Jolicoeur, David (Trugoy the Dove) (1968-2023)

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    The Artists We Lost in 2023, in Their Words

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    The many creative people who died this year built their wisdom over lives generously long or much too short, through times of peace and periods of conflict. Their ideas, perspectives and humanity helped shape our own: in language spoken, written or left unsaid; in notes hit, lines delivered, boundaries pushed. Here is a tribute to just some of them, in their voices.“I never considered giving up on my dreams. You could say I had an invincible optimism.”— Tina Turner, musician, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)“Hang on to your fantasies, whatever they are and however dimly you may hear them, because that’s what you’re worth.”— David Del Tredici, composer, born 1937 (Read the obituary.)“Ever since I can remember, I have danced for the sheer joy of moving.”— Rena Gluck, dancer and choreographer, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)“The stage is not magic for me. It never was. I always felt the audience was waiting to see that first drop of blood.”— Lynn Seymour, dancer, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)Paul Reubens.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images“Most questions that are asked of me about Pee-wee Herman I don’t have a clue on. I’ve always been very careful not to dissect it too much for myself.”— Paul Reubens, actor, born 1952 (Read the obituary.)“If you know your voice really well, if you’ve become friends with your vocal apparatus, you know which roles you can sing and which you shouldn’t even touch.”— Grace Bumbry, opera singer, born 1937 (Read the obituary.)“Actors should approach an audition (and indeed, their careers) with the firm belief that they have something to offer that is unique. Treasure who you are and what you bring to the audition.”— Joanna Merlin, actress, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)Glenda Jackson.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“If I have my health and strength, I’m going to be the most appalling old lady. I’m going to boss everyone about, make people stand up for me when I come into a room, and generally capitalize on all the hypocrisy that society shows towards the old.”— Glenda Jackson, actress and politician, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)“I don’t see myself as a pioneer. I see myself as a working guy and that’s all, and that is enough.”— William Friedkin, filmmaker, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)“Some people, every day you get up and chop wood, and some people write songs.”— Robbie Robertson, musician, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)“I wasn’t brought up in Hollywood. I was brought up in a kibbutz.”— Topol, actor, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)Jimmy Buffett.Michael Putland/Getty Images“I don’t play at my audience. I play for my audience.”— Jimmy Buffett, musician, born 1946 (Read the obituary.)“I’m still not a natural in front of people. I’m shy. I’m a hermit. But I’m learning a little more.”— Andre Braugher, actor, born 1962 (Read the obituary.)“Some poets do not see reaching many in spatial terms, as in the filled auditorium. They see reaching many temporally, sequentially, many over time, into the future, but in some profound way these readers always come singly, one by one.”— Louise Glück, poet, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)“I paint because I believe it’s the best way that I can pass my time as a human being. I paint for myself. I paint for my wife. And I paint for anybody that’s willing to look at it.”— Brice Marden, artist, born 1938 (Read the obituary.)“Writing is about generosity, passing on to other people what you’ve had the misfortune of having to find out for yourself.”— Fay Weldon, author, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)Ryuichi Sakamoto.Ian Dickson/Redferns, via Getty Images“I went to see one of those pianos drowned in tsunami water near Fukushima, and recorded it. Of course, it was totally out of tune, but I thought it was beautiful. I thought, ‘Nature tuned it.’”— Ryuichi Sakamoto, composer, born 1952 (Read the obituary.)“I hate everything that is natural, and I love the artificial.”— Vera Molnar, artist, born 1924 (Read the obituary.)“A roof could be a roof, but it also could be a little garden.”— Rafael Viñoly, architect, born 1944 (Read the obituary.)