In 1972, Nikki Giovanni wrote a lovely poem by the name of “Ego Tripping (there may be a reason).” Inspired by a trip to Africa, it was an anthropological toast to black feminine pride and drew strength from history, geography and, ultimately, impenetrability: “I am so perfect, so divine, so ethereal, so surreal/I cannot be comprehended except by my permission.”
It’s not entirely clear that the Long Island trio De La Soul had this poem on their mind specifically when, in 1993, they recorded their knotty and brilliant third album, Buhloone Mindstate. “Ego Trippin’ (Part Two)” was the album’s second single, but that title was by all accounts a hand-me-down from rap’s earliest eccentrics the Ultramagnetic MC’s, who recorded their own “Ego Tripping” in 1986. It’s possible that the De La MCs Posdnuos and Trugoy the Dove and DJ Maseo recorded their “Ego” without ever knowing of Ms. Giovanni’s existence—hip hop memory has always been shallower than its actual roots often demand. In any case, it’s hard not to read Buhloone as a direct successor to the OG “Trippin’”—a fever dream of shared memories, historical touchstones, geographical landmarks, first person pronouns, and six feet deep self-actualizations. It's also a notoriously and proudly inaccessible project. “Fuck being hard, Posdnuos is complicated” has become its unofficial tagline in part because it was one of but a few direct statements made in an otherwise indecipherable web of interlocking wordplay.
The De La catalog had always been littered with linguistic in-jokes and secret passwords, but the broad stroke mythology was fairly straightforward prior to Buhloone. Check any number of the nth-anniversary reviews that practically write themselves today: Their 1989 debut, 3 Feet High and Rising, was an exercise in fluorescent sampledelic hippie rap, conceived or at least marketed as an antidote to all the tough guy posturing that had previously come to define hip-hop. The follow up, De La Soul Is Dead, was the reaction to that reaction. The group recanted their flower child ways and knuckled the fuck up. They were weirdoes to be certain, but these lunchroom identity narratives—the Peace Loving Hippies Have Arrived; the Peace Loving Hippies Strike Back at the Folks Calling Them Peace Loving Hippies—provided an anchor for that weirdness. Buhloone was just weird, lost in the woods. There is no decoding this album; you can only hope to inflate its context.
So here it goes: Buhloone Mindstate came at a time when De La’s career was hanging in the balance. …Is Dead was a success by both critical and commercial standards but less so than the dominant 3 Feet. Their Native Tongues collective—an amorphous, ever-growing posse comprised of A Tribe Called Quest, the Jungle Brothers, and basically every other rapper to ever rock a leather medallion at the dawn of the ’90s—was falling apart in the way adolescent social circles typically dissolve with time. Dr. Dre’s genre realigning gangsta opus The Chronic had just dropped. Enter the Wu-Tang was on its way. But rather than chasing trends or (worse still) pushing back against them with a grown-up scowl, they embraced their fate as outsiders. It was a case of personal liberation via free fall. They buried themselves in themselves.
“This time out, the peace of mind was cool,” Pos told Vibe in 1993. “We dealt with the stuff we had to deal with on the second record... we didn’t care; we said, ‘Let’s go back to ‘Buggin’ Out.’” “Buggin’ Out” meant bouncing off the walls in a narrow space. Songs might stop mid-verse; verses felt like they might never end at all. The production was deceptively accessible, less chaotic and warmer than their earlier stuff and drawing a bit from the jazz-rap pool that Tribe and Gang Starr had been dabbling but without any of the explicit nostalgia. It’s a much shorter album than its overstuffed skit-heavy predecessors too, clocking in at under 50 minutes with just ten full rap songs and yet is crammed with more information than ever before. It’s never light but always loose. “We had so much fun in the studio creating it,” Pos continues in the same interview. “The mistakes we made on this album? We left them in, ’cause they sounded cool.” Cue Nikki: “I am so hip even my errors are correct.”
It didn’t have to be quite so bugged, though. The first movement of Buhloone hints at a more coherent concept album. The intro incantation of “It might blow up but it won’t go pop.” is clever but to the point, on some “No Sell Out” shit. And while the three songs that follow were definitely written from the advanced De La code book—“I hit the shines but I’m shoeing it now/’Member when the floor model had a spine? Well it’s all bent over/A dayglo nigga gets the red doormat/It’s a roller coaster when your shit’s burnt toast” laments Dove—they also occupy a clear thematic territory, navigating industry racism and the pitfalls of fame.
But then just as those ideas start to coagulate the group’s focus turns outward. They turn their mics off and make room for a somber five minute solo track from long time James Brown saxophonist Maceo Parker. Then comes a short freestyle from the Japanese rap trio Scha Dara Parr, who don’t utter a word of English until they chant “Yes, yes, y’all, we don't stop” right before being tagged out by a lo-fi live dub of Bronx old schooler Tricky Tee shouting about Long Island.
