F— Being Hard, De La Soul Is Complicated

Oliver Wang speaks with two De La Soul biographers, Dave Heaton and Marcus J. Moore, about their respective portrayals of the rap group’s complex legacy.

By Oliver WangSeptember 30, 2025

• Music

• Cultural Studies

ON SEPTEMBER 21, 1993, De La Soul released their third studio album, Buhloone Mindstate, much to the delight—and confusion—of their fan base. The group’s debut, 3 Feet High and Rising (1989), had been a riotously creative and playful effort that redefined perceptions of what hip-hop could look and sound like. In an era when rappers puffed out gold chain–laden chests via larger-than-life personas, Posdnuos, Trugoy (a.k.a. Dave), and P. A. Mase (a.k.a. Maseo) were nebbish eccentrics from the suburban streets of Long Island, New York, who possessed both a biting sense of humor and an eclectic musical appetite.

However, these eccentricities, along with the marketing of the group by their record label, Tommy Boy, led the music press to pigeonhole De La as “alternative rap” and “hip-hop hippies.” The group despised these labels, and on their heavily anticipated follow-up, De La Soul Is Dead (1991), they made it explicitly clear they were killing off the image that had helped propel their debut to gold-record status. It was a reinvention unprecedented in the history of hip-hop.

All of this gave Buhloone Mindstate stakes that were—shall we say?—high. Fans had little idea what to expect, and what De La delivered was both intimate and enigmatic. If 3 Feet High was like throwing a bushel of ideas at the wall, and De La Soul Is Dead was a strategic counterstrike, Buhloone was a song-by-song series of unexpected hairpin turns. “There is no decoding this album,” wrote music journalist Andrew “Noz” Nosnitsky, in a retrospective review of what he aptly characterized as “a notoriously and proudly inaccessible project.”

I invited two recent biographers of the group—Dave Heaton (De La Soul, J-Card Press, 2024) and Marcus J. Moore (High and Rising: A Book About De La Soul, Dey Street Books, 2024)—to join me on a deep dive into Buhloone Mindstate. Follow us into the woods as we move from our initial reactions to the album back in 1993 to a broader discussion of the group’s complicated career and their highly controlled creative process, which has produced some of hip-hop’s greatest moments as well as dramatic points of tension—including with one of our own authors.

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OLIVER WANG: What did you think of Buhloone Mindstate when it first came out? What kind of expectations did you have for it?

MARCUS J. MOORE: It hit my ear in a weird way. I didn’t have the musical nuance that I have now. I just wanted it to sound like De La Soul Is Dead, I wanted it to sound like 3 Feet High and Rising. It wasn’t until I got older that I realized that, well, that’s foolish. Any artist is supposed to evolve from record to record.

DAVE HEATON: It was the first time I tried writing a review of an album for my college newspaper. I found that review, and it’s written so badly. I focused on the introspective side of the lyrics but also on how cryptic a lot of them were, like they were talking in code.

“Breakadawn” being the lead single lulled me into an expectation for what Buhloone might sound like, but the actual album took me to all kinds of unexpected places.

MJM: It reminds me of the best spiritual jazz records, the ones that sound like a suite, the music coming at you in a big wave, like one long track.

I once quipped that Buhloone feels like a concept album but “whatever the album’s concept was, the group seemed content to keep it to themselves.”

MJM: I definitely feel like it’s a concept album, but you can’t really get the concept until you get older. It’s a treatise on getting older—on getting older in the music industry, on maintaining artistic integrity at a time when they could have gone the other way. In 1993, you could see and hear the tenor of hip-hop changing. Everything was a lot darker. When I listen to Buhloone now, as a person who also feels like I sit outside of the industry, I find myself identifying with it a lot more than I do their other records, aside from Stakes Is High.

DH: I never would have phrased it as a concept album, but on the other hand, I feel like De La come up with their concepts while they’re finalizing their albums, to give each one something that holds it together. This one’s no different. Those themes of growing up and figuring out where they fit in relation to their success are clear on the album now, even if some of it didn’t sound that way to me when I was 20.

This takes me to “I Am I Be,” where Pos talks about his daughter and learning to be a dad. In 1993, I was still 10-plus years away from parenthood myself, but now I have such a better appreciation for how that song, and the album as a whole, captured the group growing up—not just artistically but also as people. “I Am I Be,” besides being one of De La’s all-time great songs, seems also to be one of the first “emo rap” songs. I hadn’t heard MCs getting into their feelings in such a real, raw way before this. What tracks off Buhloone matter most to each of you?

