1993: Buhloone Mindstate, De La Soul

By Malcolm Ferguson

grow as you learn // learn as you grow

I’ve always felt weird about describing someone as a “product” of their environment. I’m aware that every human being is very deeply informed by who and what they experience, and the circumstances they find themselves in. And I’m sure that the term is grammatically sound. It’s just that when I hear “product,” I think of the primary definition — something that’s been ‘manufactured, marketed, and eventually sold,’ not the core experiences that shape our essences. I do like the second definition though — “a thing or person that is the result of an action or process.” Especially that action part. Maybe it’s the same shit to you, but to me that definition feels more real, easier to see and to break down each step, each outreach action of the production process. Almost like an interminable conversation between history and present, ongoing and nonlinear and full of meaning. That’s what it feels like De La Soul is doing on Buhloone Mindstate. With acerbic lyrics, strange skits sounds, and monumental guest appearances, the group uses the album to implement and feature the Black people and actions that “produced” their music. If it is a product, then Buhloone Mindstate is a product of Black resistance, expression, and self-determination; a celebration of what is because of what was. But it took me, like, ten years to understand that. 

Most of my music taste is a product of my dad’s 5th Generation iPod Classic. Whether in his Honda Civic or from the sound dock by the kitchen sink, that boxy, infinite library provided the soundtrack to the majority of my adolescence. I really can’t remember a time where music wasn’t playing in our house, and my father, a native New Yorker and self-described hip-hop purist, played a huge role in that. He had this silent ritual each evening where he’d get home from his long commute, hug me and my sister and kiss our mom, eat a pre-dinner bowl of cereal while he scanned the (print edition!!) Baltimore Sun, ate dinner, and then immediately cranked that iPod to the max while he cleaned the kitchen until he felt it was spotless. 

It was the last part of his routine that gave me those family standards, those “aww shit” songs that your folks play around you over and over again until they become permanent earworms, entrenched so deeply in the back of your brain that your ears prick up like a retired racehorse on the off chance you hear them at karaoke night or from a passing car window. For me those were songs like Peter Brown’s “Dance With Me,” ‘Don’t Look Any Further” by Dennis Edwards, Eric B & Rakim’s “Eric B is President,” Cheryl Lynn’s “Got to Be Real,” Run DMC’s “Sucker MCs,” Jill Scott’s “Love Rain’ remix with Mos Def…so many songs I knew better than my Bible verses because my parents had ultimate aux privileges. This routine is how I got put on to De La Soul, and Buhloone Mindstate, really without even realizing it. It’d be about 10PM, I’d be struggling over word problems at the kitchen table, and my father would be hunched over the sink, overhead lamp pinging off his bald Black head while he bobbed mindlessly to the drums of De La’s “I Am I Be.”

Listening to that album out of order and only knowing songs as “untitled 1” kind of felt right for this particular De La Soul album, especially when I was a younger listener. It’s a raw album littered with unconventional moments that work simply because De La Soul can make them work. As Pos told Vibe in 1993, “The mistakes we made on this album? We left them in, ’cause they sounded cool.” The album opens in pretty typical De La Soul fashion: a cryptic intro track (it might blow up but it wont go pop) followed by two jazzy Black hippy moments in “Eye Patch” and “En Focus.” On ‘Patti Dooke' though, the album gets blown wide open, as Pos, Trugoy, and Guru rap about the exploitation and commodification of Black music while accompanied by Maceo Parker, Fred Wesley, and Pee Wee Ellis, all formative members of James Brown’s legendary backing band, the JBs. The very next track is “I Be Blowin,’” where the group literally just lets Maceo solo for five minutes over the same beat used for the later “I Am I Be.” This section of the album is just one small example of how Black music — and Black culture — evolves and builds upon itself. It’s like George Clinton in the California Love video, like Kendrick Lamar rapping over EvilGiane drill beats, or like AI crossing up Michael Jordan. The JB’s are responsible for so much of what hip hop sounds like, they are the action that produced the result of De La. And if you really wanted to, you can trace the actions that produced them all the way back to the blues, or even to the drums of West Africa. De La’s decision to give Maceo, Fred Wesley, and Pee Wee the flowers that they, and many more, deserve on the album makes that lineage crystal clear. 

