The most formative musical memory of my youth occurred 30,000 feet over central California in the summer of 1989. I was almost 17, flying on a school trip from LA to the Bay Area, and popped into my Walkman was an album I had just picked up from my local record store, Moby Disc: De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising. When the cassette reached “Eye Know,” about midway through Side A, I sat transfixed in my seat. I had never heard anything like this before: an earnest rap song about love that wasn’t a sappy radio ballad (no offense, LL Cool J), set to a delicious groove that merged ’60s soul and ’70s art pop. Part of me wanted to take my headphones off and share the song with one of my classmates but the part that was selfish won out. When the track ended, I rewound and played it again. And again. And again. “Eye Know” wasn’t the first rap song I ever heard but it was the first that sparked an interest to explore the music and culture behind it. As with many others who discovered hip-hop in that same era, that private epiphany changed my life’s trajectory.
We learned yesterday that one of the group’s core members — David Jolicoeur, aka Trugoy the Dove, aka Plug Two — has come to the end of his own journey at the age of 54. As of this time, no cause of death has been announced, but in 2017, Jolicoeur revealed that he was suffering from congestive heart problems. On Feb. 5, when De La Soul was feted as part of this year’s Grammy Awards’ celebration of hip-hop’s 50th anniversary, Trugoy was conspicuously absent from the proceedings.
Like the rest of the group, including Kelvin “Posdnuos” Mercer, Vincent “P.A. Mase” Mason and their mentor “Prince Paul” Houston, Jolicoeur grew up in the Long Island village of Amityville; all four men met while attending Amityville Memorial High School. Their middle-class, suburban roots were an important part of their difference from most of the hip-hop landscape of the mid- and late-1980s when rap music was still associated with gritty, urban ‘hoods like Compton in Los Angeles or New York’s South Bronx and Queensbridge Projects.
The leading MCs who hailed from those areas were mostly brash braggarts with super-sized personalities: Think Big Daddy Kane, Run DMC, LL Cool J or Ice Cube. By comparison, Trugoy and his group-mates looked downright bookish, wearing “black medallions, no gold,” and possessed of irreverent wit and cutting humor that became the group’s calling card. Dante Ross, who helped manage them after they signed to Tommy Boy Records in 1987, told Check the Technique author Brian Coleman in 2007, “when De La Soul came in the game, there was just a changing of the guard. The gold chains and the macho s*** just wasn’t all that anymore.”