The one De La Soul song Trugoy the Dove never liked
De La Soul were masters of alternative hip-hop, whose music, while never finding truly mainstream success, nonetheless helped to influence so many artists who came later. But even they released some duds in their time, as they have been happy to acknowledge.
Not long before group member Trugoy the Dove died in 2023, the trio, completed by Posdnuos and Maseo, gave an interview to GQ, in which Trugoy spoke of a song from their back catalogue that he wasn’t very fond of. From the outside, it frankly sounds like a great track—but, as Trugoy explained, the group themselves struggled with it.
The song was ‘Breakadawn,’ from De La’s third album Buhloone Mindstate from 1993. It was the lead single from the record, and it’s a cool, jazzy number very much in the same spirit as A Tribe Called Quest. But Trugoy characterised it as a “song that I will never gravitate to.”
“I just don’t feel it,” he said. “I just get nothing from it.”
As Trugoy saw it, De La had been forced into making a song like ‘Breakadawn’ because record execs wanted them to. “I think my sentiment somewhere in the back of my mind was, ‘I am tired of these popcorn radio records that the label is looking for us to do when we have so much more that we can create and that we’re about,’” he explained. “And it’s like… It almost felt like a slave record.”
By making ‘Breakadawn,’ it felt to Trugoy that De La Soul was following orders. He resented it for that. “I could never appreciate it for what it is—and for what a lot [of people] appreciate it for,” he admitted. “At the time, I think I was questioning how I really wanted to be in the game and hip-hop and this career. You know?”
Trugoy felt that “the realities and the dark demons” of the music industry were present on that song, as the group had made it for reasons that weren’t truly authentic. “And I don’t wanna say those demons are some mystical Illuminati shit,” he insisted. “It was just like you had to do a lot for the sake of selling this product. Opposed to, ‘Okay, we’re an artist in an art form and expressing ourselves.’ And that’s why I’ve never liked that song.”
Even a quarter-century later, Trugoy still couldn’t appreciate the song in the same way that its fans do. People really like that song, and found a limited amount of chart success when it was released. But Trugoy couldn’t see past his negative experience of it.
“It is a reminder of that stage in life,” he said. “You know, I was going through personal things as well. I remember shootin’ the video was the worst day of my life. It felt like, ‘Gosh, I don’t want to do this. I don’t like this. I don’t feel good about myself. I don’t feel good about this music.’ I think I was just in a place and ‘Breakadawn’ was just the cherry on top.”