De La Soul’s “Plug Tunin’” Started Out as a Live Routine and a Pause-Tape Beat
Before “Plug Tunin’” wound up on the demo that landed De La Soul a deal with Tommy Boy Records and eventually served as their breakout single in 1988, the song began as a live act performed over a famous breakbeat. “We would do it off of The Honey Drippers’ ‘Impeach The President,’” Maseo explained in a 2014 interview with Vibe magazine. “Somehow we started to make a conceptual song, but it really didn’t become much of anything until Pos found a sample.”
While Posdnuos is the one who found the sample that ended up serving as a backbone for the song’s instrumental, he credits two pioneering rap groups for inspiring the original dynamics of the track. “In the beginning ‘Plug Tunin’’ was really a routine,” he told Vibe. “Being young, we were still taking a lot of lessons from groups like Cold Crush Brothers and Crash Crew.”
Cold Crush Brothers and Crash Crew informed the initial live version, but it was a Pos’ copy of The Invitations’ “Written On The Wall” that sparked the version of “Plug Tunin’” people know and love today — as well as the song’s name. “Funny enough, on the b-side of ‘Written On The Wall’, it said Plug Side,” Pos told Vibe. “So that’s the only reason we titled it “Plug Tunin.’”
“We thought the intro was hilarious, so we just threw it on at the beginning of the song. Like everything else we did, there wasn’t much rhyme or reason to it.” — Prince Paul
After hearing some unconventional potential in “Written On The Wall” — which didn’t sound like many famous break records at the time — Pos used a pioneering sampling technique to compose the initial draft of De La’s timeless 12". “I had a little pause cassette thing and I paused it like, ‘Yo, this could be dope,’” Pos told Vibe. “I played it for Dave and he was like, ‘Yo that can work!’”
In addition to Pos providing the record for “Plug Tunin’”, the records from his father’s collection wound up playing a central role in the making of the rest of 3 Feet High and Rising. De La and Prince Paul admired his rare vinyl, which helped inform the aesthetic of the album. “We combined our collections,” Prince Paul told me in a 2008 interview I wrote for The Smoking Section. “We more or less gathered what our families listened to and had collected over the years. Pos had a deep collection. His dad had some really obscure records, which helped us out a lot.”
Pos’s early pause-tape creation would eventually make its way over to Prince Paul, but not before Maseo beefed up the beat with an added drum track. After fleshing out to song with some percussion, Maseo brought the tape to Paul, who was still an active member of Stetsasonic at the time. Paul immediately shared Dave’s enthusiasm for the promise of the rough-cut version of “Plug Tunin’”. “This was probably the end of ’86, ‘cause we started the new year working on the demos,” Paul told HipHop.com in a 2009 interview. “And I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ It was very stripped down. It still had the main loop, though it wasn’t really arranged that well. But just to hear the potential!”
“I was very concerned about what he was gonna do to the music that I was trying my best to produce, which was my first stuff. But right from there he made me feel at ease.”
— Posdnuos
Knowing that working with De La was a can’t-miss opportunity the second he heard the skeletal version of the track, Paul instructed Maseo to bring the rest of the group back with him for a studio session the next day. In the meantime, he took the pause-tape version of the song and went to work — layering different samples and enhancing the overall sound. “I took it, overdubbed it, added other samples, and rearranged it,” he told Complex in a 2011 interview. “I played it for them and they were like, ‘Oh, that’s crazy.’”
The other elements Paul added to the demo version of “Plug Tunin’” include a sample further popularized by Cypress Hill two years later with “How I Could Just Kill A Man”, a James Brown snippet, some Billy Joel piano keys, and most surprising of all — a flip of a Liberace cassette tape.
According to Paul, he and De La Soul were mixing the single at Island Media when they saw the tape lying around the studio. Being the industrious sample gurus that they are, they decided to see if they could make it work within the confines of the beat. “We thought the intro was hilarious, so we just threw it on at the beginning of the song,” Paul said in Brian Coleman’s book Check The Technique. “Like everything else we did, there wasn’t much rhyme or reason to it.”
“It was arty shit. It was one of those things where you thought, ‘This is either going to be a landmark or it won’t even make a dent in the consciousness.’” — Monica Lynch
Though the group was happy with Paul’s alterations when all was said and done, Pos admitted that he was hesitant about letting someone fiddle with his rough draft beat at first. However, he quickly changed his mind when he heard what Paul was capable of and how well he meshed with De La’s style. “I was very concerned about what he was gonna do to the music that I was trying my best to produce, which was my first stuff,” he told HipHop.com. “But right from there he made me feel at ease. He was a person who was thinking on the same level as us.”
After sensing that he had earned the trust of Dave, Maseo, and Pos with his tasteful enhancement of “Plug Tunin’”, Prince Paul decided to build on the growing creative momentum he and De La had. “I said, ‘Let’s get together, get some money, get into a real studio, and record a professional demo,’” he told Complex. “So the actual record you hear on the album, is the demo we made of ‘Plug Tunin’.’”
Once the “Plug Tunin’” demo was complete — with “Freedom of Speak” serving as the B-side — reactions outside of the Long Island collective were mixed. Prince Paul tried to get Daddy-O from Stetsasonic on board to produce some additional songs for De La, but he declined, saying they sounded too much like another well-known rap group at the time. “I thought they sounded like the Ultramagnetics,” Daddy-O told The Source in a 1999 oral history of Prince Paul’s career. “But ‘Plug Tunin’’ was dope. That was my shit.”
