CAUSE OF DEATH: Rapper, Dave Jolicoeur - Trugoy the Dove, confirmed dead

DAVID “TRUGOY THE Dove” Jolicoeur, one-third of the iconic rap triumvirate De La Soul, has died, Rolling Stone has confirmed. The news was first reported by AllHipHop. He was 54. The cause of death has not been disclosed. 

Trugoy, who had recently been going by the name Dave, and was also known as Plug Two, had been open about his bout with congestive heart failure in recent years. In De La Soul’s 208 “Royalty Capes” video, Trugoy candidly spoke about how his ailing health kept him from performing.

A cause of death has not been disclosed at this time. Trugoy, born David Jolicoeur, was noticeably absent from the Grammy Awards’ hip-hop tribute performance last week that featured De La Soul groupmate Posdnuos.

Jolicoeur’s death comes less than a month before De La Soul’s music would premiere on Spotify, Apple Music, and other streaming services. The group battled with their former record label, Tommy Boy Records, for years over legal and publishing issues that kept their music off streaming services. “I’m ready just to get back to the stage,” he said. “I miss that. I love traveling. I love being around my guys and I want that back.” De La Soul was part of the Grammys’ Hip-Hop tribute performance last week, but Trugoy wasn’t onstage with his group mates.

Renown as one of the most innovative acts in rap history, De La Soul made their mark particularly in the early Nineties when they represented a fun balance to the then-burgeoning gangsta rap scene. Their early work is characterized by layers of disparate samples melded together, serving as a jazzy, energetic canvas for Trugoy, Posdnuos, and Maseo to unleash their quirky rhymes over canonical songs such as “Breakadawn,” “Stakes Is High,” and “Me, Myself, and I.” Of the latter track, Trugoy told Rolling Stone in 2009 that, “Originally, it was us trying to make sure we’re saying we’re not hippies. We were just being ourselves. People are now taking the song to be, ‘OK, it’s cool to be me and I don’t have to be hard’ — it wasn’t really about saying that, even though the video came off like that.”

Reservoir Records acquired Tommy Boy Record’s master recordings in 2021 and made a deal with De La Soul to add their first six albums to streaming services on March 3. 

Jolicoeur formed De La Soul with Kelvin “Posdnuos” Mercer and Vincent Mason, aka DJ Maseo, while still in high school in Long Island, N.Y., in the mid-1980s. The trio was known as hip-hop radicals and prided themselves on going against the grain of a hip-hop scene that was becoming more masculine and materialistic in the mainstream. 

The trio was part of the Native Tongues hip-hop collective that included acts like A Tribe Called Quest, Jungle Brothers, Queen Latifah, Black Sheep, and others that embraced not only conscientious themes of individuality and Afrocentrism but an imaginative method of sample-based music production. Jolicoeur was a distinctive but subtly dynamic MC. His idiosyncratic flow had a lumbering swing, and he was able to deftly maneuver his vocals to match the mood of his lyrics. He could be affable, as he was on 1991’s “A Roller Skating Jam Named ‘Saturdays’”; could be biting and cynical, like on 1996’s “Stakes is High”; or wryly bemused, as on “Me, Myself and I.”