Interview with Austin McCoy, author of “Living in a D.A.I.S.Y. Age”

Austin McCoy is an assistant professor of history at West Virginia University and the author of the new book Living in a D.A.I.S.Y. Age: The Music, Culture, and World De La Soul Made (Simon & Schuster, 2026). He was kind enough to chat about his new book, De La Soul, and 1980s and 90s hip hop. His book was just released in January and this interview will give you a little taste of the cultural history you’ll get if you read it. You can find the book here. 

How do you describe this book to people who haven’t read it and what are your hopes and goals for the book?

My book is a cultural and personal history of De La Soul, and in many ways, rap, since 1989. Of course, De La Soul is the central subject of examination. I analyze the content of their music—lyrics, tracks, and albums—while placing their art in historical context. Although I start the book with the group’s origins in the 1980s, I connect them to a Black countercultural, or alternative, tradition going back to George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic. I also consider the ways Posdnous, Trugoy the Dove, and Maseo changed how we viewed Black masculine expression in hip hop culture, revolutionized the art of rap production and album construction, and how they evolved as astute political observers and cultural critics. I hope readers understand the ways De La Soul responded to political, cultural, and economic developments during their careers while also transforming rap. Along with their Native Tongues compatriots—Jungle Brothers, A Tribe Called Quest, Queen Latifah, Monie Love, Black Sheep, and others—De La Soul created a lane for eclectic rappers to express their vulnerability, to present themselves as iconoclasts, and to develop an imaginative ethos, what I call a creative individualism, that embraced constant change aesthetically and musically.

And, lastly, I want to introduce De La Soul to younger fans. As I write in the book, I’ve found that many students who take my classes had not heard much of De La Soul’s music. This is obviously changing now that their famed Tommy Boy Records catalog is available on streaming, but there are many younger folks who still have not gotten around to listening to their albums.

Obviously, you think De La Soul is really important, otherwise you would not have written this book. What would be missing in hip hop culture or in history if we did not have De La Soul or if they had never achieved any mainstream success?

If De La Soul, or the rest of the Native Tongues, for that matter, had not achieved any mainstream success, we would miss the creative and whimsical style they created. They used various genres of music to create a sonic palette on 3 Feet High and Rising that has not been duplicated. (The emergence of the sampling legal regime in the late 1980s and early 1990s is partly to blame for this.) De La Soul not only helped pioneer the collage style of rap production (along with the Bomb Squad), but they used their first three albums to create surreal sonic worlds. De La Soul also emphasized the importance of a creative individualism; rather than swimming with the mainstream, they often sought to swim against it. Many music critics, their record company, Tommy Boy Records, and fans would have been happy for them to continue to ride the D.A.I.S.Y. wave after 3 Feet High and Rising, but they refused to be placed in a box. Changing up their style—fashion, production, lyricism, and relationship to rap—was central to their creative ethos. We would have been robbed of one of the most dynamic rap groups in hip hop history. We also might not get to have experienced their musical descendants like The Roots, The Pharcyde, The Fugees, Common, Talib Kweli, Yasiin Bey (Mos Def), The Juggaknots, People Under the Stairs, Little Brother, Odd Future, Tyler, the Creator, Kendrick Lamar, Rapsody, and Doechii in the way we know them now. 

Is there an alternate universe in which this book is about the Jungle Brothers?

This is a great question! The Jungle Brothers are more than deserving of a book and/or documentary. I remember reading an interview with them—maybe it was in an issue of Vibe in 1996—and I just thought, “Wow, the Jungle Brothers have not really gotten their just due either.” They introduced us to Q-Tip, spearheaded the Native Tongues collective, and inspired A Tribe Called Quest’s group name. Their first two albums are classic. Afrika Baby Bam captured the zeitgeist when he rapped on “Buddy,” “De La Soul, on a roll. Black medallions, no gold.” The Afrocentric movement in Black culture seemed to reach its zenith during the late-1980s and early-1990s and the Jungle Brothers were at the fore of that tendency.

While it is true that the music industry has not been too kind to De La Soul, the same can be said about the Jungle Brothers. Like I said, Done by the Force of Nature, is an excellent, if not classic, rap album. But, unfortunately, the group did not get the same type of industry push as De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest. Their initial third album, Crazy Wisdom Masters, never made it to stores and that seemed to derail the group. 

