De La Soul, a luminary rap group, reigns supreme as an unparalleled inspiration to The Roots, Common, Yasiin Bey (aka Mos Def), Kanye West, and other daring artists who broke the mold in a genre that had room for evolving. However, their unparalleled legacy faced a perilous threat due to a maelstrom of rapidly-evolving technology and music industry bureaucracy - until this week.

The trio of Long Island, New York artists Kelvin “Posdnous” Mercer, Dave “Trugoy the Dove” Jolicoeur, and Vincent “Maseo” Mason were classmates at Amityville Memorial High and worked as janitors to fund their passion for music. Mason built a friendship with Prince Paul, a fellow DJ and producer from their neighborhood who was a member of the group Stetsasonic. Paul began to go to the studio with them, and the result was their 1989 debut Three Feet High and Rising alone. Their approaches to lyricism, production, and fashion all made them innovators that other rap acts would follow for decades. Prince Paul's production took an adventurous approach to sampling that flipped the likes of Liberace, Johnny Cash, and Hall and Oates — and not just for breaks and choruses, but as layers and quick references that added an extra dimension of character and quirkiness.

The sound was the perfect landscape for De La Soul’s eccentric, one-of-a-kind lyricism. They spoke about sex, love, the danger of drugs, individualism, and trying new things on the path to personal growth. But it wasn’t just the subjects of their rhymes, but their method: they stuffed their songs with self-invented slang and inside jokes, letting fans figure it out instead of explaining everything verbatim. Just take a look at the members' names as an example: Trugoy is simply the word “yogurt” but backward, Posdnous is backward for Sop Sound, and Maseo is an acronym for Making A Soul Effort. They were also the first to integrate comedic skits in between songs to further flesh out the fiber of the album. And they joined forces with the Jungle Brothers and A Tribe Called Quest to create the Native Tongues collective – which, along with building an Afrocentric musical aesthetic, ushered in bohemian threads and African medallions instead of the street-centric wears of Public Enemy and the disco-heavy fashion of the rap acts before them.

Hip-hop had already begun to bloom into a dynamic genre with acts like Public Enemy, N.W.A., MC Lyte, Slick Rick, Boogie Down Productions, and others making their own presentations of Black consciousness, rebellion, machismo, and braggadocio. But De La Soul brought a unique sense of innocence, playfulness, and insularity, a mode of outsiderness that proved they were solely doing hip-hop for themselves — a notion that meant a lot as the genre was beginning to prove its commercial and cultural viability.

While Three Feet High and Rising is primarily seen as their crowning achievement, De La Soul’s following albums continued to push the boundaries of hip-hop and establish their own place as one of the genre’s most distinctive voices. Efforts like De La Soul Is Dead took on a more somber, serious tone, speaking about subjects like teen incest and drug addiction while offering a critical perspective of hip-hop and pushing themselves out of the “D.A.I.S.Y Age” flower imagery that they felt fans and critics had boxed them into. Buhloone Mindstate offered a more abstract approach to their rhymes while using live instruments and foreign language musicians, while Stakes Is High spoke out for hip-hop as the genre had lost some of its leaders to gun violence and newer predecessors like Nas, OutKast, and Jay-Z were beginning to find their voices. The two-album Art Official Intelligence series had some of the earliest examples of hip-hop growing up, and The Grind Date, their first album after leaving longtime label home Tommy Boy, proved that they were just as sharp as when they debuted a decade and a half earlier, rhyming alongside MF DOOM and Ghostface while establishing a smooth three-man weave over beats from J Dilla, Supa Dave West, Madlib and more.

But after years of being ahead of the curve, De La Soul has spent the last decade being behind in terms of industry standards. The group’s innovative approach to samples, along with a bunch of other confusing music industry red tape, made for a years-long dispute with Tommy Boy Records that has delayed the availability of their music: none of their first six albums were on the streaming services where so many fans have consumed their music, and they didn’t release physical copies of their albums anymore either. The delays made it feel like the group was functionally being erased from rap history: if their classic albums weren’t available to consume on fans’ own time, then how could their legacies be properly respected?

Despite being unable to put their music on streaming services, De La Soul didn’t allow that to stop them from moving. On Valentine’s Day in 2014, the group effectively bootlegged their own music: they requested fans’ email addresses and sent out links to download their entire catalog at the time, from Three Feet High to Stakes Is High to 2001’s AOI: Bionix. They stayed on the road, and they earned a major crossover look with The Gorillaz as collaborators for the animated band's Grammy-winning 2005 song “Feel Good Inc.” They were also one of the first major acts to use crowdfunding to create their album …And The Anonymous Nobody, rewarding Kickstarter investors of a certain tier with exclusive access to a bonus song. And some of their music still scored major licensing opportunities: “The Magic Number” appeared in the closing credits for Spider-Man: No Way Home.

But this year, the group has begun to get the props they deserve. The music rights firm Reservoir Media acquired the rights to De La Soul’s catalog in 2021 and gave the masters back to the group while working with them to clear the pile of samples that helped make the albums so special in the first place and enlisting Prince Paul to help recreate the magic. In January 2023, they announced that they would be formally making their catalog available on digital streaming platforms, along with exclusive merch, vinyl, CD, and cassette releases. The group also performed at the 2023 Grammy Awards’ blowout hip-hop tribute, appearing alongside everyone from Public Enemy and LL Cool J to The LOX and Lil Baby in a medley that told the story of hip-hop.

A week after De La Soul’s triumphant performance at the Grammys, and less than a month after their music was scheduled to receive the worldwide rerelease it deserves, the group suffered its biggest tragedy yet: Dave Jolicoeur, originally known as Trugoy the Dove before simply going by his first name, tragically died. He had been upfront about his struggles with congestive heart failure in previous years, but the group never officially shared his cause of death.

While Dave’s passing was tragic, hip-hop’s reaction was not. Artists like Questlove, Cypress Hill, A-Trak, DJ Premier, Open Mike Eagle, Robert Glasper, Pharrell, Kaytranada, Nas, and many more took time to pay their respects to the legacy that he and his De La Soul groupmates made on hip-hop as a whole, and their exploratory, avantgarde path through hip-hop encouraged them to spread their creative wings on their own terms. Between their odes, the pending availability of their music, and the legacies of their remaining two members, De La Soul’s legacy will remain intact.

Stream the De La Soul catalog here.