This very same generational dynamic is so incredibly, intoxicatingly apparent on the album’s thirteenth track, “Breakadawn.” Sampling Michael Jackson and Smokey Robinson in the same song over some loud ass boom bap drums feels like a very serious event, and it should. It’s funny that Trugoy didn't particularly enjoy the song, and I can definitely understand given the significant commercial success it had. Yet there’s still such a power in how accessible and malleable Black music is, how seamlessly soul standards can be flipped into hip hop standards in a generation, or two. This adaptability goes beyond music, and is representative of the constant states of chaos, creation, flux, and violent instability that Black diasporans have perpetually experienced. It’s in our nature to reuse and recreate the knowledge of past generations because it’s how we survived in environments that were hostile to our very existence. It’s bigger than just a Smokey Robinson sample, or a Maceo sax solo. This album successfully wove together multiple eras of Black music by zeroing in on the actions of those who built it from the ground up.

There are so many other tracks on this album I could spend time on. The strangely placed skit “Long Island Wildin’' features Scha Dar a Parr and Takagi Kan, the opening act of De La Soul’s 1989 Japan tour and the first time Japanese rappers were placed on a major label album. The beautiful Al Hirt sample on “Ego Trippin” that some felt was a Tupac diss, Biz Markie going crazy on “Stone Age.” But it’s always been “I Am I Be” that’s stayed with me. 

It didn’t register to me that “I Am I Be” was essentially a spoken word posse cut when I first heard it. Listening to it with the historical context of De La Soul and the Native Tongues Collective really adds to the gravity of the song. I love hearing the statements of “I am ___, I be ___” melt into Maceo’s saxophone and over each over, as familiar voices stick out and unfamiliar ones leave me wondering. It’s punchy, classic Black vernacular that feels natural for some speakers and very awkward for others, and I love that too. Each participant adds a personal touch to the statement. 

“I am Shortie, I be 4’11.”

“I am Patrick, and I be the biggest shoe collector in the world.” 

“I am Laura, and I be traveling.” 

“I am Q-Tip, I be friction.” 

“I am Posdanous, I be the new generation of slaves / Here to make papes to by a record exec rakes / the pile of revenue I create / but I guess I don’t get a cut cuz / my rent’s a month late / Product of a North Carolina cat who scratched the back / of a pretty woman named Hattie / who departed life just a little too soon / and didn’t see me grab the plug tune fame.” 

This song is absolutely the nucleus of the album. It raises the question of what the Black artist is and can be in the face of an industry that views them as that first definition of product — manufactured, marketed, and ultimately disposable. It’s such a multifaceted track — somber musings on Black masculinity, stubborn shit talking, lighthearted cameos that make you smile, and drums hard enough to drown all of that out anyway. It’s very humanizing, which is something the entire Native Tongues collective was excellent at. And like so many other fans, it was and is so easy to see myself in them, particularly as a 24-year old Black writer who often feels like hollering just like De La was on “Ego Trippin.” And that’s not to say I don’t have time for braggadocious, ignorant excess raps, because I certainly do. It’s just that this album, and this particular moment in hip hop, was able to carve out a space for Black expression in ways that were whittier, jazzier, more outwardly Afrocentric, and it’s aged like fine wine. And De La Soul has now firmly become another action, another step in the production of more Black expression, whether it be the Soulquarians, or Odd Future, or some 12-year-old Black kid listening to “I Am, I Be” with his pops on the way to work.      

 The deeds of a natural

Are seeds that are no longer planted

So the famine in the mind is strong

Tactics of another plane is now proven sane

Sane enough to let you know from within this song

I stabilize many cableized viewers

So my occupation's known

But not why I occupy

And that is to bring the peace

Not in the flower but the As-Salaam Alaikum in the third I am.

Malcolm is a writer and journalist who currently works as an assistant editor at The Atlantic. Raised in Baltimore County, now based in Washington, DC, His writing interests mostly lie in Blackness, arts & culture ,domestic politics, labor, and drug policy. He is also an avid Wizards and Ravens fan.