David Jolicoeur, a founding member of De La Soul, has died at the age of 54, with the cause of death still unknown, All Hip Hop reports. The musician has commonly performed under the stage name Trugoy the Dove, and later in his career as Dave. On De La Soul's debut - '3 Feet High and Rising', the band's most commercially successful record, and widely considered a masterpiece - they differentiated themselves from their contemporaries with their eccentric wordplay and eclectic jazz and funk samples.

"There were a lot of samples and things that needed to be taken care of. It was long, but it wasn’t grueling. What’s great is that a lot of these owners, writers, and publishers were De La Soul fans, and they had publicly understood what was going on" - De La Soul's Posdnous says in the Billboard interview about his band's music finally coming to streaming platforms. It was frustrating to be absent from the digital media: "It almost felt like we were being erased from history, because our music wasn’t up".

De La Soul were the latest guests at the animated show 'Teen Titans Go!' where they had their music eaten by an enormous monster, Rolling Stone reports. It's a direct reference to the band's troubles with their publisher. De La Soul are one of the foundational voices of modern rap, but today most of their catalogue remains digitally unavailable, with everything before 2004 missing from streaming services. The reasons are said to involve issues with sample clearance, bureaucratic feet-dragging across Warner and Tommy Boy Records, and muddled contract disputes.

Video for DJ Shadow ft De La Soul’s 'Rocket Fuel' won the Video of the Year award at the UK Music Video Awards 2020, and three more awards, Music News reports. The Sam Pilling-directed video for 'Rocket Fuel' is a comic recreation of the Apollo 11 mission as a staged event that goes catastrophically awry. Anton Tammi, director of four interconnected music videos to accompany The Weeknd’s latest album 'After Hours', won the highly prized Best Director award, and also Best Pop Video International for the video for 'Blinding Lights'.