POP MUSIC : Alive and Rapping : With its second album, ‘De La Soul Is Dead,’ the Long Island trio’s sound moves from the ‘burbs toward the inner city

Driving along the serene residential streets of this Long Island town, about an hour from New York City, it must be hard for the average pop fan to realize that this is the home base for De La Soul, one of rap’s most acclaimed groups.

From the beginning, rap was considered an inner-city sound, and the music’s image--despite the carefree exuberance of M.C. Hammer and Vanilla Ice--has tended to be associated with the tensions and trials of the ghetto.

All of this made De La Soul’s 1989 debut album, “3 Feet High and Rising,” an eye-opener. From the cheerful innocence of the music to the group’s D.A.I.S.Y. Age logo on the Day-Glo album cover, the collection was a highly accessible package that reached well beyond the normal demographics of rap and led to the group being called the hippies of the genre.

Imagine the surprise, then, when De La Soul returned recently with a second album that was even more startling: “De La Soul Is Dead.” The album cover: a drawing of dead daisies in a kicked-over flowerpot.

Built around such stark, disturbing tracks as “My Brother’s a Basehead” (about drug addiction) and “Millie Pulled a Pistol on Santa” (sexual abuse), the new album is much darker in tone. If it doesn’t move the trio from the suburbs to the ghetto, it at least deposits them in some sort of halfway house.

Some rap observers regard the album’s frequent references to the frustrations of fame as evidence that rap’s flower children have turned into embittered, overly self-referential young men. Others suggest that the Amityville trio has adopted a more hard-core style for commercial reasons--to build a stronger base with rap’s traditional audience.

Posdnuos--the name adopted by De La Soul’s Kelvin Mercer--nods when the reactions to the surprising tone of “De La Soul Is Dead” are cited.

“People say the title is bitter, but the whole thing started as a joke,” he says, sitting on the wooden deck behind the two-story house where fellow De La Soul member Baby Huey Maseo (Vincent Mason Jr.) lives with his mother. “After ‘3 Feet High’ started fading on the charts, we used to joke about how De La Soul was dead.

“It was during the downtime between albums that every group goes through. It’s like you really are dead to some people. Girls who were always calling you and wanting to be around you disappear. They go after whoever has the new record out.

“So we were joking, ‘We’re dead, we’re dead. . . . No one wants us anymore.’ It was just funny to us seeing how people would diss us, knowing that once we come back out, these same people would be after us again. And we finally decided that’s a good title. It’s funny. It catches people’s attention and it (tells) them that this is a different album.”

Posdnuos pauses.

A serious, bespectacled young man, he stares out at the lawn, which is still aglow from the moisture of a brief afternoon drizzle.

“But I don’t know about all this talk about the ghetto and the suburbs,” he says. “We didn’t sit down when we made the first record and say, ‘Let’s talk about the suburbs,’ and then sit down and say, ‘OK, now let’s talk about the ghetto.’ The music on ‘3 Feet High and Rising’ was just one album . . . just one side of us. It didn’t tell everything about us. This album is the same people--just two years later.

“We may live in the suburbs, but we all came from the inner city. I was born in the Bronx, and I still have a lot of family there. I didn’t have to make up a story about drug addiction (“Basehead”), because I am talking about what I went through with one of my older brothers. He’s doing much better now, but I was really upset at him and I wanted to dis him in the record--tell him just how much he hurt himself and his family.”

Posdnuos, Baby Huey Maseo and Trugoy the Dove are the latest in a changing series of group names adopted by Mercer, Mason and David Jolicoeur. Posdnuos is a playful reverse of Sop Sound, a nickname Mercer coined for himself--as a maker of music--years ago. Baby Huey, the cartoon character, fits Maseo because of his bulk. Trugoy is yogurt, a favorite food, spelled backward. But they just refer to each other as Pos, Mase and Dove.

If the three have gone to that much trouble to come up with colorful names, it’s easy to see why they also delight in making novel or surprising twists--including recurring “in” jokes--in their music. There are so many ideas in the albums--from the nonstop language to the cascade of samples--that you get the feeling they would be intense, obsessive people who might pepper every conversation with clever wordplay.

But Pos seems unusually down to earth and straightforward as he traces the history of the group--a history that started on these same Amityville streets. He’s wearing just a simple sweat shirt and jeans, no gold chains or other stereotypical rap attire.

All three are shy and soft-spoken, but Pos speaks the most freely and has emerged as the group spokesman. Just 21, he can’t remember a time when he wasn’t fascinated by music. His start wasn’t in rap but in singing in the church choir with members of his family.

“My father was a really good singer, as good as Al Green as far as I was concerned,” Pos recalls, sitting on the back yard deck with Mase. Dove was across town on an errand.

“I used to listen to all my father’s records--Motown, Stax, all that stuff--and watch ‘Soul Train’ when I was in the first grade. I remember my mother saying at one point, ‘I hope you do something in the music business, because that’s all you do: listen to the radio and play records.’ ”

Pos’ family had already moved to Amityville in the early ‘80s when he got into rap. “I’d make my own tapes at a friend’s house down the street,” he explains. He later found a rap ally in Dove.

While still in junior high, they wrote raps together, but unlike most young, would-be musicians, they didn’t start out copying what they heard on records and on the radio.

“Boasting and ego rhymes were big at the time, but we were always into being different,” Pos says. “We talked about things in our own lives and what we saw on television, anything that came into our minds. What we were doing with words was as different from most rap as heavy metal is from rap.”

By the mid-’80s, the pair had joined with Mase, a deejay with a rival crew in town, and De La Soul was born. They connected with Prince Paul--a member of the rap group Stetsasonic and another Long Island resident. He passed the group’s demo tape along to Tommy Boy Records, one of the nation’s leading independent dance and rap labels. Mase was still in high school when Tommy Boy released a test single by the group. The record was an underground hit that led to the “3 Feet High” album.

