...when he saw the name, lol, here's the a piece of an interview he said it from:

Afrika: The first time I heard of De La Soul was funny. I was sitting in Red ‘s room, and he had demo tapes and acetates. I would listen to records as they came in, and he’d ask me what I thought of them. And, like, he had this cassette, and I remember it clearly. It had this blue sticker over the whole cassette, and it said ‘De La Soul’. We had just gotten back from England, this was in September, and I’m saying to myself, ‘De La Soul? What is this? Is this a Latin rap group?’ And I’m gonna tell you: instinctively – and it might have been to my own ignorance, because there was a rapper I think in one of these old school groups who was Hispanic – but I was like, ‘It’s too soon for that. Why would somebody try to go there?’ And I put the tape in and it was Plug Tunin’. And I’m like, ‘Oh, they’re not Puerto Rican! This is cool.’ That’s how prejudiced the average rapper might have been! The new rappers, not the old school rappers. And the purists might have been by that point. We wasn’t accepting west coast, we wasn’t accepting European rappers, we wasn’t accepting commercial rap, we wasn’t accepting Latino rap. So I put it in, and I was like, ‘Oh, Plug Tunin‘! I know that beat, that’s a cool beat. It’s different.’ So that was the intro to me.