Hearing De La Soul’s Kelvin Mercer, aka Posdnuos, and Vincent Mason, aka Maseo, talk about growing up in the ’70s and ’80s will certainly make you rethink their stomping grounds of the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Long Island, but also the South. Beyond mere geography, there were elements of a Southern state of mind in and around that hotbed of hip-hop innovation that came to be known as “Strong Island.”
It has come up in these pages before, when the Flyer interviewed another Strong Islander, Chuck D of Public Enemy, who spoke of his scholarly immersion in Memphis history and the Stax and Sun labels. Now, with De La Soul about to appear at the Mempho Music Festival on Saturday, October 10th, at Memphis Botanic Garden, the weird ley lines binding Northern hip-hop and its pioneering Native Tongues movement to the South are revealing themselves once more. We delve into it as I speak with both Posdnuos and Maseo in a recent Zoom meeting.
Photo: Courtesy Reservoir Media
Pass the Soppin’ Biscuits
It turns out that Posdnuos, who mainly grew up on Long Island, spent many a summer at his grandfather’s farm in Georgia. That may have even influenced his playful tongue-twisting moniker, a backward spelling of his earlier teenaged DJ name, Sound Sop, as in sopping up the last of a meal from your plate, but sonically — a new twist on a very down-home idea.
It was an idea he identified with, as Posdnuos explains in our conversation: “I was proud I was from New York, but I took pride in my family as well. I brought this cotton back from my grandfather’s field, and people would be so mesmerized. Or, ‘Yeah, this is corn from my grandfather’s field.’ Like, I would have all this stuff with me, and you know, he paid us.
“We worked on his farm. We chopped weeds out of his crops, and he paid us weekly. I was making money, and I could buy my own school clothes. And the other kids were like, ‘Wow, Kelvin!’ Like, you know, this was kind of unheard-of to them. So, [being connected to Georgia] was something to be proud of, and something that I felt like, wow, I was blessed to be a part of that. Yeah, even at that early age.”
Given De La Soul’s celebration of refreshingly blunt New York dialects and attitudes in their music, it all seems a little ironic, but really, you see aftershocks of the Great Migration ebbing and flowing everywhere, once you look. Just as Mississippi blues informed the music of Chicago a generation earlier, Black families that continued moving north through the 1970s brought the best of Southern culture with them. Think of Run-D.M.C.’s “It’s Christmastime in Hollis, Queens/Mom’s cookin’ chicken and collard greens.” And, speaking recently with Questlove on his podcast, Maseo noted that, when moving to Long Island after a youth in Brooklyn, his newly adopted home “felt country. It felt very Southern … like you were going down South. That’s what Long Island used to feel like.”
Photo: Courtesy Reservoir Media
De La Family Values
All of which underscores another traditional value behind De La Soul’s spirit, the value of family. Posdnuos explains, “Anything I needed to try to get myself out of, or get myself into, I would just think, ‘Okay, well, how would my brother do this? How would my father do that? What would my mother tell me to do or not to do?’ I just had this really large community around me of uncles, aunts, and cousins, because both my parents came from like a family of 13 siblings. I mean, family was always around.
“And you know the music, it was beautiful. The church music, going to church every Sunday, just viewing how my parents viewed the world. All that was a part of where I pulled from when it was about performing stories, lyrics, and creativity. We were from that era of thinking your mind was meant to make use of itself. You had to go around with your brothers and be this superhero, or make this thing up in your head. So all that really helped me when it came down to making up different things to talk about within hip-hop.”
“At the same time,” adds Maseo, who had run with a rougher crowd in Brooklyn before moving to Long Island, “I didn’t have big brothers. I’m the oldest. So there was also a lot of vulnerability there, ’cause I had no one to run home to. There’s a precedent set with people who have big families, brothers and sisters. There’s always a thought in the bully’s mind that somebody’s big brother might come out of the woodwork, you know?”
“And,” Posdnuos adds, “Mase can definitely attest to how, just being a certain age and then moving to Long Island, people your age will feel like, ‘Oh, this dude may think that we’re country and we gotta show him we’re not. We gotta show this Brooklyn dude!’ He, I’m sure, went through a lot of that.”
Posdnuos notes that Long Island wasn’t all suburban peace and harmony. “Me and Mase were both very educated guys, but we knew street dudes, and what was cool about hip-hop then was, like, the street dude along with the nerd dude could still love the same music. We could both love Stetsasonic. So when we were trying to figure out what we as De La Soul were gonna do, even though it didn’t have necessarily gangster themes, there were still people around us who sold drugs, and could be cool with us.”
“You know, I can honestly just speak for the era that we grew up in,” Maseo adds, “when you got involved in something that looked positive in the community, and it looked like it could get you out of the community, the real street cats would encourage you. Like, ‘Don’t come around here. Go do that. Get out!’”
OG De La: Maseo, Posdnuos, and the late Dave, aka Trugoy the Dove (Photo: Courtesy Reservoir Media)
Bringing It All Back Home
Beyond the tensions of family values versus the mean streets of Long Island, what’s truly inspiring is how, once De La Soul hit it big with their 1989 debut, 3 Feet High and Rising, their mode of expression was carried back down South. And that spoke to a young Memphian named James Dukes, who would later be known as IMAKEMADBEATS (aka MAD) and found the collective dubbed UNAPOLOGETIC.