And just like that the whole album cracks open, giving way to a full-on psychedelic-egotistical history lesson. While Ms. Giovanni traced the full African American diaspora, De La narrows in on its one corner that has, for better or worse, come to most visibly represent it over the past four decades of hip hop music. Their Sahara was the South Bronx, their Noah was Kool Herc, their precious jewels were the hand me down tape recordings of late ’70s and early ’80s rap concerts funneled eastbound to the Long Island suburb of Amityville that they called home. (Pos’ personal background is even more tangled than than just the reels on his cassettes here—when he was still in elementary school his family was forced out to L.I. after their South Bronx apartment was burnt down by one of the many crooked landlords who would leave the borough in ruin while inadvertently setting the stage for the most important American cultural movement of the 20th century. You can hear Pos’ own take on these events in the opening verse of the gorgeous Michael Jackson-–flipping “Breakadawn.” His telling also involves catscans and stew.)
Though hip hop’s absolute commercial peak wouldn’t come for a few more years, it was already a global, multimillion dollar industry by 1993. And as is frequently the case with global, multimillion dollar industries it had already begun to lose sight of its cultural origins. Rappers who were once household names to the small cadre of first-wave, five borough hip hop heads had become ancient history in the wake of the Def Jam explosion. To many of the kids buying De La Soul tapes, particularly those outside of the culture for whom 3 Feet’s hippiedom provided an easy point of entry, Grandmaster Caz or Melle Mel might as well have been Fats Waller. It would’ve meant something had De La just said their names. And they did do that. But they also showed a deeper spiritual connection to the old school, foregrounding the language and stylistic tics of their predecessors. If you spend enough time listening to rap music, your brain will break, and all of your thoughts will be colored within the lines of the many raps you’ve memorized.
I think a little bit of that was happening on Buhloone. Nearly every bar on the record is a triple folded origami reference to a rap verse from a bygone era. Disembodied Busy Bee routines dialogue with repurposed Joeski Love adlibs. On the 12"-only “Ego Trippin’ (Part 3),” Pos explains: “My style was created from the tapes of boys and girls/Who had the second generation dubs of crews at Harlem World.” (For further B-side breadcrumbs check the rare, supplemental promo EP Clear Lake Audiotorium where they actually rocked alongside Caz, Prince Whipper Whip of the Fantastic Five, and LA Sunshine of the Treacherous Three on the posse cut “Stix & Stonz.”)
And however tethered they were to those old-school routines this was no revival act. There was a perpetual newness bursting out of their cadences. Pos in particular was peaking here, rocking a sharp-elbowed, crisply enunciated and instinctively avant-garde flow that had few stylistic precedents. Sometimes he’d stilt his bars, leaving half measures hollow or letting sparred ad-libs from guests like Biz Markie and Shorty No Mas fill in the blanks. Elsewhere he would ramble on for bars and bars without even hitting a single identifiable rhyme. I’ve long believed that the greatest rappers—from T La Rock to 2Pac to Gucci Mane—were the ones who rapped and wrote like they needed to get every last thought they’ve ever had committed to tape. Pos’ style here gives shape to that sense of urgency.
At times that stream-of-consciousness gives way to straight-up consciousness. Check the album’s emotional centerpiece “I Am I Be,” a pageant of self-definition that draws Pos back down to earth for a minute to paint the record industry as a modern-day slave system and to shout out his daughter and late mother by name. Dove, on the other hand, stays in the abstract, letting trees fall for ink playgrounds and spilling H2O drops, but does so with such sentimentality that you would swear he was speaking simply. “This record flowed on feeling, on emotions.” Pos told Vibe. “I listen to it now and think ‘Wow we weren’t even thinking of saying this or that.’ It’s like a jigsaw puzzle.” This is perhaps the best way to approach Buhloone as a listener, too. If you roll with the stikabushes and absorb all the zoas, and dodge every punk squid, the album’s depths reveal themselves with time. Let it all go over your head and it will come back around and hit you in the heart.
Unsurprisingly mainstream audiences did not show Buhloone the patience it demands upon its release. It did not go pop; it did not blow up. It fared well critically—four-and-a-half mics in the Source, No. 8 on the Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop critics poll —and was embraced by diehards but was basically dead-on-arrival commercially. It remains a bit of a favorite amongst critics to this day, but isn’t nearly as adored as the more accessible De La albums. When it does get a mention, its inherent and remarkable weirdness is usually brushed over in favor of parroting the basic Won’t Go Pop thesis.
Even the group themselves has seemed baffled by the project in retrospect and reluctant to stand behind the strength of their own gibberish. On the follow up, Stakes Is High, they would take a sharp turn towards conservatism in both form and content, fleshing out many of the concerns about the state of hip hop that had only obliquely addressed on Buhloone and in the most literal terms possible. “We being real blatant now,” Mase told Rap Pages at the time of its 1996 release. “No more symbolism, no more beating around the bush, no more talking over people’s heads in a language we only understand.” In a 2005 interview with AllHipHop.com, Dove—having long since formally rechristened himself as just “Dave”—dismissed the bug outs of Buhloone even more directly: “Personally, I hated Buhloone Mindstate.… I think we were just a little too creative.”
But appropriately enough, Buhloone lives on in the subconscious of modern day hip-hop. You can hear specks of its style in Kendrick’s anxiety of representation, in Chance’s responsible whimsy, in Earl Sweatshirt’s ADD introspection, in Young Thug’s cascading chatter, and in Big Sean’s run-on sentences. It’s unlikely that all or even many of these artists have even heard the record—in part because it, like every ’90s De La album, remains woefully unavailable for streaming or legal download—but again, sometimes influence is ephemeral. And hip hop’s memory is still out of focus. It cannot be comprehended.
