Hip-Hop Made: Maseo of De La Soul on earliest influences and untold Hip-Hop history

Continuing our celebration of Hip-Hop's 50th anniversary on Audacy's Hip-Hop Made, De La Soul co-founder and turntablist Maseo shares with us his excitement to finally be streaming on music services after quite a long wait, as well as some of the most memorable parts of his storied career. One of the very first DJ/Emcee moments that host Mike Street at Audacy’s 106.5 The Beat in Richmond, VA remembers from back in the day is Maseo’s part in De La Soul’s “Bitties in the BK Lounge” off of 1991's De La Soul Is Dead. Mike admits, “you know, there were others but that was the one that stood out with the beat and everything, and by the way, that's available for streaming right now, in case you didn't realize,” as of March 2023 after quite a long time off of streaming services due to contractual and label shortcomings. “Yes it is, yes it is. Ain’t that crazy,” Maseo says with a smile. As a longtime fan, Mike was actually unaware that De La Soul’s music was unavailable because he actually owns their catalog. “Whether it's on my iPod or just in my crates or on a hard drive with the vinyl," he admits. "I didn't realize until in the mid-2000s that it wasn't streaming. It's well documented that that was due to, I guess you call it contractual conflicts, but people don't realize, they just didn't anticipate back then that the digital age would exist, so they didn't know how to split that bread.” “Well, our situation was a little more unique than everyone else's,” says Maseo. Their record label at the time, Tommy Boy, simply didn't have any language regarding streaming in their contracts, “but moving forward,” he adds, “when we did renegotiate with Tommy Boy, there was some language implemented that would be like that, that most labels started implementing after the late 80s anyway. They started to implement ‘the universe’ instead of 'the world,' you know. So, when they implemented ‘the universe,’ it made it open for mediums such as the Internet or maybe even going out into space.” “To Tommy Boy's demise,” he continues, “they folded. So whatever renegotiation there was with us, it was all in breach. Once they folded -- it wasn’t like we left, they left -- so all the contracts are null and void. It was pretty much like doing a new deal for old music.” Label founder Tom Silverman, he says, “was trying to revert back to a very old contract that wasn't even the contract that we renegotiated on. Him trying to revert back all the way to ‘89 was just asinine for the business that we had continued to do. The value of what we developed to be and what we learned of our own value, that just to signing that Tommy Boy deal would have been something that would have just been done for the sake of putting the music out, and we would have been in the same kind of rut.” “Even in the first time, I can't even say it was a bad deal,” Maseo adds. “It was a great deal based on my situation. It was also a great deal based on the era that we was in, you know, and what was also considered market value at that time because I can't sit here and say Tommy Boy was the only one giving out these contracts. It was the market… and at some point, we superseded the industry standard.” Looking back to before De La Soul's first album, 1989's 3 Feet High and Rising, and the influence Hip-Hop culture had on Maseo growing up, he says at the time, it wasn't about doing music for a living, it was simply doing music for the love of it. “It didn't seem like music really presented any economic opportunity,“ he explains, “but there was this thing happening here… We didn't have a name for it yet. ‘Hip-Hop,’ you know, and it was happening behind DJing, B-boy and break dancing, writing graffiti, lacing up your sneakers a certain way, even down to watching karate flicks. All of that played a big part of this developing culture... All these different factors that played a significant part of the culture that was very exciting, the energy that was brewing, especially for my era in particular. There was an era before us that we was watching with our uncles, you know, when this whole thing gave birth in ’73. There was a developing thing, especially if you spent time living in the boroughs, you know, and I spent a significant time living in Brooklyn before I moved to Long Island.” “Sound system culture, seeing how this whole thing developed behind being a little kid just riding the big wheel and seeing this thing growing, I gravitated more to turntables or records than I did toys,” he says. Speaking on the importance of the DJ in Hip-Hop, and of course, DJ Kool Herc who is credited as being the first to put words over a beat in the Bronx in ‘73, Maseo explains how “the DJ was the first MC, and the DJ comes from Jamaica -- and [in] Jamaican culture, the DJ is actually the MC. Trying to transcend it to that one guy that would come up or one girl that would come up and have a book full of poetry or a mind full of poetry, that that person, that poet then turned into what we call the MC… It became someone who had stories to tell, had a bravado to talk nonsense to the other MC.” As for the DJs he remembers, “There was Ron C, there was Butchy, rest in peace, there was Loki, these are the guys who were like, set up sound systems. Before moving to Long Island, what gave me the inspiration to wanna go to the studio and start making records was the song “It's Yours” by T La Rock and Jazzy Jay. That was the record that set it off for me to say I want to make records. Prior to that, it was all about just kind of preparing for your neighborhood party or a block party or something like that or getting up around your friends and just saying who could really be clever with the freestyle and who could really be clever with writing, tagging their name.” Finally, giving us a Hip-Hop story that he’s never told before, “a lot of them are awfully provocative,” he admits, Maseo revealed one that Mike Street had always wondered about regarding a skit on one of the records about him getting jumped overseas. “Yeah, ‘The Art of Getting Jumped,’ it's a really true story. I got jumped by a Turkish gang out in Germany somewhere, I wanna say it was, either Frankfurt or Hamburg. We had an off day at some club that normally everybody would go to on their off day. This happened to be our first time going to the spot; this is where Cypress Hill would go… where Ice-T would hang out when he's on tour. A lot of us who toured internationally would kind of go to the spot. This is like the first time we were going and we happened to be there around the time where there was a lot of racial tension, you know, between obviously blacks and whites, but then also the blacks and the Turkish.” Maseo continues, “I happened to run into an issue where they thought I was from deep Africa. They thought I was from Cameroon or somewhere. I just was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I got jumped, I got snatched into the club, they duffing me out… My eye is all swole up and everything, and sure enough, once we got outside of the main club into the corridor area where people are coming in and out… the security there, the owner, and all of them was like, ‘yo, yo...' and all of a sudden this s*** stopped, but I still wanted to fight… because I got my ass tore up and I really wanted to fight the person who actually set it off on me… I needed some get back, but I didn't quite get it because soon as I got outside, he pulled a gun in my face and he pulled the trigger -- and the gun didn't go off.” “So I just ran,” he says. I ran like hell yeah. God spared me. I got spared that day. The victory was in running!” Words by Joe Cingrana Interview by Mike Street