“I had a little pause cassette thing and I paused it like, ‘Yo, this could be dope.’ I played it for Dave and he was like, ‘Yo that can work!’” — Posdnuos
Though he was not as taken with the rest of the demo, Daddy-O started to come around on De La once he agreed to help Prince Paul shop their demo and it generated serious interest. “He was getting more buzz on my tape than his own artists,” Paul told The Source.
Daddy-O certainly deserves credit for helping the demo make noise at various prominent labels of the day, but according to Prince Paul, it was a forgotten figure in the De La Soul story who made sure their tape found its way to the right people at Tommy Boy Records — De La’s eventually landing spot and the place where they released six albums in a twelve year span. “While I was in the studio mixing it (‘Plug Tunin’’) down, a gentleman by the name of Rod Houston, who worked at Tommy Boy, was in the studio, and he was like, ‘Yo, you should bring this to Tommy Boy,’” Paul told HipHop.com. “I was like, ‘I wasn’t even thinking about Tommy Boy for this!’ And he said, ‘No, you should let Monica [Lynch] hear this’. So he brought it to Tommy Boy, and he never got credit.”
Once the demo made its way into the hands of former Tommy Boy Records president Monica Lynch, she knew “Plug Tunin’” would be a boom or bust type of release. In her eyes, the record would either change the game or fade into total obscurity. “It was arty shit,” she told The Source. “It was one of those things where you thought, ‘This is either going to be a landmark or it won’t even make a dent in the consciousness”
“Here’s the basic formula we used to make that album: a deep record collection and a lot of laughing. Nothing more than that.” — Prince Paul
Despite her risk assessment of the group’s work, Lynch understood from experience that acts like De La Soul didn’t come along every day. Not wanting to miss a golden opportunity, she started compiling the necessary paperwork to bring them on board. “Tommy Boy signed them quicker than I could say fuck,” Daddy-O told The Source. “Monica moved so quickly she had the contracts ready before I even knew they were being drawn.”
According to Paul, he was hesitant to sign with Tommy Boy again because of issues Stetsasonic was having with the label. Further complicating the situation, both Geffen and Profile had made significant offers to the group that were tantalizing because of the attached dollar signs. But in the end, De La had a gut feeling about Tommy Boy and decided to go with them.
Once they signed their name on the dotted line and Tommy Boy pressed “Plug Tunin’” up on 12" vinyl, it didn’t take long for the song to make some serious noise. “‘Plug Tunin’’ was doing really good,” Paul told The Source. “It got play on the radio. It was bumpin’, at the Latin Quarters.”
“Somehow we started to make a conceptual song, but it really didn’t become much of anything until Pos found a sample.” — Maseo
And it wasn’t just underground hip-hop shows that were playing De La’s first single, it also started bubbling up on stations with listeners who were less familiar with rap music. For such an unconventional and unprecedented record to receive love from the mainstream let Paul know that “Plug Tunin’” could symbolize a major career shift for him and the rest of the group. “It’s such an odd record, nothing predated that, and it sounds like throwing whatever in the wind,” he told Complex. “You didn’t know where it was going to land. For touchy radio world back then to play that record is when I knew I won.”
Using nothing more than a Casio RZ-1 drum machine and sampler, some records, a pause-tape, and their imaginations, De La Soul and Prince Paul had opened up a new lane for rappers looking to go against the grain. “The best word to describe that song is a word that was in the hip-hop parlance of the day — ‘dusted,’” Lynch told The Source. “It was abstract, so different from the visceral literal kind of hip-hop that was dominant back then.”
Setting up shop in a professional studio to cut the rest of the records on 3 Feet High and Rising after the success of “Plug Tunin’” only further opened the floodgates of creativity for De La Soul, allowing them to test the limits of their “dusted” sounds. “At home we did these dusty old demo tapes using one little Casio sampler that could only fit in two samples at a time,” Pos told The Washington Post in a 1989 interview. “Once we got in the studio, we found that we could work the equipment in, and it just brought forth more ideas.”
“It’s such an odd record, nothing predated that, and it sounds like throwing whatever in the wind. You didn’t know where it was going to land.” — Prince Paul
Their ideas caught on quickly, with 3 Feet High and Rising moving 500,000 units in its first year of release and later going platinum in 2000 while simultaneously earning near-universal acclaim from critics. Unfortunately, the sample heavy production that helped make the album a hit in the first place led to a costly and precedent-setting sample lawsuit from The Turtles a short time later.
These days, with Warner Music Group in control of their distribution, and a myriad of legal complexities due to the sample-heavy production on their first few records, De La Soul’s entire six album-Tommy Boy catalog is currently out of print and unavailable on all digital platforms. Time will tell if their work will ever make it out of record label purgatory, but some recent official Tommy Boy YouTube uploads from 3 Feet High and Rising and De La Soul Is Dead could be a sign of a positive outcome.
In the meantime, Prince Paul encourages people to remember that creativity and a sense of humor were two key ingredients behind their master work. Instead of attaching invented meanings to their art, he wants people to remember that 3 Feet High and Rising is supposed to be fun. “Here’s the basic formula we used to make that album: a deep record collection and a lot of laughing. Nothing more than that,” he told Pitchfork in a 2012 interview. “People try to look into the psyche of it, like, ‘You guys invented this.’ We just followed our own inner voice and made the album.”
Connect with De La Soul on Facebook, Instagram, their website, and on Twitter @WeAreDeLaSoul.
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