Although they'd announced a new direction and attitude in hip hop with their Plug Tunin' and Jenifa (Taught Me) singles, it was the release of De La Soul's debut album, 3 Feet High and Rising, in the spring of 1989 that started turning heads both inside and outside the hip hop realm. After Run-DMC hipped rock fans to rap, and Public Enemy's militancy had built on the impact of The Message and brought those weaned on punk's political energy into the hip hop fold, it was De La and 3 Feet High... that first told the rest of the world about this music. Accessible, populist, and devoid of the element of threat that accompanied PE and their more strident contemporaries, 3 Feet High... was tailor-made to introduce the world to the most exciting new musical form of the day - but as the record's makers and their contemporaries reveal, changing the world was never on the agenda.

CAN U KEEP A SECRET
Behind the codes and the pseudonyms: the origins of De La Soul...

Chuck D (Public Enemy): Among the great innovators of the classic era, somebody who just decides to say, 'You know man, fuck it. If they're there, then we're gonna totally be on this other side', was De La Soul and Prince Paul. And Prince Paul also comes from the understanding of the most under-rated group of the classic era, and possibly of all time - Stetsasonic. The first hip hop band: the band that made The Roots understand the way they could go in the '90s. In Stet you had minds like Delite and Daddy-O, and also Prince Paul, whose ideas manifested into De La Soul, these young innovators from Long Island. And when you see a record like that, you go 'What the fuck? These guys is crazier than we are!' That was the beauty of that era: everybody had to carve out their own private Idaho.

Posdnous (De La Soul): We were the same kids who had every Kool G Rap album, every Rakim song, all the early Juice Crew stuff. We loved Run-DMC, knew every lyric to Criminal Minded. We were just fans of the music. Whatever was out at that time, that's what we were on, hardcore or not. But regardless of what we were into, we always were all about what we were gonna do when we ever got the chance to get out there. It wasn't like we thought to ourselves, 'We're gonna try our best and make sure we come out as different as possible from what's out,' it's just that it was the natural way how we were. We had the funk and soul from Mase's side, the calypso and soul from Dave's side, and my father's jazz and blues and soul and gospel side, and we just put that all together with our own influences.

Prince Paul (Stetsasonic): I kind of knew of them in school, but not as De La Soul, just from seeing them around. We all went to the same high school, but I never knew they emceed. It turned out that Mase, De La Soul's DJ, he was a DJ for this guy named Gangster B, and it just so happens that our high school music teacher, this guy named Everett Collins, decided to start his own label. He signed Gangster B, and Maseo was his DJ. And he wanted me to program a beat for Gangster B.

Pos: Mr Collins lived on my block. He was working with a couple of artists. He used to play drums for a group named Surface, and he also toured with the Isley Brothers. Mase was gonna help this gentleman by the name of Gangster B who was coming out on Mr Collins' label, and that's how Mase started to work with Paul. We all knew Paul, you just knew who he was. 'That's DJ Paul!' You know? We'd go to parties and he'd be there. Even before Paul was in Stet he was a very popular and respected DJ in the neighbourhood, so I mean we all knew him in passing. But it was Mase's relationship that got forged with him first, and from there Mase introduced him on a more personal level to myself and Dave.

Paul: So I brought the drum machine I had at the time, called Sequential Tom. And the cool thing about that drum machine was you were able to reverse the beats and play 'em backwards. And so, you know, I programmed one part of it, and then played the next part backwards. And they were like, 'Yo! Do the whole beat backwards, like Paul Revere!' I'm like, 'No! That's biting, and biting is a crime!' But they went 'Do it! Do it!' I did it, and it sounded horrible. Mase had seen me all miserable and he was taking sides with me! So Mase came to me and said, 'Look, I got a group, they're called De La Soul - there's two emcees and I'm the DJ. And that's my real group. Whatever you wanna do, we'll do it.' I guess because they respected me because I was the one guy in the neighbourhood who made records.

A NEW STYLE OF SPEAK
Plug Tunin' and signing to Tommy Boy...