Something that stood out to me was how much storytelling was involved with De La Soul’s music and albums. It seems to me that storytelling was a bigger part of early hip hop and rap and we see less of it now. Do you agree with that or am I way off base? And if there is less storytelling, how does that affect the genre?

I definitely agree. Rap music, especially as it matured in the 1980s, was based on storytelling. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message” and Run-DMC’s “It’s Like That” are storytelling songs. The dueling songs—MC Shan’s “The Bridge” and Boogie Down Productions’ “South Bronx”—are telling stories about hip hop’s origins. Then, of course, we got music by Slick Rick, Queen Latifah, Public Enemy, and Ice Cube that tell incredibly vivid stories. De La Soul’s “Tread Water” and “Millie Pulled a Pistol on Santa” are great as well (the latter might be the group’s best storytelling song). I do not think this tradition will go away in rap. Doechii tells stories throughout Alligator Bites Never Heal. Kendrick Lamar’s “Duckworth” is another compelling narrative track. Aesop Rock’s “John Something” is unexpectedly great as he talks about attending a talk that an artist gave at his school in the mid-1990s. 

In your book, you walk the line between not assuming too much reader knowledge and not too little. What would be different if you wrote it just for people who know nothing about hip-hop? What would be different if you wrote it just for people who know a lot about hip-hop?

I probably would have offered more historical context about the development of hip hop culture if I had written it for an audience who knew little about it. What would be fun about writing this book for “super fans,” I should call them (and myself), is I would have tried to focus more on the music they’re less known for like the scores of B-Sides, their mixtapes (they recorded one in 2014 over J. Dilla beats), and albums like their Plug 1 and Plug 2 Present…First Serve. Of course, I would have felt compelled to find the most obscure facts about De La Soul, their songs, and their albums. I could also make arguments that might have appealed more to insiders. I would be slightly afraid to write this book for people who knew much about hip hop because there will always be some morsel of information that I do not know and/or not had access to at the time of writing that I surely would be called out for.

The word “weird” comes up a lot in the book (in a good way). How do you define it? And do you think it is the same now as it was in the 1980s or 1990s?

I’ve always interpreted “weird” as “different” or inscrutable. As we know, the meaning of these terms depends in the context in which we use them. De La Soul arose at a moment during the late 1980s when the expectations for Black masculine performance in hip hop culture (and Black youth culture, which isn’t entirely the same) felt more fixed as forms of physical and verbal presentation emerged (i.e. LL Cool J, Run-DMC, and Slick Rick wearing large gold chains, NWA wearing mostly Black clothing with Raiders caps, Eric B. and Rakim wearing chains and Dapper Dan jackets). De La Soul wore more colors, they created their own language, sampled more genres of music, and embraced a sense of inscrutability.

I’m sure our definitions of “weird” have changed, but we might need to be more in tune with youth culture to understand any shifts in understanding. What we know for sure is other rappers continued to pick up that mantle after De La Soul dropped 3 Feet High & Rising—The Roots, Outkast, especially Andre 3000, The Neptunes, Missy Elliot, Odd Future, Tyler, The Creator, and A$AP Rocky all exhibit a level of weirdness, or operating off the beaten path. Even Kendrick Lamar and Cardi B demonstrate their quirks occasionally.

Since MTV just officially ended, I can’t help but ask: You mention skits and videos a lot in your book, but neither are really around much today. We don’t have things coming out in the CD format the same way and we’re not seeing videos like we used to. I would add liner notes to the list of things we’re missing. What are we missing out on by not having those things so much?

I love this question because the issue of streaming and physical media has come up quite a bit in my hip hop classes and discussions about culture with students. I remember telling a student I could not ever imagine having almost every music album at my fingertips as a teenager. However, the streaming model governing music production and consumption has produced superficial and passive engagement with music and culture for some of us. It is true that one can listen to physical media passively, however, there is more intentionality when we listen to music on vinyl, CD, or a cassette. It is harder to skip and repeat songs. We are forced to listen to and assess an album as a total body of work. We must engage deliberately—drop a needle on a groove and push the play button on a cassette and CD player. An album has a beginning and an end! The CD, tape, or record player will stop playing the album when it stops. Then we must go either play it again or change the record, tape, or CD. And we get to decide what we want to listen to next, not an algorithm. Also, it was rare for an artist to drop more than one project in a year due to production and distribution costs, so we savored each release because we did not know when we would get another album! We appreciated everything about the album—the cover, inserts, production credits, thank yous, and the rest of the liner notes. As any music lover who came up in the era of vinyl records, cassette tapes, and CDs would tell you, reading the liner notes was an important step to learning the context of the album’s production—who appeared on the album, who composed the music, and, especially in rap, what songs the artists sampled (at least the ones they cleared). The Roots’ Questlove was the first to introduce me to extended liner notes on albums like Things Fall Apart. I enjoyed reading as much about how artists approached the creation of their music about as much as I enjoyed listening.

Streaming has altered music production. As we know, especially after reading books like Liz Pelly’s Mood Music: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, streaming/tech companies incentivizes artists to drop more singles, EPs, and albums to accumulate as many streams as possible. Streaming has also led to artists recording shorter songs and albums with fewer skits. Albums like De La Soul’s Cabin in the Sky are rarer now. Streaming reversed this trend in rap when many artists sought to fill vinyl and CDs with as many songs as these forms could fit.

Physical media also created more opportunities for collective engagement in culture. Growing up in the 1990s, not all of us had access to a bunch of music due to a lack of money, so we made copies of albums for each other, and we might make mixtapes for ourselves and others. And it took time to record albums and make mixtapes—doing so could take an hour or two out of your day at minimum! Mixtapes often took longer! This started to change once we could burn CDs, especially as we moved into the early 21st century.

Then, if there was an album we all anticipated, but could not afford, one of us would go buy a copy and then we gathered to listen to it. I listened to countless class rap albums this way—Wu-Tang Clan’s Enter the Wu-Tang, Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, Wu-Tang Forever (I bought the double cassette tape!), De La Soul is Dead, etc. I did not live in New York City or another big city with robust bootleg or mixtape cultures, so I had to wait for the radio to play a song, MTV or BET to play a music video, or read The Source, before I knew one of my favorite artists were dropping an album.

What are your thoughts on why we don’t see as many collaborations among musicians and groups today—like the Native Tongues collective (or even Outlaw Music)?

I always think about Chuck D’s desires for rap (and music, generally) to feature more groups and collectives. Of course, there are structural reasons for this—splitting advances, royalties, merchandise, and concert revenues. And while we tend to see less of this than during the late-1980s with the Juice Crew, Native Tongues, and NWA Posse and the 1990s and early 2000s with Wu-Tang, Boot Camp Clik, Dungeon Family, and the Soulquarians, there is still a spirit of collaboration. These collaborations are often limited to artists on the same record label/company like Griselda, 38 Spesh’s Trust Gang, and Backwoodz Studioz. Rappers and producers are also collaborating with each other on full length albums. Alchemist seems to work with everyone. Q-Tip produced all of LL Cool J’s The FORCE, which is a great album. Madlib produced all of Black Star’s (Talib Kweli and Yasiin Bey) recent album. And, every once in a while, we’ll see a cool collaborative song like Talib Kwelis and J. Rawl’s “Native Sons, Part 2,” which brought some members of the Native Tongues together—Maseo and Posdnuos from De La Soul, Mike G and Afrika from Jungle Brothers, Busta Rhymes, and Black Thought (Still no one from A Tribe Called Quest!). 

Ok, we’re right around the same age, so I also have some questions that are only somewhat related to the book’s topic, but I think you may enjoy based on age demographic. First up, when did you officially give up on Lauryn Hill creating a follow-up album to Miseducation? How old were you? (I was late, I probably only gave up within the last five years.)

I think I’m someone who doesn’t think too much about whether an artist will release a long-awaited album. I tend to assume Lauryn Hill might not ever release a follow up to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Of course, I would definitely be excited and love I to listen to a new album if she decides to release one. But I understand she may not need to drop anything else. It is amazing to leave everyone with one incredible piece of art and move on.