“True architecture is life.”— Balkrishna Doshi, architect, born 1927 (Read the obituary.)Sinead O’Connor.Duane Braley/Star Tribune, via Getty Images“Words are dreadfully powerful, and words uttered are 10 times more powerful. The spoken word is the science on which the entire universe is built.”— Sinead O’Connor, musician, born 1966 (Read the obituary.)“Before I can put anything in the world, I have to wait at least a couple of years and edit them. Nothing is going out that hasn’t been edited a dozen times.”— Robert Irwin, artist, born 1928 (Read the obituary.)“An editor is a reader who edits.”— Robert Gottlieb, editor and author, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)Matthew Perry.Reisig & Taylor/NBCUniversal, via Getty Images“Sometimes I think I went through the addiction, alcoholism and fame all to be doing what I’m doing right now, which is helping people.”— Matthew Perry, actor, born 1969 (Read the obituary.)“It was the period of apartheid. You know, it was very hard, very difficult and very painful — and many a time I felt, ‘Shall I continue with this life or shall I go on?’ But I continued. I wanted to dance.”— Johaar Mosaval, dancer, born 1928 (Read the obituary.)“God would like us to be joyful / Even when our hearts lie panting on the floor.” (“Fiddler on the Roof”)— Sheldon Harnick, lyricist, born 1924 (Read the obituary.)“I remember back in the day, saying it’s so cool that the Beatles, Stevie Wonder, David Bowie are still played. That’s what we wanted hip-hop to be.”— David Jolicoeur, musician, born 1968 (Read the obituary.)“Civilization cannot last or advance without culture.”— Ahmad Jamal, musician, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)Harry Belafonte. Phil Burchman/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“Movements don’t die because struggle doesn’t die.”— Harry Belafonte, singer and actor, born 1927 (Read the obituary.)“Some people say to artists that they should change. Change what? It’s like saying, ‘Why don’t you walk differently or talk differently?’ I can’t change my voice. That’s the way I am.”— Fernando Botero, artist, born 1932 (Read the obituary.)“Performing is my way of being part of humanity — of sharing.”— André Watts, pianist, born 1946 (Read the obituary.)Renata Scotto.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“Singing isn’t my whole life.”— Renata Scotto, opera singer, born 1934 (Read the obituary.)“It’s through working on characters in plays that I’ve learned about myself, about how people operate.”— Frances Sternhagen, actress, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)David Crosby.Mick Gold/Redferns, via Getty Images“I don’t know if I’ve found my way, but I do know I feel happy.”— David Crosby, musician, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)“I’m very abstract. Once it becomes narrative, it’s all over. Let the audience decide what it’s about.”— Rudy Perez, choreographer, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)“I don’t have a driven desire actually to be in the act of writing. But my response to any form of excitement about reading is to want to write.”— A.S. Byatt, author, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)“I don’t think I ever wrote music to react to other music — I really had a very strong need to express myself.”— Kaija Saariaho, composer, born 1952 (Read the obituary.)Richard Roundtree.Celeste Sloman for The New York Times“Narrow-mindedness is alien to me.”— Richard Roundtree, actor, born 1942, though some sources say 1937 (Read the obituary.)“The reason I’ve been able to dance for so long is absolute willpower.”— Gus Solomons Jr., dancer and choreographer, born 1938 (Read the obituary.)“My practice is a resistance to the glamorous art object.”— Phyllida Barlow, artist, born 1944 (Read the obituary.)“My lifetime ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form.”— Milan Kundera, author, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)Mary Quant.Hulton Archive/Getty Images“The most extreme fashion should be very, very cheap. First, because only the young are daring enough to wear it; second, because the young look better in it; and third, because if it’s extreme enough, it shouldn’t last.”— Mary Quant, fashion designer, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)“I spontaneously enter the unknown.”— Vivan Sundaram, artist, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)“The goal is to wander, wander through the unknown in search of the unknown, all the while leaving your mark.”