David Jolicoeur, a founding member of the hip-hop group De La Soul, who performed under the stage name Trugoy the Dove, was not particularly a fan of the album Buhloone Mindstate, one that many diehard De La Soul fans claim as the group’s best. In an interview from AllHiphop.com from 2004, Dave felt the group got too creative, caught up in the hype of incorporating jazz into the project. Dude wasn’t even a fan of the lead track “Breakadawn.”
“I didn’t like the album because I think we were just a little too creative. And to me, you should never use the phrase ‘too creative’. But I think we took it a little too far. You know I think there was a big influence on us at the time from groups we were hanging out with. Like Tribe and so many others on the Jazz tip. I just felt it went a little to the left or who we were as people and what we were accustomed to at the time.”
Dave, who passed in 2023, got a sense that it just didn’t hit. Which is code for “not street enough.” It could also mean he had a greater sense of what was unfolding in real time; 1993 was another transitional time, for hip-hop. Wu-Tang Clan made their debut with such an original template on Enter the Wu-Tang—groups will forever copy that formula for decades. Snoop arrives and just crushes. Souls of Mischief, and Freestyle Fellowship making noise. KRS-ONE’s BDP, Return of the Boom Bap, is one of his finest.
The world is moving. Changing. And Buhloone Mindstate sounds of a different era altogether. Some would opt for outta place. Probably Dave. But consequently, according to producer Prince Paul, this is Chris Rock’s and Dave Chappelle’s favorite De La Soul record. Sincerity can’t be made up.
De La Soul’s third album, 1993’s Buhloone Mindstate, is a last vestige of that individualism. Trust, Snoop had a bevy of bad actors trying to follow, doing their best to simulate his trademark, but that just flooded the record bins with bland bars while Pos, outdoing himself again, drops the oft-quotable, “Fuck being hard, Posdnuos is complicated.”
It’s not just jazz music overflowing on their sophomore release; there is fresh air, weird attempts and collabs once again creating new parameters for hip-hop, including an all-Japanese-rapped track that’s more punk rock than anything else. Buhloone Mindstate is big thinking, lamenting, soulful creativity that triples down on the be-you credo once again. But with the corporatization of hip-hop being more organized and getting really wealthy, that free-thinking gets drowned out by the G-funk blaring from the speakers at your local Sam Goody.
Upon reflection, older age and experiencing death a bit more than in my twentysomething self, it’s the blues, not jazz. That’s what my washed, I’m sorry, seasoned ears pick up as Maceo Parker, James Brown’s esteemed sideman, sets a mahogany patina with his Godfather-of-Soul saxophone chops. It’s over the meditative pulse of a David Axelrod-produced “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy” by Lou Rawls; A longing, in those hoots and hollers. A sense of sadness and joy.
Children play in the background, trucks move down the street, and that triplicate of harmony from the horn slides in towards the end. “I Be Blowin’,” recorded and mixed by the ever-magical and important hip-hop consigliere, Mr. Bob Power, this fifth song on De La Soul’s third masterpiece, Buloone Mindstate, rings true, for the times they are changing, again. The track? It doesn’t possess a word. Not one witty barb, colloquialism, or any reference to an album skit—yet it sets the tone for this version of that group who in their previous two albums blew up the charts so hard, they had to kill off what shot them through the MTV-laden star-making machine. My Gawd.
For obvious reasons, they all, well at least two, felt a certain way about being freed from the convention of being hippies on the first album. They were done killing off the identities, and for sure defending that manhood on tour with De La Soul Is Dead. So they had a bit of cachet—Tommy Boy, their label, always looking for the radio darts that jettisoned their debut album 3 Feet High and Rising, was still looking for hits, a byproduct of the accident from the P-funked-up joints of “Me Myself and I.”
But this was ’93. There were new groups. Other transcendent artists on the imprint made those hit records, so De La got a little bit of solace for their third record. Some viewed it as a blessing and a curse. Naughty By Nature, a group from East Orange, New Jersey who Queen Latifah introduced to Tommy Boy Records had the mega hit “Hip Hop Hooray,” a success from the album 19 Naughty III. Spike Lee directed the video, which featured cameos by Latifah, Eazy-E, and Run-D.M.C.
So it was cool for the plugs right? Naah. De La allowed that heaviness in and it runs through “I Be Blowin’.” On this sophomore album they are experiencing and talking about how it feels to see your peers, people they brought up and through the studio on their previous endeavors experience fame. Queen Latifah has a certified hit, anthem, and message song with “U.N.I.T.Y.” that bumps so hard Maseo uses it at his sound checks, chopping the track up like a controlled substance on the decks. That’s how hard it bumps during those times and still to this day. Black Sheep, another member of the Native Tongues, was also getting serious heat—and still are—from their 1991 album A Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing with the crossover hit “The Choice Is Yours (Revisited)”.
There is symmetry as well. De La, along with Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, and any other hip-hopper whose parents came up with Parliament Funkadelic, got those P-Funk vibes meshed with hip-hop so hard that P-Funk All-Stars* – Live at the Beverly Theater in Hollywood from 1990 hit the charts, and those musicians, Maceo Parker included, got to hit the road again and make some bread off the kids and their parents. So I’m sure Maceo was not inconvenienced to do a spot for a hip-hop group with a weird name. But he laid down those blues so hard that the band had a rebuttal, “I Am I Be,” which also featured Fred Wesley and Pee Wee Ellis, more James Brown soldiers, spoke to the dysfunction of celebrity amongst friend groups and individuals yearning for singular power.
That, too, is the blues. But let me ask, who else would pull the curtain back and let the public take a peek? De La Soul, with the broad shoulders.
“I Am I Be,” which features Fred Wesley & Pee Wee Ellis joining Maceo on that previous instrumental track, sees the emcees, Posdonous and Dave get uncomfortable about promises made throughout the Native Tongues getting easily broken by fame, ego and one would assume money: “Or some tongues who lied / And said ‘We’ll be natives to the end.’ / Nowadays we don’t even speak / I guess we got our own life to live.”
Trombonist Wesley and saxmen Parker and Ellis pick up the casual cool on “Patti Dooke,” a breezy inference about the misappropriation of Black music into mainstream music, which features a big-steppin’ cameo by the late great Guru, who had just finished and released the watershed project Jazzmatazz Vol. 1 half a year before De La dropped their third record. Yet another centerpiece on the album, “Ego Trippin’ Pt 2,” goes at it again about emcees who just brag, brag, brag, and ignore reality.
As a whole, this classic set them and us up for yet the third comeback, an incarnation of De La with the Stakes Is High project and single. A street record, traveling farther on the boulevards and avenues, where the group stays true to their mission of staying true to themselves, amidst the encroaching trend of a flock mentality. But it makes no difference; with either method, De La wields benchmarks for themselves and the culture.
De La Soul : Buhloone Mindstate
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