Buhloone Mindstate was a reaction to gangsta rap’s ascendance of tough posturing. It’s their least songful, eschewing the hooks of Three Feet High’s hummable collage and De La Soul Is Dead’s sprawl for a web of ideas in a holistic package: a quiet but assured treatise reckoning with the music industry’s mistreatment of black expression and its place just below the mainstream. “It might blow up, but it won’t go pop!”
De La Soul’s classic first album, 3 Feet High and Rising – a brilliant, genuinely psychedelic, sincerely fun record – hit streaming services last month after 34 years. Given much less fanfare was the uploading of their three subsequent LPs. De La Soul Is Dead and Stakes is High have their defenders, but the former is too aimless a sprawl and Stakes’ self-congratulatory parodies suck De La’s colour and good nature away. The remaining LP, Buhloone Mindstate, saw De La settling into lesser relevance after 3 Feet High‘s shockwave dissipated, getting stranger and, paradoxically, releasing their most thematically incendiary album. Although it will never match 3 Feet High’s quality or tangible influence, it’s an album of delightful twists that’s more than worth spirited analysis and evaluation thirty years later.
De La’s convictions are conveyed first through Prince Paul’s production. Speaking bluntly, Paul’s colourful, eclectic and humorous production was what elevated the Three Plugs – never possessing the greatest flow or lyrics – from playful nerds to vanguards of a colourful new style of hip-hop. His work is lazier here, sure – nothing as sublimely inventive as ‘Transmitting Live From Mars’ or as sweet as ‘Eye Know’ – but its subtlety and creativity remain. Paul is more inclined than ever to let his beats breathe, sitting contentedly beneath the voices of MCs Trugoy, Maseo and Posdnuos where they would have previously and eagerly subsumed them. They’re often stripped to emphasise a single element, filling the space he’d normally cluster with instrumental samples with a sparer collection of rapped voices, isolated vocal hooks and buried murmurings, and the effect is obvious: this is an album about black voices all the way down.
On the mic, De La Soul (along with a delightful pantheon of collaborators) had more to say than ever, developing their reaction to gangsta’s continual ascendance as hip-hop’s colourful weirdos. Their practically indistinguishable voices play to their advantage: they come across as a unified front. Their self-references manifest as statements of self to be applied to the wider alternative black community (a wise move: the prideful nerdiness from ‘Me, Myself and I’ assured many young people outside cultural trends), and their playfulness expands to weave in the lines, flows and contribution of heroes and contemporaries.
The appearance of Maceo Parker, Pee Wee Ellis and Fred Wesley (of hip-hop godfather James Brown’s band) is a gorgeous thematic decision, drawing a direct line between MCs and jazz musicians, the solo and the verse as instruments of black expression. As Pos and Gang Starr’s Guru rap against the music industry’s appropriation of black expression on ‘Patti Dooke’, they argue the importance of the ideological collective in replacement of the centrepiece ‘I Am I Be’. Recycling the ‘Blowin’ beat, ‘Be’s crystallisation of alternative hip-hop’s ideology contains Pos’ greatest verses, tracing the capturing of his art by the music industry to the restorative voices offered by his friends and family.
It’s the aforementioned personal statement applicable to wider black alternate and, for a shining moment, resistance to the pull of the industry’s trends seems the only path available. ‘Stone Age’s evocation of beat-boxing as the bare bones of hip-hop’s expressionism reinforces their conviction that rap could keep its voice even if the industry abandoned it altogether, cultivating a range of worthy perspectives.
It’s worth noting the self-righteousness in a statement like Pos’, assuming the self-representing idealism they and the rest of the Native Tongues collective exhorted was inherently better, more articulate, than gangsta rap’s depictions of violence and oppression. Whilst the sentiment isn’t as obnoxious as it would become on Stakes is High, it wilfully ignores the politically-conscious heart of gangsta rap and casts Native Tongues’ alternative proposition under a critical eye. Buhloone Mindstate is colourful but complacent, and the removal of hooks takes the possibility of reaching a wider audience (whom De La had reached before and who would have been forced to consider their arguments) with it. Alternative hip-hop’s influence would only emerge after a further ten years of gangsta rap’s dominance. Weighing their artistic and cultural successes against each other, De La’s settling on Buhloone Mindstate into the role of articulate outsiders is simultaneously laudable and frustratingly short-sighted.
Despite its inextricable shortcomings, the efforts of De La Soul result in Buhloone’s status as their tightest, strangest and, ironically, most proudly individualistic album. Even as its prioritisation of collective expression failed to incorporate the unseen audience and resulted in a project not half as lauded as its predecessors, its bravely-flown colours and rarefied twists of self-expression have made it an essential puzzle piece in De La’s legacy. To me, Buhloone is the natural conclusion of what De La’s approach to hip-hop has to offer, and understanding its place in their legacy is important to consider as we are poised to re-integrate their ideas into our own. Thirty years on, it’s still worth uncovering.
Image: “De la Soul at Gloria Cologne, 2009 VI” by Martin Terber is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.