— Richard Hunt, artist, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)Angus Cloud.Pat Martin for The New York Times“Style is how you hold yourself.”— Angus Cloud, actor, born 1998 (Read the obituary.)“I have an aura.”— Barry Humphries, actor, born 1934 (Read the obituary.)“Intensity is not something I try to do. It’s just kind of the way that I am.”— Lance Reddick, actor, born 1962 (Read the obituary.)Alan Arkin.Jerry Mosey/Associated Press“There was a time when I had so little sense of myself that getting out of my skin and being anybody else was a sigh of relief. But I kind of like myself now, a lot of the times.”— Alan Arkin, actor, born 1934 (Read the obituary.)“I have always thought of myself as a kind of vessel through which the work might flow.”— Valda Setterfield, dancer, born 1934 (Read the obituary.)“You spend a lot of time thinking about how to write a book, you probably shouldn’t be talking about it. You probably should be doing it.”— Cormac McCarthy, author, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)Elliott Erwitt.Steven Siewert/Fairfax Media, via Getty Images“In general, I don’t think too much. I certainly don’t use those funny words museum people and art critics like.”— Elliott Erwitt, photographer, born 1928 (Read the obituary.)“Every morning we leave more in the bed: certainty, vigor, past loves. And hair, and skin: dead cells. This ancient detritus was nonetheless one move ahead of you, making its humorless own arrangements to rejoin the cosmos.” (“The Information”)— Martin Amis, author, born 1949 (Read the obituary.)Magda Saleh.Vincent Tullo for The New York Times“I did not do it on my own.”— Magda Saleh, ballerina, born 1944 (Read the obituary.)“The word ‘jazz,’ to me, only means, ‘I dare you.’”— Wayne Shorter, musician, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)“What is a jazz singer? Somebody who improvises? But I don’t: I prefer simplicity.”— Astrud Gilberto, singer, born 1940 (Read the obituary.)“It’s who you are when time’s up that matters.”— Anne Perry, author, born 1938 (Read the obituary.)“When I think about my daughter and the day that I move on — there is a piece of me that will remain with her.”— Ron Cephas Jones, actor, born 1957 (Read the obituary.)“Let us encourage one another with visions of a shared future. And let us bring all the grit and openheartedness and creative spirit we can muster to gather together and build that future.”— Norman Lear, television writer and producer, born 1922 (Read the obituary.)Tony Bennett.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images“Life teaches you how to live it if you live long enough.”— Tony Bennett, musician, born 1926 (Read the obituary.)Photographs at top via Getty Images. More

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      De La Soul’s Dave Jolicoeur, a.k.a. Trugoy the Dove, Dies at 54

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      The trio expanded the stylistic vocabulary of hip-hop in the 1980s and ’90s, but its early experiments with sampling led to legal troubles, and the group’s longtime exclusion from streaming.David Jolicoeur of De La Soul, the rap trio that expanded the stylistic vocabulary of hip-hop in the late 1980s and early ’90s with eclectic samples and offbeat humor, becoming MTV staples and cult heroes of the genre, died on Sunday. He was 54.His death was confirmed by the group’s publicist, Tony Ferguson, who did not specify a cause or say where Mr. Jolicoeur was when he died. In recent years, Mr. Jolicoeur has openly discussed a struggle with congestive heart failure, including in a music video for the group’s song “Royalty Capes.”De La Soul arrived with the album “3 Feet High and Rising” in 1989, a time when hip-hop was still relatively new to the mainstream. The genre’s public face was often confrontational, with groups like Public Enemy and N.W.A speaking out about the racism, police violence and neglect faced by Black communities in America.By contrast, De La Soul — three middle-class young men from Long Island — presented themselves with hippie floral designs and a music video set in a high school for their song “Me Myself and I.” The group wore baggy, brightly colored clothes, to the sneers and side-eyeing of their classmates in gold chains, black shades and matching B-boy outfits.Mr. Jolicoeur — whose original stage name in the group was Trugoy the Dove, though he was also known as Plug Two, Dove and later, just Dave — had the first lines of the track, riffing on a fairy tale. “Mirror mirror on the wall/Tell