From now on, March 3 is De La Soul Day

Three. That's the magic number. Yes it is.

In the coming decades, I think one of the hardest concepts to try and explain to young people will be how much money I spent on compact discs. Plastic circles that contained about one static hour’s worth of carefully curated music. How crazy does that seem in retrospect?

I used to go to the music store on Tuesdays, because that’s when the new CDs came in. I and a lot of my friends collected them, showed them off to one another. They were status symbols, and they took pride of place on shelves in our rooms. I still remember how I got Supreme Clientele on launch day and took the afternoon off school to listen to it on repeat on my discman, and how the track list was all messed up.

Like a lot of people, I got rid of almost all of my CDs a while ago. I hung on to one of them, though: De La Soul’s 1989 debut, 3 Feet High and Rising. Even in the very early days of music streaming, back when it still seemed miraculous, and Apple saw fit to charge ten bucks for a downloadable album (and we still thought about music in terms of albums), it was clear that some music might never appear in the cloud.

Sadly, 3 Feet is maybe more famous for the legal turmoil and precedent-setting it caused than for the sublime sounds and joy it (barely) contains. Here’s a good summary of the album’s troubled 30+ year history if you’re interested.

The point is, whenever I decided that I could live without the CD collection I’d worked so hard to amass, I decided at the same time that I could not live in a future in which I wasn’t able to listen to 3 Feet High and Rising whenever I damn well pleased. I wish I’d kept the case and the cover art booklet instead of just the disc, but I’m sure past-me had his reasons.

I’ve gotten a lot of use out of that CD over the years. Sometimes I just need to hear about Mr. Fish and Mr. Monkey in order to get in the right headspace. But these days, the only CD-playing device I own is a combination TV-recorder/DVD player, and that’s no one’s ideal way to listen to music.

But it’s okay because literally today, the day this post gets published, De La Soul’s entire catalog is finally, finally being released on streaming platforms. 34 years, to the day, since 3 Feet was released. Old-ass hip hop fans everywhere are rejoicing and trying to convince people in their 20s to stop looking at TikTok for one goddamn second and go listen to some De La instead and get educated.

The great tragedy here, of course, is the fact that Dave Jolicoeur, aka Trugoy the Dove, one third of De La Soul, passed away on February 12. He was only 54.

David Jude Jolicoeur aka Trugoy the Dove of De La Soul, June 2016 (Matthew Eisman/Getty Images)

When I heard the news, I texted and emailed friends, including one I hadn’t spoken to in years, because she and I attended a summertime outdoor De La concert in Toronto in 2007, which was one of the greatest live music experiences of either of our lives. (Great to reconnect with you, G! I hope you’re reading this!)

But mostly, I just shook my head. How’d we lose Dave? How’d we lose Dave already? 54!

I’ll be honest: I’ve always been more of a Posdnuous (aka Kelvin Mercer) guy than a Trugoy guy. But you can’t really love De La without loving both MCs. Pos has always been a little more ostentatious with his flow, impressing at first listen with his vocab and his wordplay. Dave, on the other hand, was (typing was hurts) so laid back you didn’t fully notice what he was all about at first. When you went back and listened again, though, you heard a guy who was so confident in who he was, and in presenting his view of the world, it was like he was just waiting there for you to come back and get it.

Dave was the kind of guy that would get invited to every party, no matter who else was getting invited, or who was doing the inviting. And he’d show up and have a chill time without making a big deal about it, and just about everyone else who was there would agree that he was the coolest guy at the party, so long as they took the time to interact with him. That’s the kind of guy Dave always struck me as.

I’d love to know how many total hours I’ve spent listening to De La over the years. I can’t even remember whether I started with 3 Feet High and Rising, or whether the first De La album I really fell in love with was 2000’s Art Official Intelligence: Mosaic Thump. I know I listened to both of them constantly throughout high school, and they weirdly meld together in my mind, even though their sounds and their significance could not be more different.

As a high school kid, I was very serious about learning everything I could about real hip-hop. That New York hip-hahp that Desus and Mero used to joke-but-not-really-joke about. Shit, I still am. One of my favourite books last year was Jonathan Abrams’ The Come Up: An Oral History of the Rise of Hip-Hop. So while I could tell you all about the trajectory from Boogie Down Productions to Big Daddy Kane to Biggie to Nas and Jay, and all the branching paths that extend from their illustrious careers, as well as the “conscious” response to all of that, and so on and so on…

De La Soul always felt like they existed somewhere else. They never quite fit into the puzzle. And that, for me, was accentuated by loving equally 3 Feet and Mosaic Thump. One is the kaleidoscopic product of four dudes (De La and Prince Paul) just out of high school, doing their own free-spirited thing. The other is a stark reminder to a changing industry from those same dudes (notably minus Prince Paul), now grown up and world-weary from performing, but sharper and edgier for it, yet still trying to outshine the identity they’d been assigned back in ’89.

I could go on about how I was sort of disappointed by 2001’s AOI: Bionix, or about how 2004’s The Grind Date is criminally underrated. I could talk about how Dave got Gorillaz over with Feel Good Inc., and about how that song is already 18 goddamn years old (or about how Dave’s verse on a different Gorillaz song, Superfast Jellyfish, is actually superior). Hell I could even tell you which tracks from And the Anonymous Nobody…, their 2016 album which I’m pretty sure only I listened to repeatedly, deserve to be included among De La’s best work (Property of Spitkicker.com feat. Roc Marciano, Snoopies feat. David Byrne, and Whoodeeni feat. 2 Chainz, if you’re curious).

Let me tell you about the number of times I’ve been drunk on the train, heading home late at night, and frantically searching the depths of Vimeo for some crummy upload of the Oooh video with Redman and Rah Digga.

And then there’s the latest Dave/Gorillaz collab, Crocadillaz, which just dropped on February 24. It proves not only that Dave still had it, that late in the game, but that he was positioned to continue being at the vanguard. This time of this burgeoning subgenre of old man rap, which we need more of. What could have been!

Listen to that second verse, the way Dave pauses just before lowering his voice a half-octave with “…that says it all.” You can hear the way his eyebrow is arched.

Personally, I’m just glad I’m finally able to spend quality time with the albums that came between 3 Feet and Mosaic Thump—De La Soul is Dead (1991), Buhloone Mindstate (1993), and Stakes is High (1996). I’ve heard them all before, but mostly in bits and pieces. I was always too busy loving the De La albums I loved to pay adequate attention to those other ones. I never owned them. The CDs were too expensive, because they fell in between the categories of “New Release” and “Classic Mainstream Appeal.”

I’m going to spend the next few days soaking up every second of every De La album, start to finish, in chronological order. They’re all gloriously remastered now too, sounding so much richer and more layered than the muffled, muted quality on the CD versions I’ve got burned into my brain.

It's impossible to hold on to music, just like it’s impossible to hold on to the people who matter to us. All we can do is appreciate these blessings in the moment, and hope against hope that those moments keep coming. I’m thankful for Dave and his work with De La, and for all of the moments they’ve given me.

Like Dave said back in 1989, “time is a factor so it’s time that counts.”