Paul: Later on, Mase came by my house and brought their demo. It was a rough of Plug Tunin'. This  was probably the end of '86, 'cos we started the new year working on the demos. And I was, 'Oh my God!' It was very stripped down. It still had the main loop, though it wasn't really arranged that well. But just to hear the potential! I was like, 'Oh my God! Let me hold this tape, come back tomorrow, bring the emcees, watch what I do with it.' That was the ego in me! I added a whole bunch of little things to it. This was back in the days when we dubbed cassettes, because I had a four-track. So I dubbed all the other stuff over it, added the extra beats, the break, the little piano, the Billy Joel piece. Then they came over, and then I played it for them, and they were like, 'Wow! That's great!' And I was like, 'Yo! Let's work together! Let's go into the studio, go get your money together, let's go straight 24-track and let's forget making little cheesy 4-track demos.' And that's what they did.

Pos: I remember when we first got together with Paul and he told me all of the things he was gonna put to Plug Tunin'. Cos I did Plug Tunin': [the main loop] was my father's record, I put it together, put it into song form. And then Mase gave Paul a tape of it, and Paul then brought us over to his house and told us 'I'm gonna put this to it,' and we would hear it, and go 'Damn! That sounds incredible!' Then he's 'I'm gonna add this little James Brown horn stab to it...' I was very concerned about what he was gonna do to the music that I was trying my best to produce, which was my first stuff, but right from there he made me feel at ease. He was a person who was thinking on the same level as us.

Afrika Baby Bam (Jungle Brothers): De La got to Prince Paul, and Prince Paul already had some masterminded things that he couldn't get off on Stetsasonic. He had the quirkiness, the P-Funk that he wanted to do with Stetsasonic, but he was being overpowered by Daddy-O who was doing most of the production.

Paul: They all had day jobs, everybody put their money together, and we went to Calliope because that was the studio I'd worked in with Stetsasonic. I remember specifically it made a lot of the group feel uneasy, me bringing them in. 'Who are these guys? Why you got them hanging around?' I'm a nerd, they're nerds, you know? I remember I asked Daddy-O - 'Yo, you wanna help me produce some of this stuff?' Because everybody knew Daddy-O, he was kind of a famous guy, and I thought it'd be kinda cool. He's an elder, plus he's Daddy-O! But he was like, 'No, they sound too much like Ultramagnetic.' I was like, 'Alright then, cool, I'll do it myself.' And thank God I did! The first demo is exactly what the first single was: Plug Tunin', Freedom of Speak, we had a little bug-out piece on the end, though now they call 'em skits, and that was it. So now we had a demo.

Afrika: The first time I heard of De La Soul was funny. I was sitting in Red [Alert]'s room, and he had demo tapes and acetates. I would listen to records as they came in, and he'd ask me what I thought of them. And, like, he had this cassette, and I remember it clearly. It had this blue sticker over the whole cassette, and it said 'De La Soul.' We had just gotten back from England, this was in September, and I'm saying to myself, 'De La Soul? What is this? Is this a Latin rap group?' And I'm gonna tell you: instinctively - and it might have been to my own ignorance, because there was a rapper I think in one of these old school groups who was Hispanic - but I was like, 'It's too soon for that. Why would somebody try to go there?' And I put the tape in and it was Plug Tunin'. And I'm like, 'Oh, they're not Puerto Rican! This is cool.' That's how prejudiced the average rapper might have been! The new rappers, not the old school rappers. And the purists might have been by that point. We wasn't accepting west coast, we wasn't accepting European rappers, we wasn't accepting commercial rap, we wasn't accepting Latino rap. So I put it in, and I was like, 'Oh, Plug Tunin'! I know that beat, that's a cool beat. It's different.' So that was the intro to me.