me mirror, what is wrong?” he rapped. “Can it be my De La clothes/Or is it just my De La song?”That album, with singles also including “Say No Go” and “Eye Know,” reached only as high as No. 24 on the Billboard 200 chart, but it was an instant classic that pointed to new directions in hip-hop. Later albums included “De La Soul Is Dead” (1991), “Buhloone Mindstate” (1993) and “Stakes Is High” (1996).With its producer, Prince Paul, the group developed an idiosyncratic and freewheeling style of sampling that brought new textures to hip-hop. “3 Feet High” contained pieces of more than 60 other recordings, including not only Funkadelic and Ohio Players grooves — de rigueur in 1980s rap — but also oddities like sounds from old TV shows and recordings of French language lessons.But legal problems related to its samples became the bane of the group. One sample, of the Turtles’ organ-driven psychedelic pop track “You Showed Me” (1968), had not been cleared properly, and the Turtles sued; the case was settled out of court.Ongoing legal problems with sample clearances prevented the group from releasing its music in digital form, which effectively blocked the trio from music’s most important marketplace in the 21st century. Recently, the group finally cleared those samples and was gearing up to release its music in digital form in March.The group’s lighthearted style — whimsical in-jokes, and lyrics that could be irreverent or earnest — delighted fans and captivated critics. It was one of the first in hip-hop to cross over to the collegiate crowd, and took on the reputation of “thinking-person’s hip-hoppers,” as the critic Greg Tate put it in a review of “Buhloone Mindstate” in The New York Times.“With irreverence and imagination,” Mr. Tate wrote, “De La Soul has dared to go where few hip-hop acts would follow, rejecting Five Percenter polemics and gangster rap for reflections on an array of topics: ecology, crack-addicted infants, Black suburbia, roller-skating, harassment by fans, male sexual anxiety and even gardening as a hip-hop metaphor.”Mr. Jolicoeur distilled the group’s worldview into a few lines in “Me Myself and I”: Write is wrong when hype is writtenOn the Soul, De La that isStyle is surely our own thingNot the false disguise of showbizDavid Jolicoeur was born on Sept. 21, 1968, in Brooklyn and moved to Long Island with his family as a child.In Amityville, N.Y., Mr. Jolicoeur joined with high school friends Kelvin Mercer, known as Posdnuos, and Vincent Mason, or Maseo, to form De La Soul. The group’s demo for “Plug Tunin’,” which later appeared remixed on “3 Feet High and Rising,” caught the attention of Prince Paul, the D.J. of the group Stetsasonic, who was then quickly establishing himself as one of the most gifted producers in rap. Their collaboration introduced the abstract, alternative hip-hop it would become known for.“Every last poem is recited at noon,” Mr. Jolicoeur rapped as Trugoy — yogurt backward, for a preferred food. “Focus is set, let your Polaroids click/As they capture the essence of a naughty noise called/Plug Tunin’.”The trio honed its sound and comedic stage presence at school concerts and parties at a space it called “the dugout,” on Dixon Avenue in Amityville. Proudly repping “Strong Island,” De La Soul noted that its proximity to New York City allowed it to keep an eye on the hip-hop stronghold, while the suburbs gave it space to grow and learn.“The island has given us the opportunity to see more things,” Mr. Jolicoeur told The New York Times in 2000. “It broadened our horizons.” He added, “We had the opportunity to soak in a lot more. And that’s why we are who we are today.”De La Soul went on to lead what was known as the Native Tongues, a loose collective of outsider hip-hop groups like A Tribe Called Quest and the Jungle Brothers, which influenced artists like Mos Def and Common.In addition to sampling, De La Soul was formative in the incorporation of skits — spoken dialogue between tracks — on its albums. In a live review from 1989, the Times critic Peter Watrous wrote that the group “seemed on the verge of inventing a new type of performance — part talk show, part rap concert — where their funny conversations and routines were as important as their raps, even if the funniest lines were accusations about Trugoy’s status as a virgin.”The group’s absence from digital services kept it from reaching new audiences for years.