Sunday Music: "Bitties In The BK Lounge" By De La Soul

This entry is about a song that’s as much a song as it is a miniature musical movie script. But before we get into the genius of track, it’s worth understanding it at the meta-level of the entire project it appears on. (Yes, I’m still/forever stuck on De La Soul, they were my top streamed artist in 2024, yet again, for probably obvious reasons).

On De La Soul’s debut album, 3 Feet High and Rising (1989), they were marketed as the hippies of rap, decked out in bright colors and daisy imagery, juxtaposing the “trio” in what can only be described as a “very made for mainstream safety way, just look how opposite of hardcore/gangster rap contemporaries they are based on this album cover alone?”

The visual positioning of 3 Feet High and Rising makes a ton of sense, especially when you think about its release 6ish months post Straight Outta Compton (and the “F*** tha Police” controversy). If NWA was working by making people mad at rap, the Tommy Boy team, De La’s record label, was trying to zig against the gangsta zag for promotional purposes.*

The move worked, at least to a degree as far as album sales were concerned, but on the ensuing tour, De La found themselves getting… tested. A lot. And violently.

If people think you’re soft, and you’re a crew of young rappers in the late ‘80s who aren’t actually soft, you fight back. You fight hard. You prove yourself. You throw some joints. The tour stories from this period are WILD.

So when it came time to make the follow up record, it was as much about setting the record straight as it was proving who they really were to the world.

As such, it’s an album of intentional contradictions. The cover is a tipped over (and de-potted) trio of daisies, with the very particular album title, De La Soul is dead.

From the intro, it’s clear that they are still just as playful and fun as they were on the first record. And, in case you don’t know, De La is regularly credited as the group who invented the rap album skit. These interludes might sound derivative now, but they were as original as they were authentic in 1989 and 1991.

The skits connect directly connect across both albums, but with a new level of self-awareness. On 3 Feet High and Rising they were positioning their senses of creativity and humor. On De La Soul is Dead, we hear the group responding to the repositioning of their positioning by the label and the marketplace (and I know I’m getting super meta about all of this, but the background is so worth studying - there are so many marketing and branding lessons in these 2 records it’s ridiculous).

After the backlash the trio had received from their image on the first album, lesser groups might have tried to posture themselves differently. There’s an alternate reality where De La Soul turns a new leaf and goes full Dre La Gangsta mode. Had they spun around and said, “Oh that wasn’t the real us, the label made us do it - THIS is the real us,” we wouldn’t be talking about them now.

But De La Soul didn’t do that. If anything, they leaned even deeper into who they were and why. De La Soul is Dead became an album’s worth of reflections on not just their naivety surrounding the first record (hey, they were teenagers), but their commercial awareness going forward.**

Now we’re ready to break into the song. Because the ultimate example of expressing the good, bad, and ugly of who they are, and what it was like to be them in the world post-3 Feet High and Rising world, comes via their classic mid-album cut, “Bitties in the BK Lounge.”

“Bitties” is a song in 3 parts (no, not just two!). But before we break those bitties into smaller bits, it’s critical we talk about where they take place: in, as the title suggests, a Burger King restaurant.

On one hand, you have BK as a pure fast food commercialism metaphor. Calling something a “king” when the quality is mass-produced and sub-par? Hello music industry, this metaphor is about you and your business.

On the other hand, you have the two sides of anyone who might find themself in a “BK lounge.” There are only two reasons to be there. You’re either at work, or you’re hungry and buying food.

Where there are people, there are always more questions.

Does either side of the counter really have more status? Are you willing to take minimum wage to work for the king? Or, are you so cool or popular that you won’t stoop to buying and eating such commoner fare?

Again, art and how it’s produced, bought, and sold are on display through the metaphor of a Burger King and the people inside of it. Kind of like a music industry artist who. after creating a work and sees how it’s sold, learns to understand the business and what it means to be on both sides of the proverbial counter.

That’s the scene setting, let’s get into the parts.

Part 1 features Dave/Trugoy (RIP) telling a story about going in to buy a meal, as a regularly customer. The girl at the counter can barely be troubled to acknowledge him.

After a back and forth, and because he’s on the customer side of the counter, Dave attempts to play his fame card to finally get her attention and some service already. After all, De La had bona fide hits on their first record,

Ultimately, our hero leaves to go get a slice of pizza instead. He doesn’t bother with the burger, not because the employee cares about losing the sale, but because she got her autograph and he get recognized, and that’s kind of all each of them wanted in a much broader perspective. It’s a perfect ending to an otherwise awkward exchange.

