De La Soul ‘Cabin in the Sky’ Review

For much of the past year, Mass Appeal Records has curated a series of releases called “Legend Has It…,” a seven-album spotlight of hip-hop’s golden era. The first five installments — Slick Rick’s Victory, Raekwon’s The Emperor’s New Clothes, Ghostface Killah’s Supreme Clientele 2, Mobb Deep’s Infinite, and Big L’s Harlem’s Finest: Return of the King — have sometimes sounded like weathered reminders of past glories. (The final installment in “Legend Has It…,” Nas and DJ Premier’s Light-Years, drops Dec. 12.) But with De La Soul’s Cabin in the Sky, the series really achieves a goal, stated in a press release earlier this year, of “preserving the past, celebrating the present, and pushing hip-hop into the future.” Ironically, that future involves learning to accept, process, and even celebrate the passage of death.

Hip-hop teems with singular memorials to fallen loved ones, from 2Pac’s “Pour Out a Little Liquor” to Clipse’s “The Birds Don’t Sing.” Album-length treatises seem rarer: Saba’s Care for Me, which is riven by grief over a slain friend, comes to mind. Cabin in the Sky, for its part, evokes artistry beyond the genre, like Stereolab’s Margarine Eclipse, where the Chicago avant-pop band struggled to process the loss of longtime member Mary Hansen. On that 2004 album, lead vocalist Laetitia Sadier could only get through a few songs before she helplessly harmonized, “Margie,” as if reaching for a voice that was no longer there. Cabin in the Sky, where surviving members Kelvin “Posdnous” Mercier and Vincent “DJ Maseo” Mason honor the late Dave “Trugoy the Dove” Jolicoeur, is a bit like that. Numerous cuts unfold, only for Pos to abruptly begin reminiscing about his late friend or, on “A Quick 16 for Mama,” with Killer Mike, honoring his late mother. He and hype man Maseo sound as if they’re dancing through tears, both exultant and traumatized from weathering tragedy.

De La Soul have always packaged their albums in conceptual frameworks. “Season Nine,” as Posdnous calls Cabin in the Sky, is no different. It opens with a classroom roll call led by Giancarlo Esposito. Younger listeners will recognize the name from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, while old folks will note the allusion to the actor’s breakout performance in Spike Lee’s 1988 HBCU homage School Daze. Esposito takes attendance as he recites a lengthy list of contributors such as Nas, Common, Q-Tip, and Slick Rick, before finally stopping at Trugoy’s name. His voice trails off as he asks, “Dave? Dave…” 

Cabin in the Sky is De La’s first album since 2016’s And the Anonymous Nobody, and at an hour and 10 minutes, it sounds like something that was tinkered with for nearly a decade, well before Trugoy’s death in 2023. Yukimi Nagano from Little Dragon reprises Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer” on “Cruel Summers Bring FIRE LIFE!!,” only for the track to shift after a minute or so into Trugoy the Dove harmonizing over a loop of Roy Ayers Ubiquity’s “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” and claiming, “Shit’s wired like Baltimore.” Then it abruptly cuts to “Day in the Sun (Gettin’ Wit U),” with Yummy Bingham singing the chorus in the mode of Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway’s “Back Together Again.” Throughout, there’s Pos’ idiosyncratically awkward syntax: “Through the pastures of the blue, of clouds meanderin’/The sun got a front-seat view to the panderin’.” It’s joyously twee and, yes, a little goofy and corny. Still, its depiction of grown folks happily and haplessly partying to oldies feels more honest and engaging than Ghostface Killah cosplaying his hardbody youth on Supreme Clientele 2. “Mayday! Mayday!/We got these rappers out here living good like it’s still their heyday,” raps Posdnous on “Palm of His Hands.” Then, his voice turning serious, he adds, “How we still here? Only God knows why.”

Longtime fans will note how Cabin in the Sky’s volley of chirpy melodies, callbacks to old-school roller-skating and quirky skits featuring Saturday Night Live’s Jay Pharaoh evokes past De La fare like De La Soul Is Dead. Unlike that 1991 gem, Cabin in the Sky doesn’t bristle with satirical edge, preferring instead the gospel fervor of “Believe (In Him),” a gospel number highlighted by Lady Stout and K. Butler & The Collective. As he’s done throughout his career, Pos spends a few verses chastising wayward souls in the Black community. “So many mesmerized by the mess/They hear the ringin’ in their ears/That’s the gods trying to align ‘em/But unlike pianos, they choose to be out of tune, so that’s where you find ‘em,” he raps on “EN EFF,” a collaboration with Black Thought and DJ Premier and an album highlight. In the past, he would’ve delivered those lines with withering sarcasm or barely concealed anger. Heads still argue over whether De La’s 1996 hallmark “Stakes Is High” is a vibrant call-to-action against rap’s aesthetic decline into street-rap clichés or a hectoring and classist attack. Here, he simply sounds resigned to fate. “Live and let give life and when death is within sight/I hope to be surrounded by my seeds/Tell ’em to love one another/Tell my son to treat a woman better than I treated his mother,” he raps on the title track.

Nearly four decades after banding together as Long Island teenagers, De La Soul still knows how to create event albums that command our attention. It’s one of their less acknowledged gifts – there’s only a handful of rap acts who warrant critical fervor with every release – and a primary reason why Cabin in the Sky’s feels riveting despite a surplus of sentimental pop tones. The trio, now reduced to a duo, excel at sequencing tracks and stacking ideas so their thoughts on overcoming grief and embracing the possibilities of growing older feel more life-affirming than cloying. Pos’s songwriting may not be as sharply engaging as in the past, but he effectively portrays himself as a Black musician wary of how “We worth millions but not millionaires/’Cause music industry rules are in disrepair,” as he puts it on “EN EFF,” yet still optimistic about what’s to come. In the burgeoning subgenre of old-man rap, there’s not much more you can ask for.