DH: “I Am I Be” is the heart of the album in so many ways. I hadn’t heard hip-hop songs that were introspective or reflective in that way. It was rare to be that open about your feelings about your life and where you fit in your family and things like that. “Breakadawn” appeals to me right now too. I like the blend of the samples. I know Trugoy talked about how the group was pushed to make it [for airplay], but it doesn’t feel like a song that was ever going to be on the radio.

MJM: I’m going to make it a clean sweep and say “I Am I Be” is the one for me. I’m a lyrics person and a clarity person, so I appreciate that Pos was saying directly what was going on. There was no coded language. It was very much: “Here’s what’s happening with me in my life. Here’s what’s going on with the Native Tongues.” Also, I’ve always been a weird, left-of-center cat, so I appreciated “Long Island Wildin’” [which prominently features Japanese rappers Scha Dara Parr and Kan Takagi] for its bravery: when you first hear it, it’s like, “Hold on, is this meant to be on the CD?” It goes to what we’ve been saying about how this was an album where they were doing whatever they felt like doing without having to explain themselves. So, with “Long Island Wildin’,” it just lands out of nowhere.

I also feel like it opened the door for international hip-hop. That could just be me making stuff up, but I don’t remember a bridge between international and American hip-hop being so open before that song.

No one’s mentioned this one yet, so I need to put an honorable mention on “Ego Trippin’ (Part Two).” Marcus, you described yourself as a lyrics person; I’m first and foremost a music person. If the beat hits, I’m very forgiving of whatever lyrics may follow. With “Ego Trippin’,” the lyrics are on point, but that Al Hirt [“Harlem Hendoo”] sample didn’t sound like anything else I’d ever heard before. Putting “Ego Trippin’” on today still feels fresh as hell. I love all of the shout-outs that they’re giving to peers by quoting their most iconic lines.

I’m curious which of De La’s albums each of you spend the most time with. Let’s stick to their first four albums, from 3 Feet High through Stakes Is High, since, to me, this is when De La was most consistent and impactful. Where does Buhloone fall within your respective listening habits?

MJM: For me, it sits third. I’m younger than the two of you, so Stakes Is High has more of a resonance because I was in high school when it came out [in 1996]; it naturally taps into my nostalgia. Secondly, I go to De La Soul Is Dead because I love the dark sophomore record. Then it’s Buhloone.

And this may be an unpopular opinion, but 3 Feet High is the last one for me. I understand why people go for it, but I can also understand people who say that it’s a tough listen now with 2025 ears. It’s a long slog of a record.

DH: The two I listen to the most often are Stakes Is High and Buhloone Mindstate. Their first two albums are ingrained in my brain to the extent that it’s like, Do I need to put either on again? 3 Feet High still sounds good to me, but I don’t ever put it on to listen; whereas Buhloone and Stakes are the ones that I can listen to on a day-to-day basis.

I just realized how hard it is for me to come up with an answer. 3 Feet High changed my life, no exaggeration. I don’t find it to be a slog like you do, Marcus—but like Dave, I’m just so familiar with it that I’m less compelled to spontaneously relisten to it. I probably go back to De La Soul Is Dead the most because that first half of the album is sequenced so well. I love it when albums flow from one song to the next, and I never feel the need to skip a track.

Let’s pull the scope back. What compelled each of you to write a De La Soul biography?

MJM: I always want to write about people who, in the literary sense, don’t get the shine they deserve. Even though De La Soul and Kendrick Lamar are mainstream acts, they don’t sit in literary space like that. You can go to a bookstore and see a million books on Springsteen, Dylan, the Beatles, Miles Davis, John Coltrane. Well, what about hip-hop?

After my book on Kendrick came out, some guy asked why I decided to write my first book about a rapper. I took offense to that. Why wouldn’t I write about Kendrick? Why wouldn’t I write about De La Soul?

De La reminded me of my own upbringing, of my older cousin Eric, who was the same age as these guys. He was a DJ and taught me a lot about hip-hop. De La Soul reminds me of my older brother too. Their style of hip-hop was the type that I grew up on, and I wanted to catalog that experience as best I could.

DH: This was my first book. I’d written about music online as a hobby, a freelance career, an outgrowth of when I started writing in college. I had always wanted to write a book because I wanted to have something in my hand, especially as websites disappear or fail to keep their archives up. The publisher reached out to me to say they were looking for short biographies of groups, mostly from the nineties. De La jumped out at me right away. I didn’t know Marcus was already working on his book. But at the time, I felt somebody needed to write one. I wanted to go into a bookstore and find books about artists like De La instead of 30 books about Bob Dylan, or whoever. It was also when De La’s music still wasn’t on streaming services, and it felt like they weren’t as prominent in hip-hop conversations, even about the nineties era. What appealed to me was the idea that I could write something that would get their story out there.

