The Outsized Influence of De La Soul

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Sheldon Pearce
Pearce has written about music for Goings On since 2020.

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For nearly two decades, De La Soul was one of hip-hop’s most important acts and among the most under-acknowledged. In the late eighties and nineties, the seminal group—formed on Long Island by the rappers Posdnuos and Trugoy the Dove and the d.j. Maseo—built a jazzy career on irreverent wit and outsider charm, its chummy dynamic underscored by the chemistry of its m.c.s. The trio’s 1989 début, “3 Feet High and Rising,” is one of the best rap albums ever made, a sampling milestone that disrupted the gangsta-rap Zeitgeist. Its success set in motion a four-LP run that has rarely been matched: the intricate, conceptual “De La Soul Is Dead” (1991); the zany “Buhloone Mindstate” (1993); and the solemn, territory-marking “Stakes Is High” (1996).

De La Soul.Photograph by Anthony Barboza / Getty

The group’s impact isn’t limited to that classic run—its achievements include the 2004 album “The Grind Date,” which revelled in a rap world that it helped imagine into existence alongside the producers J Dilla, Madlib, and 9th Wonder, and the 2016 album “And the Anonymous Nobody…,” which was nominated for Best Rap Album at the Grammys. But those initial albums defined De La’s experimental identity and outlined its outsized influence; years of label disputes kept that music off the Internet, leaving the group practically inaccessible to generations of listeners. In 2023, De La’s right to its albums was restored, finally bringing its catalogue to streaming, but, just as it seemed like a door was opening for the embattled group, Trugoy died. His loss is immense for a trio that always prioritized interplay, but the remaining members carry on, honoring a shared legacy. On Jan. 17, De La Soul returns home for a show at Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall, making good on its storied history amid transition, and reintroducing itself once more.

About Town

Broadway

The setup of “All In”—comedians and actors read short fiction by Simon Rich—emphasizes presence over preparation. There’s a touch of Broadway glossiness here; Alex Timbers directs, and the Bengsons sing plaintive Magnetic Fields songs as interludes. But the vibe is charity event minus the charity: the rotating cast samples from a grab bag of charming celebrities (John Mulaney, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Richard Kind, Chloe Fineman) who read scripts without leaving their chairs. The cutest bit I saw was a noir manqué about baby siblings—a two-year-old P.I. takes on a missing-stuffie case for his infant sister, who hasn’t developed object permanence. I enjoyed it a great deal. As for the rest of the show, I’m like that bébé fatale: I can’t quite hold the thing in my mind.—Helen Shaw (Hudson; through Feb. 16.)

Soul

There is a shiftiness to the appeal of the Brooklyn quintet Phony Ppl. Since 2008, the group has evolved from a groove-focussed, rap-inflected R. & B. band to something harder to define, spiralling out into funk, jazz, and even bossa nova. It has only grown bolder with a mid-career lineup change—now composed of Elbee Thrie (vocals), Elijah Rawk (guitar), Bari Bass (bass), Matt Byas (drums), and Aja Grant (keyboard)—and its seamless experimentation hints at an omnivorous palate and an understated virtuosity. “Mō'zā-ik,” from 2018, demonstrated the full extent of the group’s boundary pushing, and its most recent album, “Euphonyus” (2022), is just as restless. But it was the 2015 album “Yesterday’s Tomorrow” that marked the first significant step in the Phony Ppl evolution, a milestone now celebrated back home with a trio of tenth-anniversary shows.—Sheldon Pearce (Cafe Erzulie; Jan. 14-16.)

Dance

Shaylin D. Watson and Austin Coats.

Photograph by J Boogie Love

“Grace,” the luminous masterpiece that Ronald K. Brown made for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre in 1999, ranks as one of the greatest and most enduringly spirit-lifting dance works of the past twenty-five years. The Ailey company revived it beautifully in December, but it’s also wonderful to see it performed by Brown’s own troupe, Evidence. His company’s fortieth-anniversary run at the Joyce pairs “Grace” with “Serving Nia,” a sort of sequel made in 2001. Like “Grace,” it is religious in meaning and rich in make-you-want-to-move musicality. Unlike “Grace,” it’s funny in parts. One of its tracks is Dizzy Gillespie’s “Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac.”—Brian Seibert (Joyce Theatre; Jan. 14-19.)