“If I was to say what had the first UNAPOLOGETIC energy, it might be De La Soul,” MAD says. “Or someone in the Native Tongues gathering. Also, when I got into [the De La Soul album] Buhloone Mindstate and then eventually Stakes Is High, the next album, which was the game-changer for me, at the same time, my mom was living in Long Island. So we were riding bikes in the summertime, visiting my mom, listening to De La Soul! I had been to the five boroughs and all that, but when my mom moved to Long Island, De La Soul became the soundtrack to us discovering places like Amityville, Hempstead, all these different neighborhoods and areas out there.”
Moreover, he says, the group’s “skits and comedy and quirkiness and different personalities at the time were rare in hip-hop.” The artistic territory De La Soul carved out for themselves, embracing humor, vulnerability, and just plain silliness, made a huge impression on the future IMAKEMADBEATS.
When I observe that there might be a shortage of humor or fun in today’s hip-hop, MAD is quick to agree. “What you said is a fact. You know, I get it. We’re in an interesting time now. This ain’t the late ’80s. Terminator 3 is about to happen. But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve told my team, ‘We will never let skits die, never!’ We want our music to represent us, right? Like, authentically, who we are, what we go through. And truth be told, most of the time when we’re together, we’re laughing and joking. I think it’s incredibly important to be who we really are in our music, and you know, De La Soul just embodied that.”
At the same time, MAD cites the De La Soul album Stakes Is High as his favorite precisely because the group struck a new balance between their humor and their realism. Hearing it for the first time, “I remember feeling like, okay, I can hear the tide kind of change,” he says. “These guys are getting a little bit more serious. But then, also, I felt like I heard them realize that that was happening, and then be like, ‘Nah, there’s still a lot of fun in us.’ You know what I’m saying?”
That’s not to say that De La Soul can’t relate to the grimmer side of hip-hop, especially those sounds of trap and crunk that the Bluff City is known for. As Maseo says, “That darker sound developed in Memphis because Memphis has for eons been a very dark place. And [Memphis rappers] only can speak on what they encounter, and apply their critical thinking to what they’re going through and how they circumvent it. And they do it in a very poetic way. I always loved what came out of Memphis. First of all, I’m a DJ. So what moves the crowd moves me. I like to see the beauty of how people react to this genre that came out of ashes.”
Out of the Ashes
In celebrating his love of De La Soul, MAD references the many past epiphanies they inspired, like his first awareness of producers like J Dilla or Prince Paul. (“Everywhere Prince Paul goes, it’s gonna be a world. He doesn’t get mentioned enough.”) But he’s also quick to point out the genius of their 2025 album, Cabin in the Sky. “The latest album, the one that just dropped, is phenomenal,” says MAD. “Not just awesome like, ‘Oh, it’s cool that they’re still around.’ No. If they dropped this album 15 years ago, I would still be like, this album is amazing. And if you just hit play on it, the very first thing you hear, the intro, is something that sounds like it could have come straight off of 3 Feet High and Rising, you know?”
Yet that intro may also cause you to tear up a bit. It’s the perfect blend of the group’s humor and gravitas in equal measure, as, throughout the album, the group takes stock of growing older with all its tragedies, staying healthy, and soldiering on as artists after one of their comrades has fallen.
“Often the real true soldiers just don’t get that shine like they should,” says a soundbite from Dave Jolicoeur, aka Trugoy the Dove, the missing third of De La Soul, on the topic of hip-hop lifers “staying true to that magic.” Hearing his voice at the end of “YUHDONTSTOP,” the first track on the album, is haunting: It’s the group’s first album since Jolicoeur’s death in 2023. Yet hearing Trugoy’s voice throughout the album is a welcome sign that De La Soul are, in true De La fashion, confronting his death bluntly, summoning all their wit and soul to lyrically deal with both loss and the lingering presence of loved ones who have moved on.
Amid unexpected (even for De La Soul) orchestral passages deftly cribbed from Ahmad Jamal and a very Isaac Hayes-inspired record by Living Jazz, the remaining voices of De La Soul, Posdnuos and Maseo, summon their missing third brother in the appropriately titled “YUHDONTSTOP,” announcing, “And remember, when it’s Pos and Maseo you see, the magic will always remain three,” affirming that, even now, “(3 Is) The Magic Number” before Maseo adds, on a forward-thinking note, “But tell yourself, I’m staying true to myself.”
He could have been singing those lines to himself and Posdnuos while they march into the future as hip-hop’s truest lifers, still committed to what they hail in the song’s call and response as “Art Official Intelligence, or simply, AOI/No doubt, and we are still making art/That will forever remain official and filled with intelligence.”
Or, as Posdnuos rhymes:
I keep moving at my best
Cindy said, ‘If y’all stop, then Dave stops’
And that wouldn’t be the sure shot
So we keep implementing that gift
The D.A.I.S.Y. age lift, Cracker Jack box, scratch, sniff
Graveyard shift, studio cooks
Up from out of the dens of the crooks
Who converted to a better way
And have their own inner voice ready for when the day
Come out dry, we more than meets the eye.
“Yeah,” he adds at the end, “’cause there’s high stakes being played around the world.”
