J-Card Press will release De La Soul, a short biography about the highly influential hip-hop trio written by PopMatters and The Big Takeover writer Dave Heaton.

De La Soul has been an indestructible creative force over the past thirty years. From the nonconformist humor of their Day-Glo debut, to their eventual role as hip-hop elders, the trio is a model of fearless evolution and perseverance. They’ve toured the globe, worked across genres, and helped to establish the Afrocentric collective known as Native Tongues. De La Soul conveys the scope and depth of their legacy, going behind the scenes to look at how they formed, trace the evolution of their sound over three decades, and discuss why the group still matters today.

De La Soul began in Long Island, New York, as a collaboration among three young fans of the evolving culture and incipient musical genre of hip-hop. Their 1989 debut album 3 Feet High and Rising, with its hit single “Me Myself and I,” was an overnight success, launching the trio into a lifelong vocation they didn’t realize they were pursuing. Navigating industry challenges, fickle musical trends, and personal tragedy, they’ve built an artistic legacy and made an impact on listeners and musicians across genre boundaries.

“De La Soul were one of the most uniquely, defiantly nonconformist groups to emerge in the creative free-for-all of the late eighties, not just in hip-hop but in any genre that valued fearless creativity,” Nate Patrin, author of Bring That Beat Back: How Sampling Built Hip-Hop, says. “Heaton’s in-depth, career-spanning chronicle of their legacy doesn’t just get at what made their music special, but what motivated it—their upbringings, their enthusiasms, their influences, their friends (and rivals)—and in the process, he pinpoints in fine detail every giant step they took in evolving both their art form and their own relationship to a record business that might not have been entirely ready for them. A must-have whether you’re just starting to familiarize yourself with one of rap’s most transformative groups, or are a longtime fan looking for a reminder of just how and why they meant so much.”

De La Soul will be available online whenever books are sold on July 11. It was also be sold directly from the J-Card website at https://www.jcardpress.com/books/p/de-la-soul.

Photo courtesy of J-Card Press.