Paul: I didn't want to go to Tommy Boy. I was already there, we were having problems being there with Stetsasonic. I gave it to Daddy-O to shop, because he was shopping this guy named Frankie J, and I didn't know anybody. Turns out people were more interested in us than they were in his artist! We kind of took over. And somewhere in the process I got it to Profile, so we met up with Profile. This was right before they put out It Takes Two. They were like, 'Hey, we just signed this guy Rob Base, check it out, it's got a cool hook.' And next thing you know it was a huge record. So they wanted to sign us. Geffen was just starting to pop off and they wanted to sign a rap act, and we would have been the first ones on Geffen. And Geffen was offering a lot of money. Oh my gosh! Back then it was almost... if I'm correct it was more than $20,000, just for a single. That's a lot of money for a single. Profile was about $10,000, which I thought was really good. But the reason I went to Tommy Boy, and this is a story I always have to correct because people are like, 'Oh, Daddy-O brought it to Tommy Boy, he gets credit.' Or even, a lot of times, 'Dante Ross brought it to Tommy Boy': Dante Ross wasn't even working at Tommy Boy then. The only reason why they went to Tommy Boy, the only reason the tape ever got there, was because, while I was in the studio mixing it down, a gentleman by the name of Rod Houston, who worked at Tommy Boy, was in the studio, and he was like, 'Yo, you should bring this to Tommy Boy.' I was like, 'I wasn't even thinking about Tommy Boy for this!' And he said, 'No, you should let Monica [Lynch] hear this'. So he brought it to Tommy Boy, and he never got credit. Credit always went to Dante, it went to Daddy-O, and they probably were getting plaques and stuff! 'Thanks for finding De La, or getting them signed!' And those guys had nothing to do with it! It was a publicity stunt. Rod was doing videos, he was in video productions, and now he's doing voiceovers. He's the guy on the radio now doing all the Burger King commercials. So it came to the point where we had the three offers, and I was like, 'What do you wanna do?' And they were like, 'We wanna go with Tommy Boy. What do you think?' I was like, 'I wanna go with Profile.' Geffen I wasn't too familiar with. So it was three against one. They wanted to go to Tommy Boy 'cos they felt Tommy Boy showed more interest, which I can understand. So we wound up with Tommy Boy, but Tommy Boy was less money. I was looking at the money factor back then! I'm on Tommy Boy and I ain't get paid nuthin'. You know what I'm saying? I haven't seen a royalty cheque. I've seen statements saying 'You owe us'! I knew our records didn't take that much money to make, so I was like, 'No, I don't really wanna go here.' But, I said, 'Whatever y'all wanna do.' And that's how it all turned out. To make the single we got probably $3,000, if that, between the four of us. The song was getting played on the mix stations, Red Alert and Mr Magic and all of that, so they [the label] were like, 'We need another single.' Cool! So that was when we went in and did Jenifer and Potholes in My Lawn. So we did that, and I think there was so much buzz on the group after that - because we did that little cheap video for Potholes - and there was enough buzz for them to say 'Let's make an album.'

THIS IS A RECORDING...
How De La, Paul and a cast of thousands created a masterpiece

Paul: That was a very quick record. We did that in two, two-and-a-half months, and the reason it even took that long is 'cos I was still with Stet and I had to go on tour in between us recording, so there was some time taken off until I came back so I could finish the album. And that was a pretty low budget. I think we got about $25,000 in total. Everything came out of that: the recording, and we all got paid out of that.

Pos: Myself and Dave were in our first year of college, and Mase was still in high school. We were just blown away by everything. We were living out our dreams. A lot of the songs was all stuff that was out of our parents' collections, we would put it together, and Paul would add the spice to it, the recipes that make it right. He would help arrange it with us. It was such a great time.

Paul: I think the main vibe this time was, 'Yo, wow! I'm in control! And people listen to me! And not only do people listen to me, they respect me!' Which, you know, made me... I wouldn't say 'cocky,' but it was so nice to have people say, 'Yo Paul, what do you think?' Or, 'Whatever Paul says.' And that was amazing. The environment was fun, because Calliope was like a penthouse studio. Acoustically it was horrible but it had so much space. It was so comfortable.

Guru (Gang Starr): In [Calliope], the main things that were there were a turntable, with a mixer, for sampling and also for scratching. Premier used to bring his [SP] 12 with him, and the disks. We used to do 8-hour lockouts whenever we could get 'em, 'cos that was a busy studio at that time.

Paul: We'd just all be sitting around listening to stuff. They had a turntable set up and a mixer, and we all had stacks of records. 'OK, play the beat on the main speakers, play it loud... Alright!' And then we'd have something playing, thinking about whatever was on the record... 'Yeah! That'll work, but can we pitch-shift it so it'll fit in key? Yeah, that's good. Oh, yeah! That's hot!' It was just... whatever popped into mind. And I think it almost made me a madman because I had so much control - I wasn't used to that. Every little idea, every little fantasy of wanting to do stuff, I was able to do. And they [De La] were great. Those guys are very artistic, and I learned a lot from them during that time. So it was a good trade-off.