When you first started on your respective books, did either of you have a sense of a central point you wanted to get across?

DH: Yeah, a little bit. I’ve read great books about hip-hop that mentioned De La somewhere, but it was always the briefest point, [describing them] as “positive, suburban, alternative.” These words don’t tell you much. If they’re suburban, it has to be in the context of Long Island, not like the suburbs of Kansas City where I live. Same thing with “alternative” and “positive.” [De La] are often set against people like N.W.A, but they went on tour together and were friendly with one another. So from the outset, I wanted to get past those kinds of taglines.

MJM: Similar to what I tried to do with Kendrick, I wanted to show that Black people can be normal. If you look at the New York Times bestsellers list, all the “Black books” are based on some sort of fantastic story, as if a spectacular thing has to happen for a Black person to exist. With High and Rising, I wanted to show that you can have a middle-class existence and still be spectacular. We don’t always have to save people. We don’t always have to overcome some sort of harrowing circumstance. Here are three nerdy guys from Long Island who, after school, decided they were going to start sampling Steely Dan and Hall & Oates. And they made a career out of it.

It’s a love story, if you think about it, because these three guys loved each other; now it’s just Pos and Maseo [after the death of Trugoy/Dave in 2023]. How do you grieve in public? How do you move forward after one of your band members dies right as your music is coming back to streaming? I wanted to tell that story as well, because as I was finishing the book, my mom passed. So [my book] was also about grief and the complexities of love. And it was about, quite frankly, just being normal and showing that you can be normal and still be seen.

Were there any revelations that came up for you?

MJM: It wasn’t until I looked back at the full manuscript—in conversation with my own evolution—that I realized these guys are essentially my cousins, my brothers, my friends around the way, people who are trying to figure it out like we’re all trying to figure it out. In this current celebrity culture, there’s this notion that they don’t have the same issues and the same problems [as the rest of us], whereas when I looked at Pos, Dave, and Maseo, I saw that they were also trying to figure it all out. That was the ultimate takeaway.

DH: Overall, [I was drawn to] themes about how they’ve been treated over the years, their perseverance as friends, and the longevity of them as a group, how much work goes into that, how much they focused on work as a concept. It’s not just naming their 2004 album The Grind Date. Throughout their career, work is a driving thing, and I traced that from when they were kids.

What new facts surprised you most?

DH: There’s one that’s also in Marcus’s book, which is Charlie Rock, a.k.a. DJ Stitches, the fourth member of De La in the early years. The guy was right there with them in the basements, working on stuff. I didn’t know that until I started working on the book.

We haven’t mentioned [De La’s producer] Prince Paul at all, but his whole story and how he fit into the group was also interesting. I kept having to stop myself from just following his trajectory, because he was another young, creative mind trying to figure these things out.

I also didn’t know about Charlie Rock. He was like their fifth Beatle! Based on what both of you wrote, he influenced their concept, contributed samples, shaped songs. That was a revelation for me. Likewise, Dave, you mentioned Prince Paul: when I was younger, I just assumed that Paul did all the music for the group on those first few albums, but what I learned is how the music-making was much more collaborative. I loved those behind-the-scenes details from each of you, how Pos brought over this breakbeat one day, and the next it was Mase bringing in a different sample. They achieved this creative alchemy together.

MJM: Dave took my answer. It was Charlie Rock. I was surprised by Charlie’s level of honesty. People don’t want to look crazy when you interview them, so they’ll leave stuff out or keep it vanilla. Charlie Rock didn’t do that at all. He was saying, “‘Da inner sound y’all’ was really ‘da ill shit y’all.’ And I was the one bringing those breaks. Because I’m a little rougher around the edges, they kicked me out the group.” He also added that he and Maseo had patched everything up, they’re good now. There was no way I could not lead the book with all that.

Another surprise I caught was during a conversation with DJ Premier for the book. Premier was talking about how De La were self-deprecating to a fault. Even as they got older and established, they still didn’t want to reach out to certain producers because maybe they didn’t feel like they were good enough. What I was told is that they would have a wish list of people who they wanted to work with, but then they would talk themselves out of it. Premier was saying how all these people would have given their right arm to work with De La.

MC Serch [of 3rd Bass] was also a great interview because he was telling me that De La were building toward a middle-class existence, while 3rd Bass, when they were on tour together, were spending all this money they really didn’t have. 3rd Bass were staying in all these fancy hotels in London, whereas De La found some cheap, affordable spot way out and stayed there in the same room.

One common theme between both your books is this tension between the group’s public image—happy-go-lucky nerds, if I’m being reductive—and their consistent battles to wrestle control back from the music industry. Not to bury the lede this deep into our conversation, but Marcus, I feel like we have to talk about how the group called out your book last November on social media by saying, “This is an unauthorized book, and we are not connected to it in any way.” They even went as far as to add: “[W]e are exploring all of our legal options.” I was shocked at that post, especially because I kept thinking, But Marcus’s book isn’t meant to be any kind of hit piece. If anything, it’s probably going to be more like a love letter. They have a problem with that?!

MJM: It was quite literally them judging a book by its cover. There’s nothing about the narrative they took issue with. I don’t even know if they read the book. But when they saw the cover and the love the book was getting, it probably triggered 35 years of bad blood because, “Oh, here’s somebody else trying to profit off our image.” I was trying to explain to Maseo, behind the scenes, that this isn’t how books work. I’m not sitting in a mansion right now.

Their response to me was rooted in trauma. They had been fighting against the industry since they were in high school, their whole creative lives. When you feel like you have to fight for everything, it’s naturally going to make you angrier. I told my team this was going to happen; at a certain point, they’re going to respond, and they’re probably going to make a fuss, they’re going to try to rally their fans against this book, and so if you see it happen, it’s not the end of the world. And right on cue, they did it.

To Maseo’s credit, right before the book came out, we started talking. I told him, “Look, I’ve been trying to get at you guys for four years.” Serious heads were putting us in the same emails, trying to get us together to talk, and [De La] didn’t respond to anything. So I said, “I feel like my book has the right to exist because it’s a journalistic take. I’m not sitting here acting like it’s the De La Soul book. I would love to read an authorized De La Soul book written by you guys. Me writing this book doesn’t negate your book.”

DH: They’ve been in that fight mentality for much of their career. There’s a business side to so much of their career that is prominent in the control that they exert over their legacy. Put that together with the many different times they feel like they’ve been wronged, and I think it exerts itself in this overwhelming protectiveness. As somebody writing my first book, I was worried that they would react the way they ultimately reacted to Marcus’s book, or worse. Part of me felt like maybe the reason no one had written a book about them is that defensive stance. I did see a couple of times people would tag them on Instagram or whatever and say, “Well, what about this other book? Is this one okay?” They never gave any response, either because my book didn’t have the same marketing or it was just completely off their radar.

You both have mentioned how De La is this middle-class group, but for the last question, I want to talk about them also being middle-aged now … like all of us, here. It’s been interesting to see all these 1980s/’90s-era artists still putting out new music in recent years: Common and Pete Rock, MC Lyte, LL Cool J, Slick Rick. There’s a much longer conversation to be had around reconciling hip-hop’s youth-oriented ethos with the reality that artists—and their fan bases—get old too.

Obviously, with Trugoy/Dave gone, putting out new music would be tricky. But Pos and Maseo have already created new music videos for older songs like “Oodles of O’s” and “Rock Co. Kane Flow,” and the group have created a couple dozen “visualizer” videos for other tracks. To me, they clearly want to stay relevant.

DH: In some of the interviews they’ve given since Dave passed away, they claimed they’re going to put out multiple new albums. It seems right now they’re doing touring, social media posts, this supposed book they’re working on. I feel if they put out another album, it’s going to be more like, “Let’s celebrate our legacy, look at all this stuff we did,” you know, taking a pat on the back for the achievement of their career. I don’t see them doing a new album like the way LL Cool J and Q-Tip did last year [with The Force].

MJM: I feel like the best middle-aged rappers rap about what they’re going through. You don’t have to sound like you’re 25; you can talk to people who are also your age. One of my favorite DC rappers is Kev Brown. A few years ago, he released an album called Fill In the Blank (2018). I thought it was an incredible record, because that man was in his house when it was snowing outside in April, and he was talking about shoveling the driveway. He was talking about going to the grocery store, but he did it in such an artful way. The master of that is Phonte on No News Is Good News (2018). He’s rapping about aging as a middle-aged person, rapping about colonoscopies and cholesterol levels.

Obviously, I’m the last person De La would listen to, but I feel like, if they want to stay relevant, they should just be as human as possible. There’s something to be said about authenticity. If there are guest verses to be done, conversations to be had, don’t shy away from aging. That’s the one thing that I disagree with André 3000 about when he said [he was] not gonna rap about [his] bad eyesight. I’m like, “Rap about that!”

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Dave Heaton is the author of De La Soul (J-Card Press, 2024).

Marcus J. Moore is the author of High and Rising: A Book About De La Soul (Dey Street Books, 2024), and The Butterfly Effect: How Kendrick Lamar Ignited the Soul of Black America (Simon & Schuster, 2020).