“We’re in the Library of Congress, but we’re not on iTunes,” Mr. Mercer told The Times in 2016. Two years earlier, in frustration, the group gave away virtually all of its work, releasing it online to fans at no charge. Its 2016 album, “And the Anonymous Nobody,” was financed by a Kickstarter campaign that raised over $600,000. The album was largely sample-free.Still, the group retained a strong following among fans and fellow artists. In 2005, De La Soul was featured on “Feel Good Inc.,” a hit by Gorillaz, the multimedia project created by the British singer-songwriter Damon Albarn and the visual artist Jamie Hewlett. Mr. Jolicoeur co-wrote the song with Mr. Albarn. The song went to No. 2 in Britain and No. 14 in the United States.In the group’s interview with The Times in 2016, Mr. Jolicoeur spoke about the urgency the trio felt about getting its older work back before the public.“This music has to be addressed and released,” he said. “It has to. When? We’ll see. But somewhere it’s going to happen.”Joe Coscarelli contributed reporting. More

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      Trugoy the Dove of De La Soul’s 10 Essential Songs

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      The Long Island rapper David Jolicoeur, known for his freewheeling rhyme style, has died at 54, just weeks before his trio’s catalog arrives on streaming services.David Jolicoeur, best known as the rapper Trugoy the Dove of the climate-shifting rap group De La Soul, weathered decades of industry shifts with acerbic wit, oblique rhyme styles and intense bouts of self-reflection that flew in the face of hip-hop’s boast-centric bottom line.Jolicoeur, also known as “Plug Two” in the Long Island trio he helped found in 1988 with Kelvin Mercer (Posdnuos) and Vincent Mason (P.A. Pasemaster Mase) died on Sunday at 54, just weeks before the group’s songs, long absent from streaming services, will finally arrive on digital platforms.De La Soul’s debut album, “3 Feet High and Rising,” from 1989, was nothing short of a sea change moment in the genre’s sound, fashion, attitude and aesthetic. As leading lights of the Native Tongues collective — a loose crew of fellow travelers that included Jungle Brothers, A Tribe Called Quest, Queen Latifah and Monie Love — De La’s baggy bohemian look would replace rap’s thick gold chains and sweatsuits with Afrocentric leather medallions and vintage patterns. It was Jolicoeur’s innovation to raid their dads’ closets for bell bottoms and straighten the legs, not to mention stylizing their asymmetrical haircuts.De La Soul broke the Top 40 that year with the pop splash “Me, Myself and I” — for years the trio would reliably add “We hate this song!” when performing it live — but went on to become hip-hop royalty thanks to the emotional depth plumbed in tunes like “Tread Water” and “I Am I Be.”Quirky production, introspective lyrics and its unorthodox look had De La Soul dubbed “alternative hip-hop,” a feel that would rapidly spawn similar-minded artists like the Pharcyde, Digable Planets, P.M. Dawn, Arrested Development and Dream Warriors. But over time, its legacy became less a recognizable “sound” and more a model for any rap act open to aesthetics and ideas that cut against the hardcore grain, like the Roots, the Fugees, Common, Black Star and eventually world-conquering artists like Kanye West and the Black Eyed Peas.Here are 10 essential verses from an artist whose “Delacratic” attitude toward self-expression helped rewire hip-hop’s DNA.De La Soul, “Plug Tunin’” (1988)On its debut single, De La Soul introduced an abstract “new style of speak” that landed in the middle of the hard-edge Def Jam era like a prismatic fracturing of hip-hop, beat poetry and alien transmissions. On the first song the trio did as a group, Jolicoeur coolly raps like a Slinky tumbling down stairs, “Dazed at the sight of a method/Dive beneath the depth of a never-ending verse/Gasping and swallowing every last letter/Vocalized liquid holds the quench of your thirst.” As he told the author Brian Coleman of their lyrics at that time, “Maybe it was our warped character, but we didn’t really want people to understand it at all. Sometimes we were trying to make it difficult, because it would make people always want to know more.”De La Soul, “Me, Myself and I” (1989)De La Soul’s biggest hit was also De La Soul’s biggest albatross: The Day-Glo visuals around its single and video promptly burdened the group with the label “hip-hop hippies.” In a sad irony, Jolicoeur’s verses on “Me, Myself and I” were specifically about not being judged by his unconventional fashion choices. Borrowing the rhyme flow from “Black Is Black” by the Jungle Brothers, another Native Tongues crew, Jolicoeur opens the trio’s first and only Top 40 pop hit with a radical mix of exhaustion and self-questioning: “Mirror mirror on the wall/Tell me mirror, what is wrong?