A little respect and dignity, without a commercially forced transaction, isn’t too much to ask for, is it?

Which brings us to Part 2.

What’s it like on the other side of the counter? When you’re merely an employee of the king? Posdnous takes over, and we drop in on what he’s overhearing from the conversation at the front of the line across in front of his lounge,

The disrespect. The confrontational reality of being in a position where your compensation is dependent on repressing your rage. The role you’re supposed to be playing, even when you’re knighted as a “manager,” has a false halo of glory above it, and in this moment, you are feeling the falseness of it.

What do yo do when you can’t get what you want, the respect or the dignity, and somebody is trying to take even more of it from you? You have a nasty, base-level, back and forth. It ain’t pretty, what gets said between Pos and this bittie,

It only gets worse from there. The verbal battle continues until it concludes, with no sale for the manager, and the bittie and her otherwise paying customer friends leaving to go get some Chinese food, all while laughing at our hero on their way out the door. Nobody wins in the court of this king.

It’s all setting us up to step back for Part 3. Where, once you’ve lived some life in the business, now you’re ready to make some art out of it.

Maseo, the DJ of the group, takes over. It’s less of a verse, and more of a remix of what’s just happened. Appropriately, it’s set to a house party of a beat,

Ask the DJ what goes on, and… he really doesn’t know. That’s not the DJs job, to poetically explain it to us. The DJ’s job is the play what the room wants to keep the party moving.

So, Mase plays with the metaphor of flippin’.

He pulls from the two stories we just heard and lands on the ultimate lesson: go leave this faux-reality commercial stress behind and start your own business, far away from all this crap, where you can care about quality. You don’t want to eat there if they don’t respect what they’re making, and you don’t want a job there, even if they make you manager, because then if somebody disrespects you there’s nothing you can really do about it.

And before you think the flip between Dave and Pos’ verses is the only flip, as if Mase is going to get the final word in, the track ends with a the radio station cutting it (a common skit on the rest of the record too).

Even the DJ, who just keeps the party moving, has another DJ to answer to. In this case, it’s Baby Chris, ready to gossip,

Fame isn’t what you think it is when you don’t have it.

All the marketing and positioning and work to sell something at a commercial scale, the bigger the project, the greater the abstraction.

They make it look like it’s all winning, but it’s not.

So many failures. So many zeroes. So many donuts.

Why not find a way to sell them stories? Hmmm. Maybe put it on a record, and…

Then what? If it sells, you’ll have to decide how to scale yourself. Not to mention, you’ll have to decide if you’ll sell-out (which will require you figure out how to even define selling out in the first place).

Art is about reflecting, on the lived experiences of life, from all different perspectives. We should notice when someone captures it as beautifully as De La Soul did. We should celebrate it—these are the types of story that may not save the world, but they affirm it’s a world worth saving.

Enough talk.

Maybe this gives you a little more color on why this is one of my favorite songs of all time via one of my favorite albums of all time from one of my favorite artists of all time.

Here’s “Bitties in the BK Lounge” by De La Soul, in all of its glory:

*there’s a ton of mythology around the first album’s art if your curious. The band has talked about it a lot, but I highly recommend this perspective from the artists themselves, “New York City, Hip Hop in The Daisy Age,” Summer 1989 An essay by Toby Mott, 3 Feet High and Rising cover artist & Grey Organisation Founder.

**I could do a track by track breakdown of how they carried this theme and variations across the whole record I think… if anybody wants that, maybe next year I’ll do a video.

AND AND AND, on the topic of “trio” - we can’t forget Prince Paul who did the production here. Even if he wasn’t one of the 3 Plugs, his vision and perspective on how not just the 3 beats we hear on this track fit together, but how the entire album is sequenced and arranged, none of this happens without him. Hear Open Mike Eagle get the story of how Paul and the De La trio met here. It’s magic (as is that whole season of What Had Happened Was, here’s the De La Soul is Dead episode if you’re curious).

Last but not least, De La Soul DID finally open up that donut shop for a minute last year, partly as a celebration of life for Dave, and partly to help promote their work’s arrival on streaming platforms. Check out all the guest appearances in this one, it’s beautiful, especially the closing clip of Dave at the end (it gets me all choked up, you’ve been warned):