Change In Speak

De La Soul - Don't Push Me
(From Cabin In The Sky album; 2025)

De La Soul · Don't Push Me

Fave song on this new De La Soul album is the unreleased Dove solo jam produced by Dove. Tell tale signs this song is at least 15 years old include our boi Plug Two mentioning Obama becoming president, and the beat sounding like a Dancehall-inspired song Estelle would have dropped in the late 2000s. No Posdnous, no problems in this instance because Dove going for dolo is way more fun than yer standard late-career De La song. Dave Jolicoeur by name, more jocular by nature. Dove had a problem... seriously: so much later De La music is full of Posdnous' lyrical finger-wagging which is the audio equivalent of taking cod liver oil. F**k being humourless, Plug Two was complicated.

Late-career De La invariably seem to end their albums on a highlight: Don't Push Me here, Rock Co.Kane Flow on The Grind Date and U Don't Wanna B.D.S on the first Art Official Intelligence. The latter always has me wishing Maseo would do another solo track for a Change In Speak. Alas, he's too shy like Kajagoogoo.

De La Soul ft. Freddie Foxxx - U Don't Wanna B.D.S
(From Art Official Intelligence: Mosaic Thump album; 2000)

De La Soul · U Don't Wanna B.D.S. (feat. Freddie Foxxx)

When Doves Fly: R.I.P Trugoy

"Just as a reminder from the last step
Negative ones are lost in the footsteps"

Tell me what's more frequent: the deaths of goldfish, wrestlers or rappers? Generalist music fans get sad about boomer singers from the 1960s and 1970s dying off nowadays; try being a Rap fan where it seems like long-time favourites and promising young talents die every other week.

And so we bid farewell to Dove from De La Soul as he hops aboard the Chattanooga choo choo to Rap Heaven. The biggest compliment you can pay a rapper like Dove is that he rhymed shit no other M.C could or would have ever thought of saying. Dove had a problem... seriously: he was almost too good a fit for soulmate brother Plug One Posdnous because their partnership in rhyme was the gold standard for Rap duo chemistry during De La's peak. I am I be a British bloke who's been a fanatic of the DLS words since 1989 so their music really does Hit Different™ for me: they changed in speak what Rap could sound like, flipped the script on what rappers could look like, and inadvertently tapped into the spirit of Acid House's second summer of love here in the U.K. Ain't hip to be labelled a hippie, though, thus De La were masters of reinvention which left square listeners lost like high school history.

Since so much of The Discourse™ around De La Soul in recent years has been little more than basic bastard Rap fans moaning about De La's music not being on DSPs, here's one of their best B-sides which you can only currently stream on my Audiomack page. Peace out, Plug Two - I hope Heaven got a buncha bitties in the B.K Lounge.

De La Soul - What's More?
(From Me Myself & I 12"; 1989)


Personal highlight: bumped into De La in Manchester on the day of their 3 Feet High And Rising show circa 2014 and hit Dove with an "alright, Dave?".