How De La Soul’s “Itzsoweezee” Kept It Real

Chad Clark of the band Beauty Pill recalls an authentic plea of simplicity from De La Soul’s Dave Joliceur.

By Chad Clark

It has been a year since we lost De La Soul’s Dave Joliceur, the sphinx most of us knew as Trugoy The Dove (or Plug Two, if you will). Tragically, Trugoy died just as De La Soul managed to recaptured the rights to their music from their baleful tormentors at Tommy Boy Records after years of legal disputes. The loss still stings. On the anniversary of Trugoy’s death, Discogs revisits “Itzsoweezee,” one of De La Soul’s greatest, underrated songs.

Stakes Is High

De La Soul

1996

Hip Hop

Vinyl, LP

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1996’s Stakes Is High was De La Soul’s fourth album, and its title was both inspired and apt. This was the first album the band made after breaking from Prince Paul, their famously inventive producer. They were newly family men. And they were yoked to an exploitative contract with Tommy Boy. The group felt their backs were against the wall. The record had to work in the market, or it was curtains. Still, De La Soul stays committed to their defiant brand of surrealism. No pandering or hedging is on offer.

Though De La Soul’s career had begun with the jubilant 3 Feet High And Rising, the band worked hard to distance themselves from that lighthearted hit, with each subsequent release growing progressively more serious in tone. Stakes Is High feels like perhaps the apogee of that trend. It’s decidedly less “zany” than the previous three albums. For one thing, there are notably fewer samples. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the strikingly minimalist “Itzsoweezee,” which obliquely features only a single sample.

Though De La Soul customarily traded bars back and forth between Plug Two and Plug One (Posdnuos, Trugoy’s equally mysterious and brilliant partner), “Itzsoweezee” is essentially a Trugoy solo song. Though the song has call-and-response elements, and multitracked (faintly out of key) singing, Trugoy’s is the only voice you hear. Pos effectively steps aside for this one. This happens in great bands sometimes. (“Yesterday” is credited to the Beatles, but it’s just two minutes of Paul McCartney and a string quartet).

As a result, the song feels like a singular and personal soul statement. Against an austere, unchanging MPC beat and stripped down, spare original composition – a stark bassline and two suspended notes sourced from electric piano and organ – the track becomes a moment for Trugoy to lay bare his philosophy. The tone is resolutely monochromatic and dryly unaffected, but the song maintains that arcane, unknowable quality that all great De La Soul recordings possess.

The song opens as an elegy for a recent heartbreak and then veers quickly into a critique of cultural appropriation… and then materialism… and then escapism. The chorus chant is as contemplative and oblique as a zen koan. You’d be forgiven for receiving these bars as non-sequiturs, but Trugoy’s flow makes the transitions feel seamless. And there does appear to be a simple, unifying theme: a plea for authenticity.

Against this unadorned music, the song seems to essentially advocate for essentialism. Honesty with oneself and with others. And while his surreal, quixotic wordplay twists and bends in your mind, the spiritual message stays basic:

Keep it real. It’s so easy.

If there is any one message to remember him by, it is this one.

-Chad Clark is a writer and musician with the band Beauty Pill, based in Washington, DC.