Hip-hop and Generation X came of age together. As Gen Xers moved through their teenage years in the 1970s and ’80s, hip-hop exploded from underground Bronx culture into a national phenomenon. Run-DMC’s collaboration with Aerosmith on “Walk This Way” in 1986, the rise of Public Enemy and N.W.A. in the late ’80s, and MTV’s embrace of hip-hop videos all happened precisely as Gen X (and older millennials) was forming a cultural identity. This generation, which is to say my generation, didn’t just witness hip-hop’s rise; we were its first mainstream audience, the generation that proved this music could speak across boundaries of race, geography, and class.
Within this broader hip-hop story lives the more specific tale of De La Soul, a group that offered a weird and wonderful alternative that challenged what hip-hop could be. De La Soul’s music gave listeners permission to be thoughtful, creative, and individual during a cultural moment that demanded conformity, but for younger hip-hop fans, De La Soul’s ground-breaking sound has been all but lost due to the music business’s tight controls over what can be streamed.
In Living in a D.A.I.S.Y. Age: The Music, Culture, and World De La Soul Made, Austin McCoy takes on the task of restoring one of hip-hop’s most innovative groups to their rightful place in the history of the genre. McCoy, a professor of History, not only provides a cultural reckoning but a personal history, a journey that begins in his youth and spans to the present day where he teaches a History of Hip-Hop in American Culture course, alongside his other areas of expertise, labor history and Civil Rights. McCoy’s meticulous discography threaded with a memoir of listening reminds us that our choices in music are not only cultural and political but also deeply personal.
McCoy begins in the classroom, where he is devastated (though not surprised) to learn that his students are mostly ignorant of De La Soul’s music because of the group’s longtime absence on streaming platforms, leaving gaps in their understanding of not only the group but its contributions to the genre of hip-hop. “De la Soul’s absence on the streaming platforms prevented younger listeners from seeing historical connections between their music and that of contemporaries, like Tyler, The Creator and Earl Sweatshirt,” writes McCoy, pointing out that, in this way, students and listeners are robbed of artistic lineage.
A self-described “80s baby,” McCoy owns physical copies of De La Soul’s albums (a topic that will become important by the end of the book), and he notes that the group—Posdnuous (Kelvin Mercer), Trugoy (David Jolicoeur), and Maseo (Vincent Mason), and their frequent producer, Prince Paul (Paul Edward Huston)—offered more than a new way to come at hip-hop. He argues that De La Soul infused hip-hop with a sense of imagination and creativity revolutionary to both Black art and Black life. Starting with the release of their first album, 3 Feet High and Rising, De La Soul showcased a complex-yet-integrated methodology that elevated the rap album to high concept art. The group’s approach to sampling, dense and layered, created a finely textured sonic tapestry that made rap more melodic, an almost handcrafted sound, which McCoy aptly describes as “stitched.” This artistic style supported the futurism De La Soul embodied, encapsulated by the “D.A.I.S.Y. Age” aesthetic.
De La Soul not only expanded the sound of rap but its influence on its listeners, making a case for creative individualism. “They made it okay for young Black men, and young men of color to be weird, quirky, and vulnerable,” McCoy writes. He points out that De La Soul enacts what scholar Robin D.G. Kelly calls “Black freedom dreaming” (or in De La Soul terms, “utopia set to music.”) “D.A.I.S.Y.,” a philosophy that underpins De La Soul’s first album, stands for “Da Inner Sound Y’all,” and it sets forth an ethos based on creativity, intelligence, wit, and delight. Drawing on a range of samples, from funk to Schoolhouse Rock jingles, De La Soul expanded what could be considered fodder for hip-hop music. Ironically, this wide-ranging sampling would soon create the quagmire that kept De La Soul’s albums off the streaming services, depriving future listeners of what McCoy describes as the group’s ability to tell many different types of stories using rap.
Before record labels and industry executives demanded their cut from artists who sampled other artists’ work, De La Soul was free to innovate. Each successive album the group created took the work of hip-hop in a new direction. In his discussion of the group’s sophomore effort, McCoy associates the cultural moment with changes in popular music and his own awakening to the significance of the genre. That album, De La Soul Is Dead, arrived in 1991, when the vicious beating of Rodney King played out alongside the ascension of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. In music, NWA made rap the number-one selling genre on the Billboard charts, overtaking alternative rock, the likes of R.E.M.
In the wake of Rodney King, the rise of gang culture paved the way for gangsta rap to proliferate on the airwaves, and as white audiences also started to gravitate toward rap music, the gang culture that arose from the King beating reinforced the negative stereotypes many in the mainstream already thought about Black culture. At the same time, De La Soul struggled to overcome their D.A.I.S.Y. image, which “critics mistook for carefree pacifist hippies, while challengers took the group for easy opponents.” Incorporating punk, hard rock, house music, and disco into De La Soul Is Dead, the group transitioned from weird and nerdy to being capable of defending themselves, using hardness as a survival tactic. Comparing this sophomore album to 3 Feet High and Rising, McCoy describes the relationship as “a great act of negation.” The catchy beats and lyrics melded with meditations on societal ills and looked at capitalism and labor in critical and subversively playful ways. We can see this working on tracks such as “Bitties in the B.K. Lounge,” which took on youth labor in fast food and service industries expressly as its topic.
