De La Soul tends to get left out of the best-ever conversation — especially alongside their fellow Native Tongue members A Tribe Called Quest — despite having a comparable, if not superior, career.

De La Soul’s catalog is among the most coveted and consistent collections of albums in hip-hop history. And yet, the trio from Long Island is rarely put in the GOAT conversation. A huge part of this problem has been their absence from streaming platforms. Although De La has announced that their Tommy Boy Records-era albums — everything from their seminal debut 3 Feet High and Rising to AOI: Bionix — will now be available on music streaming services before the end of 2021, it’s been an arduous process to get to this point.

Other legacy groups like Public Enemy and Wu-Tang Clan — both of which embarked on a “Gods of Rap” tour with De La in 2019 — N.W.A. and, of course, fellow Native Tongue members A Tribe Called Quest, have had the luxury of being in the contemporary public consciousness, their music available on streaming services (and often appearing on streaming services’ respective popular curated old school hip-hop playlists) and appearing in everything from films and TV shows (with some of those films and TV shows based on those artists, as we’ve seen with N.W.A’s Oscar-nominated Straight Outta Compton and Wu-Tang’s An American Saga).

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