The collection used imaginative musical samples--from such varied sources as country star Johnny Cash and brainy ‘70s rockers Steely Dan--in a series of musical sketches about life’s serious and wacky moments, all woven around a disarming TV game show theme. “3 Feet” was an immediate hit and went on to sell almost 3 million copies worldwide and be voted the best album of 1989 in a poll of the nation’s pop critics.

“The one thing we didn’t do in the studio was limit ourselves to the boundaries of rap,” Pos says of that debut album. “I used to always say to myself that hip-hop can really go further than people had taken it. My first memory of trying to put something together that was different was (when) this rock group called Kajagoogoo had this record called ‘Too Shy,’ and I always wanted to put that with a beat. When Run-DMC came along (in the mid-’80s) and put rock together with hip-hop, it convinced me that I was right.”

It’s not just the imagination and wit of the music on “3 Feet High” that intrigued pop and rap audiences. The idea of rap hippies was a natural promotional device and a great angle for the media.

The three rappers were themselves intrigued at first by all the commotion but later became frustrated when some people started talking more about the hippie trademarks than the music.

“The whole D.A.I.S.Y. Age thing started one day when Dove and I were in Macy’s in our local mall and there was this real big pajama shirt on the rack with Minnie Mouse on it holding a daisy,” Pos says, a touch of frustration in his voice.

“We needed a name for our crew and our production company, so we thought, ‘Let’s use Daisy.’ It was a colorful image, and Dove came up with something to fit (their acronym, D.A.I.S.Y.): Da Inner Sound, Y’all. It was just our way of saying the music is something real, something from our heart. But it was no big deal.

“We were too young to even know much about the hippies. We’d seen--what’s his name . . . at Woodstock, burning up guitars and all that--Jimi Hendrix. But we didn’t know the depth of what hippie meant.”

The new “De La Soul Is Dead” album title and cover art was clearly a move to disassociate the group from the D.A.I.S.Y. Age hippie imagery.

“We just hate being stereotyped,” Pos says. “We wanted to shatter any preconceptions about us. . . . We might have gone too far in one direction on the first album. We want to do every type of music. This record is as much a part of our personality as the first one. . . . If we came back and did another album like ‘3 Feet High,’ it’d be even harder for us to change next time, and you’ve got to change if you want to keep your music fresh.

“I may not be a fan of her music, but I like the way Madonna keeps changing. The same with David Bowie. I loved how he would always keep you guessing, going from Ziggy Stardust to whatever character came next.”

But what about the apparent bitterness?

Had the music biz knocked the playful spirit out of De La Soul?

There were many unsettling moments for De La Soul during its sudden breakthrough.

At one extreme, they found themselves being taunted as sissies on hard-core rap shows and challenged by toughs who wanted to see if they could get these peace-loving hippies to actually fight.

“It’s hard sometimes just hanging out and having a good time, especially on the road,” Mase, a large young man whose gentle demeanor does suggest the Baby Huey character, says, entering the conversation. “Some people are jealous. You don’t know who wants to step out of the crowd and punch you out just to get a rep.”

There was also the strain of touring and a much-publicized lawsuit by Flo & Eddie of the Turtles, who noticed a brief sample from one of their old records on an album track. They wanted $1.7 million in damages--reportedly the largest anti-sampling lawsuit ever. The case was eventually settled out of court.

Where others see bitterness, however, Pos sees simply reporting on events in his and his partners’ lives. And he believes there is still a lot of humor in the album, from the zaniness of “Bitties in the BK Lounge” to a running skit on the album. In the skit, some gangsta-rap fans find a tape of “De La Soul Is Dead” and give a critique of the album as it proceeds. “Garbage,” they declare at the end.

It’s unclear at this point how many people are going to accept the new De La Soul. Reviewing the album in The Times, Jonathan Gold, who liked the debut album, said: “Something about the album doesn’t quite click. Where ‘3 Feet High’ is sweet, ‘Dead’ is bitter.” He gave the album three out of a possible five stars.

Yet Rolling Stone magazine heralded “De La Soul Is Dead” as a “breathtaking combination of sonic and verbal beauty, challenging the listener with an unruly, seemingly effortless hip-hop masterpiece.” The Source, the nation’s leading rap magazine, gave it the maximum five stars.

Sales at first were brisk: An estimated 500,000 copies sold in just two weeks. But the album’s assault on the charts has apparently cooled. Where N.W.A raced to No. 1 on the charts in just two weeks, De La Soul dropped to No. 47 after just five weeks.

Meanwhile, Tommy Boy plans to release a second single from the album--the party-minded “A Roller Skating Jam Named ‘Saturdays’ “--in mid-July. The Source predicted that “Skating” will be the rap song of the summer.

Sales may be helped by a brief U.S. tour that includes a stop Thursday at the Palladium in Hollywood. Like most rap groups, De La Soul proved to be a disappointment live last year, but the group has reportedly spent a lot of time designing a show this time that will reflect more of the imagination and spirit of their albums.

Despite the furor and pressures around them, Pos and Mase seem comfortable on this afternoon at home.

“We knew this album was going to be difficult for some people--and that didn’t bother us,” Pos says. “It’s about trying to be real and think about our music long term, not just capitalize on what everyone will accept and then see the flame burn out.

“Besides, I like it when people listen to the album and say they have a hard time figuring it out. A lot of songs are so easy that once you hear it, you’ve got it all. I’ve always liked records that you could come away (from) with something different every time you listen to it. People may be confused now, but I think they’ll eventually catch on.”

He pauses and smiles.

“Maybe just in time for us to confuse them again with the next album.”