This is the high school, this is the high school I went to, Dave went to it, Prince Paul went to it, Pos went to it, Mase went to it.

So, you know, this is the high school that I was going, banging on the table, making beats, you know, doing all that good stuff.

Yo, this is like, you know, the school where a lot of stuff happens, a lot of great talents came out of it, and this is why y'all hear the music that.

This is our influence of the music and how it sounds.

This is where it all starts, y'all.

So, fellas, tell us a little bit about yourselves.

President, president preaching about the on tech, known for the new step, stop and take a bow.

Amityville, resident, resident supported by the speaker view, want to feel it in your shoe, let me show you how.

I was in 12th, Dave was in 11th, Pos was in 10th, and Mase was in 9th.

I'm a nerd, and I get that, and I accept that, but I was like, these guys are really nerdy, probably with the exception of Mase.

Mase was always like the I'll beat you up type kind of guy, real nice, but you don't mess with him.

But those guys, kind of seeing them, I was like, man, they're like ultra nerdy like me, and you rhyme?

I told them what I can do, and what I thought of them, and how we could work together.

It was perfect.

It's like an act of God, almost.

Like, we were meant to be in the same place at the same time, with the same thoughts.

How do these guys come together in a place like Amityville, Long Island, to make this record?

You know what I'm saying?

With my weird personality and their quirkiness, how do we come together?

Like it's just, it's indescribable to me.

It freaks me out sometimes, but I really put some thought into it.

If you have a creative mind, you can basically use anything.

For example, I could take a record such as a basic Disneyland Mickey Mouse record, for example.

Now, people may not believe it, but if you look at these old records, you can find things like drum beats on them.

It's hard to believe, though.

Paul was just a really dope DJ from the neighborhood, and well-respected, and actually really appreciated and loved.

He was just a really kind dude, who just loved hip-hop and had great skills.

So once he, as a Long Island guy out of Amityville, gets connected with these Brooklyn guys called Sets of Sonic, it just put that much more fire amongst everyone in the neighborhood.

Like, wow, Paul made it.

Outside of just knowing Paul and seeing him do parties, it was really Mase who linked with him, because Mase as well was just DJing.

Yeah, Paul and I, we had a natural progression behind DJing around the neighborhood.

And I always told him I had some stuff I'd like for him to hear.

Everybody used to bombard him with that.

One day he came up to the school, got me, we went to my house, got these tapes, and I played him the stuff.

And he was like, yo, I need to have a meeting with y'all.

He said, I can't make any promises, but we'll take this to the studio, and we'll clean all of this up.

A lot of stuff which you would hear is probably the main, because we have what we call the main loop, this loop, that loop, that loop, would probably be the main loop.

So whatever we would hear in the demos was always the main thing.

And my thing was like, yo, I can really make this sexy.

And they respected that, and you could hear the difference.

I first heard of De La Soul when I got a call from Daddy-O, from Stetsasonic.

And he told me that Prince Paul, who was working with this group called De La Soul, he said, you know, it's kind of ill, it's kind of different sounding, da-da-da.

I'm like, well, bring it in, I want to hear it.

Sure enough, he brought me Plug Tunin' and Freedom of Speak.

First of all, I was like, this sounds like it was mixed with sand and dirt, it was so dusted sounding, and it was so different.

When I heard De La Soul the first time, I remember saying, you know, this is going to do nothing, or it's going to be really big.

Because when you listen to it, it was so bizarre compared to anything else.

And whether it did something or didn't do something, we loved it, and we thought it was important that it came out.

I thought they were pretty fantastic.

And I had a meeting with them.

They came in.

They said, well, my name's Pos De Noose, which is sop sound backwards.

Pos De Noose.

Pos is backwards for sop, and De Noose is backwards for sound, and sop for sound.

My name is True Goy, which is yogurt spelled backwards.

True Goy the Dove.

True Goy is yogurt backwards.

And then Maceo, which was the most normal of the bunch of them.

And Mace actually means making a soul effort.

And they had, you know, these unusual haircuts, and their style was completely antithetical to the prevailing aesthetic of hip-hop at the time, which was much more driven by black leather and gold chains and such.

They were definitely, like, these introverted, nerdy guys that were very cool.

It was clear pretty early on that this was a group that was album-bound.

I had hired a young, gone A&R guy whose name is Dante Ross.

I think the first project I may have assigned to him was working with De La Soul.

One I was broke.

Two, I was hungry.

Three, I was two steps out of, like, the streets, so I was a pretty wild kid back then.

My daily routine was I usually came in hungover, bearing a firearm, and probably sold some weed to a couple of people during the day out of my office, which was a converted mailroom.

I didn't have a stereo.

I had a boombox.

That's what I listened to everything on.

Between selling weed and trying to follow up on all the girls I tried to kick it to the night before when I was drunk, I listened to some demos, and producers came and saw me and et cetera, et cetera.

Then the other thing was that De La, Monica Lynch played it for me when she was interviewing me for the job and said, we're thinking about signing this.

And I said, that's great. You should sign that.

And the rest is history.

She signed it.

And I got the job.

And she said, here's your first property.

I just like things that aren't normal.

I like shit to the left of everything.

I don't like normal rap.

I like something that stands out, that's just different, that's itself doesn't have to try and have, like, a fake image, something that comes from the heart.

Hello, Prince Paul's the name. You know, the DJ for Stetsasonic and the producer of this particular group, and now off of that and on to the soul, De La, that is.

If you take three glasses of water and put food coloring in them, you have many different colors, but it's still the same old water.

Make the connection.

And now, back to our video.

You know, Three Feet High and Rising kind of was a stage for us being kids, having a good time out of high school, being jerks, being silly.

Even with Paul being involved, like, he could lend to the zaniness and he can also help tap into your strengths and allow you not to be afraid, especially in those early albums, to use them.

I mean, like, even Dave, Dave has always been so creative.

And sometimes he would be like, but I don't know about this, but Paul be like, no, no, do it.

Look, I push for creativity and to everybody to be involved.

And I think a lot of it had to do with me being with Stetsasonic.

I remember feeling somewhat limited, like, one, because I was the youngest in the group.

So it was like, hey, I want to, hey, I want to.

So it's almost like when you get older and you say, when I have my family, we're going to go to eat ice cream for dinner.

And we're going to do it, I'm going to break all these rules.

And that's where that was the release for DeLa for me, was all the things I couldn't do in Stetsasonic, I'm going to allow these guys to do.

And in the process of me doing this, I'm going to teach them what I know.