Radio LBB: De La Soul

De La's absence from streaming sites has effectively erased their presence from the contemporary musical landscape and threatened to minimise their historical import - until now. One of the giants of hip-hop's "golden era" of the late '80s through mid '90s, De La's penchant for playful creativity would go on to influence everyone from the Pharcyde to OutKast, Kanye West to Childish Gambino. Despite this, almost all of their most important albums have been missing from (legal) streaming services.

When founding member Trugoy the Dove passed away last month, new and old fans were met with a deafening silence of options to revisit his musical legacy.

De La Soul has been trying to get their catalogue to streaming for several years now - since 2019 to be exact - after they acquired the masters to their music, but the main obstacle has been not coming to an agreement with their longtime record label, Tommy Boy, on an equitable way to earn money from the new streaming service revenue. However, after Tommy Boy was purchased by the music publishing company Reservoir Media, the process was swiftly streamlined and within 18 months under Reservoir, their catalogue finally became available on DSPs on March 3rd.

All this has finally been rectified, and we've put together a playlist of some of our favourite De La songs.