What's Good: Three kids from Amityville killed the flower on purpose

Three kids from Amityville, Long Island got handed a label before they had a chance to define themselves. The press heard 3 Feet High and Rising, saw a daisy on the cover, and decided Posdnuos, Trugoy, and Maseo were hip-hop's hippies. De La Soul hated it from day one.

So two years later they put a broken flower pot on the cover of De La Soul Is Dead and buried the persona themselves. That instinct, refuse the label, keep moving, never let a magazine profile decide who you're allowed to be, runs through every record they made after. It's still running. Cabin in the Sky landed in November 2025, their first album since David Jolicoeur's passing and their first time back with Prince Paul since the earliest records, and it's a joyous, generous tribute instead of a heavy one. That's the whole De La Soul playbook in one decision.

The full story covers the Amityville Memorial High School years, the Turtles lawsuit that helped rewrite sample clearance, the decade their entire Tommy Boy catalog was locked out of streaming, and the fight De La Soul won to get it back.

"You say Plug 1 & 2 are hippies, no we're not, that's pure plug bull."

Posdnuos wrote that hook for Me Myself and I to reject the D.A.I.S.Y. Age label before the ink on it was even dry.

Twenty years of De La Soul deserved more than a write-up, so in 2009 Mick Boogie and DJ Terry Urban gave it twenty remakes instead. Le Da Soul takes one De La Soul classic per year since 3 Feet High and Rising and hands it to a different artist to rebuild, Talib Kweli, Camp Lo, Kardinal Offishall, and a verse from Phife Dawg on Pease Porridge that hits harder every year since we lost him. Twenty tracks, one tribute done right.

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— Diony C.