Pos: Every single day we went to the studio we took the train. We would probably make it in to the studio in the afternoon. We would take the Long Island railroad in to New York, and the studio wasn't that far away from the Central Station that we would get out of. So we would just walk there with all these records and start creating. [Calliope] was such a great studio: it was set up like a loft. Like if you were in somebody's beautiful loft, only there was all this musical equipment in there. It had a kitchen, a bathroom - it wasn't all sterilised and studio-looking. It was like you were in someone's home. You could actually look outside and see the landscape of New York City. It was beautiful. There were a lot of creative juices flowing when we were there.

Dave (then known as Trugoy the Dove, De La Soul): It was exciting. It feels good to just build off of an idea that coincidentally came up, or even if you planned it, to build on something spontaneously. It's a good feeling to see it come successful at the end and you're satisfied with it. There were probably a lot of things that we did that we didn't keep, maybe some songs that we didn't record, maybe some ideas that we didn't put on to tape. But most of the stuff, you know, it was acting silly, and just working on that vibe that everybody's laughing and feeling, and you're, 'I'm gonna go in the mic booth and say it. While I do that, you find something to match it. And while he's finding something to match it, you think of a chorus.' And I think, you know, it's a good feeling to see four individuals at the time - myself, Pos, Mase and Prince Paul - just feeding off of each other's innocence and just making things happen.

Pos: We always had a great system. Paul really helped us to understand how it's great to be very spontaneous, but you should also have a plan to fall back on. So we would sit down and write out what we think we should add to the song: maybe we should add another voice, or cut in this sample, make sure Mase finds some interesting things to cut into the record. So we would have it all mapped out on paper. But you get in there, and then someone would be, say, just sitting in the studio. So we'd go, 'You know what? You! You, go in there and say something!' Lord Jamar from Brand Nubian would be in another session and we'd just take him out of his session and make him just say something in a crowd part. That was how we always did! On 3 Feet High and Rising there's a lot of people, if you read the credits. Like MC Lyte. They weren't major parts, just people who was in the crowd. Like Baby Chris, who's now Chris Lighty of Violator. A lot of different people would just come by to visit and they'd wind up in the booth just doing something silly, like whispering, or yelling, things like that.

Afrika: That was probably the beginning of record companies saying 'Get a guest artist!' We probably wound up on Buddy as guest artists as a strategic move on Tommy Boy's end, but we didn't know it, because we were like, 'Word, De La's cool, and Prince Paul's cool.' We get in there and we heard a beat they were using, that we were going to use on the first record, that we used to rhyme to, for practise! From one of the Ultimate Breaks & Beats volumes. And we were like, 'Alright, this is cool.' Then we heard the little Lionel Ritchie sample over the top, and we were like, 'This is cool, this is easy.'

Paul: A lot of the sessions kind of like blend together. I remember one session - it might have been more De La Soul Is Dead though - I remember when this kid came up and just walked into the session. We didn't think too much about him, he was just standing there. He was there probably a good ten minutes, just standing there, until we started going, 'Is he a friend of yours?' 'No, I thought he was a friend of yours...' So I turn to him and I'm like, 'Excuse me, are you here looking for somebody?' And he's like, 'I just wanted to say, I look like him!' And he was pointing to Trugoy. We were like, 'Erm... Ohhhhk-aaaay...!' One, how did he get up there? Two, why'd he wanna walk up there just to say he thought he looked like this guy?! He just left! Very weird.

