When Long Island hip-hop trio de la Soul arrived in 1989 with debut album, 3 Feet High and Rising, they sounded like nothing else. The album's colorful, almost collaged production aesthetic and the rappers' rhyme styles that were equal parts clever and goofily humorous made de la Soul a gentler, more inventive one-of-a-kind presence in a rap landscape largely defined by aggression and righteous anger. de la Soul were inventive and eclectic, bringing not only funk and soul, but also pop, jazz, reggae, and psychedelia samples into their strange and alluring patchwork of sounds. The group continued down their own path on their own terms as trends in rap came and went. Their output throughout the '90s was entirely formative for hip-hop on the whole, with works like 1991's de la Soul Is Dead and 1996's Stakes Is High providing a wealth of inspirational starting points that entire generations of other artists would build from. After 2004's The Grind Date, de la Soul went on hiatus, but returned in 2016 with the crowd-funded And the Anonymous Nobody as well as the occasional stand-alone track. In 2023, after years of legal battles over rights and ownership, De La Soul finally regained access to their back catalog and made plans to finally get some of their classic albums released on streaming services for the first time.
