbridge,) but the short version goes like this:

In the mid 70’s there were competing crews of party-throwing kids that would hang out in the park and DJ behind massive sound systems. They were often accompanied by a hype-man who would occasionally toss out “yes yes y’alls” and a few hot couplets here and there. But there was this one DJ called Kool Herc who noticed that at those parties, the crowd lost their minds every time “the break” came on; The moment in the song where the vocals drop out and you get a funky breakdown from the rhythm section. So Herc was like “Ok, what if I get two copies of the same record, play the drum break on record 1, and then at the moment it would end, start the break on record 2. While the break’s playing on record 2, I can wind record 1 back to the beginning of the break. And as a result we get an infinite break, and the crowd stays hype forever.” He called it “The Merry-Go-Round.”

Now that the break was infinite, it created all of this real estate for the hype men to extend their rhymes into entire verses, and rap was born. The wild thing about this particular moment at the inception of rap is that bedcause no one saw any money in it, no one cared about ownership. It was party music. When Sugar Hill Records’ Sylvia Robinson plucked Big Bank Hank from a pizza place to record Rapper’s Delight because she heard him rapping along to the radio, he infamously just borrowed the rhyme book of Grandmaster Caz, another MC, rather than writing his own verse.

Early hip-hop records primarily featured live backing bands playing instrumental versions of pre-existing disco tunes. But by the late 80’s drum machines and samplers had become sophisticated enough that producers could vivisect a break. Chop it up into its component parts, pitch shift it, and layer it. The break was no longer one song, it was 5, 6, 10 songs layered on top of one another to create these great dense mosaics of sound.

And that’s how we were blessed with De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising.

It’s truly hard to overstate how important 3 Feet High and Rising is in the history of hip hop. While most hip hop producers stuck to John Bonham kick drums and funk breaks, De La Soul’s producer Prince Paul took inspiration from everything. He was sampling schoolhouse rock, old pop records, Otis Redding whistling on the dock of the bay. Prince Paul is an incredibly silly dude (he desperately tried to get his own imprint “doodooman records” off the ground) and so he was deeply unafraid to make a song out of anything and everything.

3 Feet High and Rising was the first album one of the first to include what is now a mainstay in the genre - skits. In between songs they indulged bits about appearing on a game show, about how their friends had dandruff, made fun of their contemporaries in JJ Fad, and just generally being goofballs. On the songs themselves, they were a few years ahead of everyone else with the Parliament/Funkadelic samples.

The album was a phenomenon, which I suppose is how it came to the attention of The Turtles. The turtles are a pop band from the 60’s who, if you know them at all, you probably know them because of the tune “Happy Together.” Or if you were Alex Goldman in 1989, you knew them best because of the 12-second sample that appears in “Transmitting Live From Mars” on 3 Feet High… The track is just a turtles loop under some French lessons about eating sausages. According to De La Soul’s A&R guy Dante Ross, they didn’t even bother clearing the sample because it was a skit. They didn’t consider it music. Again, ownership wasn’t a thought, who was gonna make money off the weird 50 second skit on the record?

The Turtles were furious. Mark Volman of The Turtles, told the Los Angeles Times: 'Sampling is just a longer term for theft.’ They hit the group and their label with a lawsuit for $2.5 million.This was uncharted territory for the hip hop world, and unfortunately the ensuing lawsuit became a map that was very unfavorable for sampling artists. De La and Tommy Boy Records settled for $1.7 million, and that opened the floodgates. Regardless of how the sampled artists actually felt about it, people saw a new way to cash in, and a rash of lawsuits followed. Biz Markie’s career was basically ended by a lawsuit from Gilbert O’Sullivan. The ensuing decade saw a shift away from sampling and breakbeats toward drum machines and synth lines created in the studio. Sampling never went away, but massive, sprawling, plunderphonic collages like Paul’s Boutique and 3 Feet High and Rising became a near impossibility.

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De La Soul continued to release album throughout the 90’s, many with Prince Paul, many with a ton of samples, and even though I am a massive fan of their subsequent albums (De La Soul is Dead is an all timer for me), they never achieved commercial success in the way they did with their first record, not counting their guest spot on Feel Good Inc.

When streaming became a going concern, Warner Bros. (who at this point owned the De La catalog) basically threw up their hands and said “we don’t know which samples are cleared and which aren’t, this band isn’t massive, it’s gonna cost too much money, so fuck it.” Ok, to be perfectly fair what they said was “De La Soul is one of hip-hop’s seminal acts, and we’d love for their music to reach audiences on digital platforms around the world, but we don’t believe it is possible to clear all of the samples for digital use, and we wouldn’t want to release the albums other than in their complete, original forms. We understand this is very frustrating for the artists and the fans; it is frustrating for us, too.” To me, it amounts to the same thing.

In 2021, Tommy Boy founder Tom Silverman sold the entire catalog so a company called Resevoir media, who were committed to finally making the De La catalog available, and the members spent the better part of two years making sure every single sample was cleared, finally settling on a March 2023 online release date for their first six records. I remember reading about it in January, and just feeling this remarkable sense of relief. These guys really, truly, deserved the W for once.

And then, on Super Bowl Sunday, I saw #ripdave trending on Twitter. There are a million fucking Daves out there, but somehow I knew. Dave, formerly Trugoy the Dove, AKA Plug 2, had died at 53 of congestive heart failure. I spent the entire evening writing polemics on my twitter feed and taking breaks from putting my kids to bed to weep quietly to myself in the other room (full disclosure: I might have had some other stuff going on emotionally that evening). Regardless, it was beyond heartbreaking that Dave never got to see his music reach another generation. As Mase put it in The New York Times, “We fought so hard and so long for it…For him not to be here, it’s awkward; it hurts.”

The pieces of media that are unavailable for because of arcane ownership crap — because of the bedrock desire to maximize profits, even if that means minimizing access — is stunning if you make even the slightest attempt to scratch the surface. The Wonder Years has only recently made it to streaming, with have the music cues stripped out and replaced by soundalikes. Paramount + has memory holed the 2019 Jordan Peele Twilight Zone reboot. HBO Max famously took dozens of shows off its service. And don’t get me started on The Crypt Keeper (the puppet is owned by HBO, Tales from the Crypt the name is owned by the estate of comics publisher Bill Gaines, no one wants to meet in the middle to revive the series or make a half hour tv drama about the Crypt Keeper’s post celebrity life).

The timing is cruel and maddening, but it is so nice to be able to rock all those De La Soul records again with relative ease. And I’m just going to be their unofficial street team for a while to make sure that anyone who might even have a passing interest in De La Soul hears these records. If you’re reading this, maybe check them out. Do it for Dave.