/Can it be my De La clothes/Or is it just my De La song?” “If some think that we have a hippie style and a hippie sound, that’s just fine,” Jolicoeur told Melody Maker in 1989. “But we’d be offended if it was said that we wanted to be hippies. We don’t. We just want to be ourselves.”De La Soul, “Pass the Plugs” (1991)The second De La album — sardonically titled “De La Soul Is Dead” — pushed back on the daisies and fluorescents with a sound that was a little more disillusioned and dark but still breezy. Taking the second verse of “Pass the Plugs,” Jolicoeur bemoans the industry panopticon of radio programmers, promoters and a record label that wanted more hit singles.De La Soul, “Millie Pulled a Pistol on Santa” (1991)The most lyrically and thematically intense song of De La Soul’s career, “Millie Pulled a Pistol on Santa” tells the story of a Brooklyn girl abused by her father — by the song’s end, she takes her revenge with the titular weapon as he works as a department store Kris Kringle. The story is narrated mainly by Mercer, who was channeling real-life emotions after finding out a friend was a survivor. However, in a masterful storytelling technique, Jolicoeur takes two verses as the doubting acquaintance who doesn’t believe the girl’s accusations.Teenage Fanclub and De La Soul, “Fallin’” (1993)Treating an entire song like one of its famous skits, De La play washed-up, once-successful rappers on this collaboration with the Scottish jangle-rock band Teenage Fanclub for the “Judgment Night” soundtrack — a weirdly prescient rock-meets-rap experiment. “We wouldn’t play ourselves to do something that was wack, but the way the concept plays itself out, it’s supposed to be wack,” Jolicoeur told Vibe in 1993. “The track is supposed to sound wack.” Instead, the group’s look at the other side of fame produced some of the most poignant verses of its career. Raps Jolicoeur, “I knew I blew the whole fandango/When the drum programmer wore a Kangol.”De La Soul, “Ego Trippin’ (Part Two)” (1993)On this single from De La Soul’s jazz-flecked third album, “Buhloone Mindstate,” Jolicoeur draws a sarcastic line between his group and contemporary hip-hop machismo and bragadoccio. “I change my pitch up, smack my bitch up, I never did it,” he raps, flipping a classic line from New York’s Ultramagnetic MC’s. “The flavor’s bein’ bought, but brothers ain’t gettin’ it.”De La Soul, “Stakes Is High” (1996)“Stakes Is High” was not just the evocative title to De La Soul’s fourth album. As Mason told Okayplayer, “I mean the whole energy around developing that record, it was a crucial place of not knowing if we was going to continue or we going to be forced to go get regular jobs and become common folk.” For the lead single and title track — produced by the emerging beatmaker Jay Dee, later known as J Dilla — Jolicoeur unleashes a torrential downpour of criticism deriding the state of mainstream hip-hop: “Sick of swole-head rappers with their sickenin’ raps/Clappers of gats, makin’ the whole sick world collapse.”De La Soul, “Itzsoweezee (Hot)” (1996)The last track recorded for “Stakes Is High,” though it ultimately became the album’s second single, was a rare solo turn for Jolicoeur. As Mafioso imagery began taking over hardcore New York rap, Jolicoeur popped the bubble with lines like “Why you acting all spicy and shiesty?/The only Italians you knew was Icees.”Prince Paul featuring De La Soul, “More Than U Know” (1999)Another prime example of Jolicoeur and Mercer’s storytelling abilities is this song from the producer Prince Paul’s wildly ambitious concept opera “A Prince Among Thieves.” Playing the role of a crack addict, Jolicoeur pulls the extended metaphor trick, rhyming about the drug as if it were a love interest: “I can’t refuse her, my denial’s a wish/Fell into her arm when I gave her a kiss.”Gorillaz featuring De La Soul, “Feel Good Inc.” (2005)This alterna-pop gem from Damon Albarn’s virtual cartoon crew ultimately became the biggest success story of De La Soul’s career, garnering the group its first and only Grammy. Known for a usually mellower delivery, Jolicoeur instead unleashes a barrage of high-octane bars: “Laughing gas these hazmats, fast cats/Lining ’em up like ass cracks/Play these ponies at the track.” More