De La Soul’s pivot, while less radio friendly, became culturally significant, as captured in McCoy’s experience:
Before De La Soul Is Dead, I enjoyed listening to all the popular rappers of the 1990s. I listened to Ice Cube, Scarface, Tupac, and The Notorious B.I.G. However, I could not identify with any of these artists in the way I could with De La Soul on their second album. The record matched my cerebral disposition. (I was, and am, a nerd.) This album helped me become what I thought was a “real” hip-hop head.
Throughout the book, McCoy uses passages of personal experience like these to further the discussion of historical and culturally significant moments, and this makes his discussion of De La Soul feel visceral and potent. To McCoy, this listening is not merely personal, it is identity-shaping in the context of what it meant to be young, Black, and male at the end of the Twentieth Century. “After listening to De La Soul Is Dead, I recognized it was neither wack nor soft to care about culture and the people in it,” writes McCoy, and in this moment of memoir, we see, perhaps, the origins of the scholar who would construct the intellectual, cultural, artistic, aesthetic, and profoundly human argument for De La Soul as an important ensemble and contributor to the world of music.
McCoy thoughtfully unpacks each subsequent album with “labor” as a running theme. Record companies, like Tommy Boy, who put out the bulk of De La Soul’s catalog, looked for hits, but for De La Soul, there was nothing worse than creating a hit, as McCoy describes it, “their long-held belief that the profit motive represented one of the main driving forces constraining creative freedom.” With the need to continually tour to promote their music and make a living, De La Soul became the archetype for working-class rappers who find that their calling exacts a physical and emotional toll. McCoy quotes an interview with Maseo: “One thing I realized is . . . you’re not going to like everything about what you love. There’s going to be some warranted challenges.” This artistic integrity also feels genuine to Gen X artists, and it is rife with sacrifice. As mainstream hip-hop artists hit marketing heights and peak visibility, De La Soul’s quest for artistic purity proves that there are some artists in the genre who neither record labels, nor executives, nor the market itself can control. In prose accurate as well as passionate, McCoy’s broader point, however, should not be lost: the group deserves to be paid for its artistic labor. McCoy addresses the topic of “compensation” in a way that feels particularly profound and appropriate to our moment of late-stage capitalism.
Like artists in other genres, most notably Prince and Taylor Swift, De La Soul had to engage in legal wrangling to regain ownership of its musical catalog: “For Posdnuous, Maseo, and Trugoy, the struggle for ownership and the ability to reap financial and cultural rewards from their legendary albums underscored the group’s populist, anti-corporate orientation in the hip-hop culture.” Being absent on streaming meant that De La Soul was lost to rap’s cultural history, and the group lost out on revenue-generating activity like the ringtone trend. As McCoy catalogs these lost opportunities, his focus shifts to a key issue: sampling rights. Warner Music and Tommy Boy both failed to navigate these matters of intellectual property and ownership on behalf of De La Soul, and it was none other than Jay Z, whose Tidal platform refused to make De La Soul’s back catalog available in solidarity with the group. This started the long process of securing rights in order to release the music on streaming platforms, which happened at the start of hip-hop’s fiftieth anniversary in 2023. McCoy writes of this moment, “A younger generation looking to learn about the culture’s history gained access to some of its most treasured albums.”
Soon after this historic victory, came tragedy. David Jolicoeur, Trugoy of De La Soul, died in February of 2023. McCoy reminds us that this was one more casualty on a long list of young Black artists dying young. He contextualizes the awful trend as only a good historian can: “We have grown accustomed to the history of young black artists dying because of gun violence. However, in the last several years, we’ve watched many of our luminaries die due to natural causes in their forties and early fifties, around fifteen to twenty years earlier than the life expectancy of most African Americans.”
In one of the most powerful and emotionally wrenching parts of the book, McCoy follows the death of David Jolicoeur with the loss of his parents. He describes the aftermath of these deaths and his opaque search for happiness. It’s in the lyrics of Posdnuous, in “Drawn,” where McCoy begins to see the contours, allowing him to move forward with the feeling that time keeps moving. “Don’t waste it,” he writes, not only to himself, but to all of us.
By rooting his history of the music of De La Soul, a body of work he clearly loves, in his personal experiences, McCoy brings us back to his underlying, if unstated, thesis: in music, all listening is, at heart, personal. Though this is true, the music business, McCoy reminds us, chugs along on profit. The current streaming economy, which does not benefit artists, is a great example of this. McCoy makes a compelling case for owning physical copies of the music you love, and that, more than anything, is the book’s takeaway for fans of popular music. “This is why keeping my De La Soul CDs was one of the best fan-related decisions I ever made,” McCoy says. “I never lost their music.”