But! I am also willing to be surprised. I was not sure if we would get another Tribe album and we did unexpectedly in 2016. I was surprised when D’Angelo and the Vanguard released Black Messiah in 2014. I remember staying up to listen to that for the first time. But, how many artists and groups have promised us reunion albums and then failed to follow through? After a while I just rather focus on who is releasing music while going back to my old favorites. I still have catalogs of music to explore. But I am always game for a surprise release. But I’d love another album from Ms. Hill or the Digable Planets.

I noticed you didn’t mention the group Arrested Development in your book. What’s your take on them?

This is a great question and a real omission. I love Arrested Development, but more after the fact. I remember when “Tennessee” came out and my mind was still stuck on gangsta rap. I feel like I’ve always missed their releases when I was in my 20s because they were either independent or releasing music on labels that did not distribute to the music stores I went to. So, Arrested Development, except for their last couple of albums, which I enjoyed, are a gap in my development as a rap fan and that gap is clear by their absence in my book (sorry to them!). Speech is a great lyricist and would make for an interesting subject for a book or documentary, though. 

Is there already a great book about Queen Latifah? If not, could that be next for you?

A Queen Latifah book would be amazing! She’s written a couple of books already. But, I am not aware of a biography or a book like mine about De La Soul that places her in deep historical context. Similar to De La Soul, Queen Latifah pioneered various trends among rappers such as acting, genre-bending and switching (she released an album of jazz covers in the early 2000s), and as a mogul. Obviously, Queen Latifah represented a great link in the chain of Black feminist rap stretching back to The Mercedes Ladies to Roxanne Shante, MC Lyte, and Salt-n-Pepa, to Rapsody. Queen Latifah is part of many cohorts of rap artists—the Native Tongues, Flavor Unit, and rappers-turned-actors. We’re at a point where more young people might know her more for her TV shows like The Equalizer than her music, like Will Smith, Common, and Ice T (and LL Cool J). It would be interesting to reckon with Latifah’s ability to infiltrate the mainstream of U.S. culture as a Black woman who has had to deal with speculation around her sexual identity.

It would also be cool to write books about Organized Konfusion, Digable Planets, and The Roots, too. A Missy Elliot book would be great, too.

One question about process for you… In your book, it’s clear that being part of a community is important for pushing people to be more creative and innovative and we see how much collaboration and contact helped the Native Tongues groups to really mature and develop and experiment. As a thinker and a writer, who is your collective? How did you find your people? Or, if you don’t quite have one, is that partially because it’s harder academics to find that crew or what?

This is another good question. I’m part of a few different communities. I was part of an activist community as a graduate student at the University of Michigan. I’m still stay in touch with friends who were part of that community—those who stayed and many who left. Then, I would say I have my high school and college (undergrad) friends. My high school friends are the ones who helped nurture my music tastes. We still go to concerts together every once in a while, and that’s awesome. And then, I’d say I’m part of an overlapping online activist, academic, and creative community across all of the social media platforms I use.

But you’re right to point out how hard it is for some of us academics to find community. Most of us are in an individualistic enterprise when it comes to teaching and knowledge production. Then, it is hard to find the time to put roots down somewhere, especially if you have personal connections in another town or city. And this is not me saying that Morgantown, WV does not have a good community. It does! However, I split time in different locations, so it’s not easy laying down roots. But it is true—being part of a community helps grow our collective and individual imaginations, creativity, and wonder.

Last question, what’s next for you? What are you working on now?

I’m back to working on my book based on my dissertation. It’s a study of the emergence of “new progressive” politics in the Midwest during the 1970s and 1980s. I refer to “new progressives” as the 1960s radicals who adopted more reformist strategies such as electoral politics, lobbying, and policymaking in their continued pursuit of social and economic transformation. I focus on activists like Kenneth Cockrel, Sr., Sheila Murphy (Cockrel), Tom Hayden, and Ira Arlook and groups like the Indochina Peace Campaign, Detroit Alliance for a Rational Economy, and the Ohio Public Interest Campaign. In the meantime, I am considering other music history-related ideas for the next trade press book. I had so much fun working on Living in a D.A.I.S.Y. Age. Before the De La Soul book, an editor reached out to me to expand an article I wrote for The Baffler about some of my experiences organizing against police brutality in Ann Arbor in the 2010s. That could be a possibility, too. Who knows!

Interview conducted by Elizabeth Stice