Classical

Continuing its study of Mahler, the Philadelphia Orchestra returns to Carnegie Hall with the Ninth Symphony, the composer’s last completed. Written soon after the death of Mahler’s daughter and soon before his own, the symphony is a sombre, reflective, and reverberant adieu, brewing such melancholy that Leonard Bernstein theorized that Mahler was foretelling his own end. But perhaps even more devastation lies within the other work on the program, “Songs for Murdered Sisters.” This eight-piece song cycle was written in response to the true story of the brutal killings of three women by the same ex-boyfriend, on the same day. The piece was composed by Jake Heggie, in collaboration with the author—and here, lyricist—Margaret Atwood. Its soloist—and its progenitor—is the baritone Joshua Hopkins, whose sister was one of the victims.—Jane Bua (Carnegie Hall; Jan. 15.)

Movies

Hitomi Nozoe in “Giants and Toys.”

Photograph courtesy American Genre Film Archive

Since the nineteen-seventies, Jonathan Rosenbaum has been among the most influential and authoritative of film critics. To celebrate the publication of “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” a teeming and vital volume of his previously uncollected writings from 1964 to 2023, Metrograph is hosting a two-film program curated by Rosenbaum, featuring the Yugoslav director Dušan Makavejev’s defiantly sexual essay-film “WR: Mysteries of the Organism” (which led to the filmmaker’s prosecution and exile) and Yasuzō Masumura’s exuberant satire “Giants and Toys,” a scathing comedy of celebrity as corporate manipulation. Rosenbaum will be on hand Jan. 18 for post-screening discussions. (For those who can’t be there, “WR” is streaming on the Criterion Channel, “Giants and Toys” is on such services as Amazon and Kanopy, and Rosenbaum has a superb Web site, jonathanrosenbaum.net.)—Richard Brody (Metrograph; Jan. 18-19.)

Off Broadway

Amir Reza Koohestani’s Farsi-language “Blind Runner” (part of Under the Radar) is a study in grays, both in its design (by Éric Soyer) and in its metamorphosing, twilit narrative. At first, we’re watching a husband and wife (Mohammad Reza Hosseinzadeh and Ainaz Azarhoush) meeting in surveilled visitations, after the wife has been jailed in Tehran. Then Azarhoush—simply by closing her eyes—becomes a different Iranian woman, one blinded by official forces, who hires the first woman’s husband as her sighted running guide. Meaning melts: is this a romance, a protest, a dream? Koohestani hates the way that governments discriminate between “types” of refugee, and so the show, which often uses video projections to superimpose the actors’ faces, encourages us to perceive the way one person’s suffering may as well be another’s.—H.S. (St. Ann’s Warehouse; through Jan. 24.)

Pick Three

Helen Shaw on the best of the fests beyond Under the Radar.

Illustration by Marco Quadri

1. Live Artery, at New York Live Arts, has many thrilling offerings, but I’m most excited to see the choreographer and theorist Miguel Gutierrez’s piece “Super Nothing” (Jan. 12-18), a quartet about interdependence as a response to grief. Gutierrez’s deeply thoughtful, often righteously furious practice has grown to encompass many forms, including the educational podcast “Are You for Sale?” Any new Gutierrez performance is a cause for celebration—and, often, action.

2. The Exponential Festival makes aesthetic mayhem at the Brick Theatre and its satellites. I’ve been waiting impatiently for “Emphasis Mine” (Jan. 26), a new play by Spencer Thomas Campbell, who wrote my favorite ever Exponential show, “Chroma Key,” from 2017, a hilariously absurdist neo-noir about crime in a multiverse. This reading from the company Title:Point includes performances by Deep Fringe superstars—Peter Mills Weiss, Jessica Jelliffe—guaranteeing a certain level of bizarre combustibility.

3. Prototype, co-produced by Beth Morrison Projects and HERE Arts Center, will be polished by comparison, but I’m interested in their messiest offering: David T. Little and Anne Waldman’s goth-rock opera “Black Lodge” (Jan. 11-15), which scrambles our senses between live performances by Timur and the Dime Museum and a projected film by Michael Joseph McQuilken. The visuals, full of scary hospitals and a “Mad Max”-style desert, look creepy, but it’s the juxtaposition between industrial noise rock and Timur’s rasping, operatic tenor that raises the hair on my neck.

P.S. Good stuff on the Internet: