Rest in Peace Trugoy, Change is Neutral

I’m 41. Our heroes, our stylistic fathers, our real fathers, they are dying. Not all at once, not all from COVID. But there is a cycle of life, I’m halfway through my expected journey on this Earth (but nothing, including tomorrow, is promised). Yesterday morning I got a text from Big Zach, Zach Combs, a Minneapolis emcee I’ve been in friendship and business with since I turned 17. Trugoy the Dove, PlugTwo, Dave Joliceur died. 54 years old. One third of De La Soul. Rappers will die of natural causes. The man had congestive heart failure, he had been struggling for some years. He fed my soul. Some of the best days of my life are the summer of 1996, going to third base on the regular with my first real girlfriend, playing Road Rash on the Genesis and listening to Buhloone Mind State on the five disc changer with Steve and Conor. I would describe it now as wasting time, but I didn’t really know what waste or time was. I was just diving in to this record and even though I was young I could understand how crafted the record was. This wasn’t four world-class talents doing what they did best comfortably. This was world-class talent stretching themselves further than they thought they could go. So much of De La Soul’s career seemed to be about campaigning to be understood as full ass human beings since their biggest splash in the mainstream was misunderstood as a one dimensional bunch of hippy black kids. No, not cutouts. What they were was complete young men, which is to say incomplete adult men. Full of humor, anger, affection, inside jokes, outside jokes, vision, record collections and unbelievable skills. For the world of hip-hop I’m in, it doesn’t get bigger than Native Tongues. When the center of your universe was you and your friends record collection, when social media couldn’t so clearly tell you that not everyone loved Aceyalone, not everyone had the Sacred Hoop tape. In that era, Native Tongues was the superstars. I’ve never read a quote where any Native Tongues artist said this explicitly, but I’ve listened to all the records so I’ll say it: nothing easy. These artists might’ve made it sound effortless, but the strictures of their work . . .challenging. Three bar loop, bar of 3/4, trading across the bar line, everyone’s verse has to start with the same line, flow next to someone rapping in Japanese, navigate around long vocal loops. There was something athletic, ambitious and dextrous about Native Tongues music. Within that challenge they exuded emotion and they delivered my favorite soapbox to stand on in regards to great writing, SIGNIFICANT DETAIL. Press play on this one.

Trugoy appears first on this DJ Honda tune “Trouble in the Water” is an incredible story of a young boy moving from Brooklyn to Long Island. What do I mean when I say significant detail? I mean the moment when a writer gives you one phrase, one image, one snapshot and gives it to you so right that in that moment they have every credential they could need to speak to your soul. Trugoy gives us a handful of images in this verse that mean that for the rest of his career, he’s trustworthy to me, I trust him to paint pictures in my brain. Now what role and right do I, pudgy Massachusetts-turned-Minnesota white kid listening to DJ Honda in ‘98 cause my brother bought it at Cheapo used, have in giving a Trugoy the credential to say that I believe his story of moving out to black suburbia in the late 70s? My answer is my headphones. I have to listen to the stories I fall into, and I fall into these stories, delivered with the vision and perspective of a poet. I never thought of De La Soul as journalists, even though their authenticity is part of the their pitch, I thought and think of them as poets. “stepping to backyard parties was a blast, fucking up our sneakers on the wet grass” , it’s all in there, the youthful joy of gathering, the plus sides of backyards and more space, the pain of pristine sneakers corrupted by freshly dewed grass. But here’s the line: “now my time moves slow/ain’t it all full circle?/now a dove cry makes the whole scene turn purple/remember that night you had to hide in the freezer for real? see them kids were real/we still slid”. I hear it all in this one. I hear the significance of Prince, the connection to Trugoy the Dove, but that freezer line? I think about the Punky Brewster episode where somebody got locked in a freezer. I think about the idea of a young boy having to hide out in a freezer to hide from something, to survive something, but being able to walk confidently through the neighborhood afterwards. It has that depth. It has the significant detail. Most writers can’t get to it in 300 pages. . .Trugoy does it in two lines. Play this one:

And here’s my favorite little bite of a verse from Trugoy. Aside: some of the greatest moments in Native Tongues music is smaller than verses, it’s a no look pass to the center from the point guard, it’s an extra pass just to get it back to shoot the three. There’s an art not only in what they did, but how they did it, they did everything with finesse, with ambition, with style. Go to 2:40 on the song and listen how he lands “torn” on the one. Your basic rhyming words are going to land on the four. Great. But by the time of this release, that expectation was so frequently dashed that it was far from revelatory to drop the rhyming word on beat one. But somehow, the song didn’t have a lot of rhythmic sophistication yet, just a lot of bravado and style. Suddenly, Trugoy drops in on the one, goes off with by far the most rhythmically dense rhymes of the tune and signs off. It’s masterful, it’s cocky, it’s dextrous. Nothing easy, nothing but legendary. Rest in peace Trugoy.

FOOTNOTE: Trugoy, thank you for being an important part of the song “Baby Phat” which is how I track the start of the body positivity movement. It meant so much to see you celebrate big bodies when I was a young man, and it still means a lot. “Make the big panties look like little panties” is a classic line that I say to myself all the time.

SUBJECT CHANGE

I got to see my beautiful daughter sing in a kindergarten Valentine’s Show today and it warmed my heart. 35 years ago I was in kindergarten. My daddy probably wasn’t afraid that there might be a school shooting or stabbing that would take his son or one of his son’s classmates. I watch this class and I hope all these kids get through middle school, high school and beyond alive, healthy, with support. I also see all these kids blow the melody of the Beatles song “All You Need Is Love” and I feel so good I briefly believe that all we do need is love. But 1/8 of my brain tells me I’ll write about needing more than love later in my blog. How do we heal together? They’ll put some cops in front of some high schools for awhile. I understand why they want that. I understand why that might help. We need immediate solutions. But I don’t think they’re the permanent solution. Right? It’s not solved with a cruiser in front of the school. We had the cruiser in front of my high school my entire time at Central. I think it was Officer Brown. A thousand walkie talkies is all I remember. Grab a kazoo and blow a message to everyone that can hear: all you need is love. It’s not true, but don’t you love a kazoo.