David Jolicoeur of De La Soul, the rap trio that expanded the stylistic vocabulary of hip-hop in the late 1980s and early ’90s with eclectic samples and offbeat humor, becoming MTV staples and cult heroes of the genre, died Sunday. He was 54.
His death was confirmed by the group’s publicist, Tony Ferguson, who did not specify a cause or say where Jolicoeur was when he died. In recent years, Jolicoeur has openly discussed a struggle with congestive heart failure.
De La Soul arrived with the album “3 Feet High and Rising” in 1989, a time when hip-hop was still relatively new to the mainstream. The genre’s public face was often confrontational, with groups such as Public Enemy and NWA speaking out about the racism, police violence and neglect faced by Black communities in America.
By contrast, De La Soul — three middle-class young men from Long Island — presented themselves with hippie floral designs and a music video set in a high school for their song “Me Myself and I.”
Jolicoeur — whose original stage name in the group was Trugoy the Dove — had the first lines of the track, riffing on a fairy tale. “Mirror mirror on the wall/Tell me mirror, what is wrong?” he rapped. “Can it be my De La clothes/Or is it just my De La song?”
That album, with singles also including “Say No Go” and “Eye Know,” reached only as high as No. 24 on the Billboard 200 chart, but it was an instant classic that pointed to new directions in hip-hop.
With its producer, Prince Paul, the group developed an idiosyncratic and freewheeling style of sampling that brought new textures to hip-hop. “3 Feet High” contained pieces of more than 60 other recordings, including not only Funkadelic and Ohio Players grooves — de rigueur in 1980s rap — but also oddities such as sounds from old TV shows.
But legal problems related to its samples became the bane of the group. One sample, of the Turtles’ organ-driven psychedelic pop track “You Showed Me” (1968), had not been cleared properly, and the Turtles sued; the case was settled out of court.
Ongoing legal problems with sample clearances prevented the group from releasing its music in digital form, which effectively blocked the trio from music’s most important marketplace in the 21st century. Recently, the group finally cleared those samples and was gearing up to release its music in digital form in March.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.