Book Review: High and Rising

De La Soul burst onto the scene with the release of their groundbreaking 1989 album 3 Feet High & Rising, an “anything goes” hip-hop masterpiece hailed as a new masterwork from a bygone era of Black experimentation.

Formed in Long Island in 1988 by Kelvin “Posdnuos” Mercer, Dave “Trugoy the Dove” Jolicoeur, and Vincent “Maseo” Mason, De La Soul rebuked classification and appealed to the Black alternative. Their music was positive and psychedelic, their imagery full of flowers and peace signs. It was rap with a broad sonic palette which set the blueprint for an entire generation of artists who followed. But as quickly as De La ascended, they were faced with the pressures of a changing industry and bitter legal battles.

High and Rising: a.k.a. The De La Soul Book by Marcus J. Moore will be published on November 19, 2024. Dey Street Books provided an early galley for review.

I have been a fan of De La Soul from that very first album. As talked about in the book, I remember the time in 2014 when the band made all of their music to date available for free to download (I was one a many who added their digital offers to my own library that day). So, a biography of this important yet often forgotten hip-hop group was a must-read for me.

Moore does a very thorough job covering each of the De La albums, going into detail about the lyrics and production as well as filling in behind the scenes meanings and intentions. His sources for the band and their producers come from the public record (interviews and such). He also puts the records in context of the times when released, adding details about other hip-hop records that would have shared the same retail shelf space as the De La albums.

Since Moore did not speak directly to the band, the "personal" touchpoints of the book mostly come from the author's own insights: how the music made him feel, where he was in life when the albums came into it, etc. As an older reader with a wide curiosity of the human experience, this landed fine for me. Other readers might find the lack of first-hand memories from the group to be a point of lacking.