![]() After some tweaking and testing, the three settled on stage names: Trugoy, Posdnuos and Maseo, respectively. At high school on Long Island, Jolicoeur and his childhood friend Kelvin Mercer linked up with another student, Vincent Mason, and began making music together. 3 Feet High and Rising is the sound not only of young, black American men discovering themselves, but of their first-bumpy forays into the outside world, their voyages into their parents’ record collections, and their bristling as they watched a culture they loved turn into a commodity they couldn’t control. ![]() That an act so self-consciously weird could become foundational to the generations that followed, in sound and in ideology, is a testament both to the singular brilliance of the group and to the forward-thinking, creatively open ideals that hip-hop aspires to - and that De La so readily insisted were still far away, on the horizon line. What De La Soul was doing was giving new life to some of the most vibrant, inventive, vexing, thoroughly alive records in the history of hip-hip. Imitating the conglomerate: “Hey guys, what the fuck are you doing?” ![]() “They did tap on our window,” Dave “Trugoy” Jolicoeur said of Warner, to the New York Times in an interview a couple years after the fact. What I’m trying to tell you is that those albums matter I’m also trying to tell you that someone owns the copyrights. They’ve soundtracked sweaty high school house parties and are even enshrined in the Library of Congress. The delirious, server-crashing mad dash to secure the files was understandable: the records in question were bronzed by critics and burned into the brains of rap fans going back generations. Those albums - including Stakes Is High, De La Soul Is Dead and Vinyl Me, Please’s Essentials Record of the Month in March, their monumental debut, 3 Feet High and Rising - were unavailable anywhere on the legal internet, then as they are today, due to contracts that clear their samples for physical release, but do not cover digital distribution. zip files and beamed directly to the fans’ email addresses, which they had collected themselves. It was Valentine’s Day, 2014, and thousands upon thousands of fans were rushing to file-sharing websites to download De La Soul’s first six albums, which the group had uploaded as.
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