Afrika: You know what the common ground was [between the Native Tongues artists]? I'm gonna break it down like this. A lot of common ground was felt through the Red Alert show. 'I heard you on the show, Nice & Smooth.' 'Yeah, I heard you, Jungle Brothers, I'm feeling you.' Because hip hop was the move, and wherever you could get it was the move. To get it from Chuck Chillout's show or Red Alert's show or Mr Magic's show - just to hear it on radios, it was like being starved from something for the whole week, then you get it. These guys built the bridge. They built the bridge from the old school to the new. You've got to think that prior to them, if you heard hip hop, it's got to have been at a block party, or at some type of jam at a community centre or at somebody's house, or on the tapes that were made from those events. That's how exclusive it was; that's how underground it was. So when these guys came on the air they brought that with 'em. They was mixing the breakbeats. Chuck Chillout? I heard him mixing Apache or It's Just Begun on the radio. And then play LL Cool J, Rock the Bells. So they bridged the gap. So it was, who's next? You heard Nice & Smooth, you heard Jungle Brothers, you heard Big Daddy Kane, you heard De La - we all felt an affinity towards one another. 'Yo, I heard your joint last night, that's tight!' 'Cos we'd go to the club, like Latin Quarters or Union Square, and bump into one another. Or some other hole in the wall where Joeski Luv was performing Pee-Wee Herman. Some guys were still on the old school, Kurtis Blow, 'I'm too fly to talk to you,' and there were some guys who were, 'Yo, I like what you did, I appreciate your music', and it would be a De La. So it wasn't necessarily like, 'Yo, we in the same boat, we the Native Tongue family.' It was more like, 'I heard you on the line, and I'm inspired by what you're doing; you heard me on the line, and you're inspired by what I'm doing - keep up the good work and I look forward to hearing what you come out with next.' And then it came to, 'Why don't you come to the studio, 'cos we're getting ready to work on Buddy? Who's this guy Q-Tip that y'all brought to the studio?' And then it was up to the artist to take it to the next level - 'why don't we work together?'

Pos: The whole recording of that album was just so amazing. We didn't know anything. We was learning everything from Paul, and then Paul helped upgrade us to where we needed to be. It was like, we were doing it, yet it was so magical. One of the major highlights of the entire project was that there are a lot of things that are respected to this day that were literally just thought of at that moment. Like, we were in the booth, just trying to think of something to do, and I started moaning. 'Nnnnnuuuuhhhh, uuuuuhhhhh!' And then I was like, 'Yeah, we should make a song and call it De La Orgee!' And Paul was like, 'Yeah! Yeah!' That was one thing about Paul - even if he thought what we were doing was stupid or crazy, he didn't tell us. He'd be like, 'Yeah, try it.' He would say, 'You never know!' Like, say, the A Little Bit of Soap skit - I planned that. I heard the song and wanted to do something called A Little Bit of Soap. But the Take It Off thing, it was right in there. I think my little brother was there, and he was saying something like 'Take it off, take take take take it off.' It was based on a song that was out in Philly called Kick the Ball, it was one of our favourite songs at the time. They would have 'Kick the ball', so we went 'Take it off'. We just did a funny take on that song. And Paul said 'Do it! Do it for real!' So we went in the booth, writing out a couple of ideas, and that wound up being a skit.

Afrika: I remember I had Kane on the phone. I was playing him Cos I Got It Like That, and he was like, 'Yeah, I hear you doin' a little singing on there! I got something like that on my album, it's called The Day You'll Be Mine. Let me play it for you over the phone.' So we could have been affiliated with the Juice Crew at that point! Had KRS-ONE not come in and dissed 'em. He came in and dissed 'em, and because he was associated with Red, and associated with us, it separated it. That whole BDP thing separated the whole thing. Plus, Kane was one of the final members in the Juice Crew, brought in by Biz. Biz was cool with Red, Biz Mark was in every borough, in every hood, he knew everybody. Those two cats? You couldn't look at them and say they was solely Juice Crew. They were the nicest cats. Plus they were the best artists in the Juice Crew, so they kind of grew out of that. But, still, that's the way the people started looking at it. I think the De La thing lent itself to the fact that there was no crew there, they liked our work, we got a chance to work with them, they were rap chemists and their whole thing was cerebral. So they would just be like, 'Yo, let's see if it works'.

Dave: I think we were definitely doing something different, I just didn't think it would impact with the hip hop audience as it did, or even with people who weren't in tune to hip hop. I didn't think our record was going to be so detrimental towards hip hop, which, in hindsight, I don't think if a record like 3 Feet High and Rising came out, or a group like De La Soul came out, hip hop might not have taken its great turn as it has. Recording the record? No, I mean, who would sit and say 'This song is about to do something, we're gonna change the world!' Nobody really says that, and I'm sure that we didn't say anything like that! We knew we were doing different music, and if anything there might have been a little bit of a doubt that people would get it or even like it. And I think what was most difficult to understand was how this record seemed so incredible to people. Why is this thing blowing up? Is it that good? And I guess that was to do with because it was so different.

For part two, click HERE.