Pop’s timeline is speckled with such ironies. Spring 1989: At
the precise moment black lacquered long-players gave way to the compact
disc, the most vinyl-conscious music genre ever conceived came into its
own. Hiphop—a full 10 years after its first appearance on
wax—was venturing where wheels of steel alone couldn’t take it,
far beyond the disco lock-groove of “Rapper’s Delight”; past the 808
jabs of Paid in Full; and into the realm of smart digital
samplers.
Where it finally arrived was 3 Feet High and Rising, De La
Soul’s debut album, and a bric-a-brac masterpiece. Robert Christgau,
the Village Voice‘s stingy champion of all things
lizard-brained, closed his review of the Long Island trio’s debut by
assuring his readers, “You can dance to them.” A glib endorsement,
sure, but one that spoke for the counterintuitive brilliance of an
anti-crack anthem set to Hall & Oates (“Say No Go”) and a Cymande
sample made even funkier by Monkees accents (“Change in Speak”). Like
the Bronx block parties that cradled hiphop in the early ’70s, 3
Feet High and Rising was a feast fed by vinyl—the more
eclectic the ingredients, the better.
But it was elsewhere on the record that De La Soul consummated its
relationship with the deep crates of its members, Maseo, Posdnuos,
Trugoy, and their producer, Prince Paul. On interludes like “Cool
Breeze on the Rocks,” which interpolated over a dozen songs in
succession, and “Transmitting Live from Mars,” which pitted ’60s bubble
gum group the Turtles against a French lesson, De La Soul introduced
the staple of rap albums to come–the hiphop skit.
Welcome or not, hiphop skits are an extension of the album’s
packaging. At a time when packaging was shrinking to the size of
mass-market paperbacks, interludes functioned as aural gatefolds or
expanded liner notes, reaching into the audio itself. “We always saw
the skits as an open curtain to the group and the way we related to
each other,” De La’s Trugoy says by telephone. “It’s something a lot of
groups would record but not actually put on the album. We just thought
it would be something to unify the record.”
But 3 Feet High and Rising‘s innovation has a mixed legacy.
Some listeners loathe hiphop skits as a self-indulgent exercise serving
two nefarious purposes: to interrupt the music’s flow while filling the
disc. Though a handful of interludes are unanimously regarded as
classics, the majority of skits fall flatter than a Fat Boy.
But the skits on 3 Feet High and Rising are funny, and they
add an extra dimension to the crate-digging aesthetic that hiphop
reclaimed in the late ’80s. By structuring the record around comedic
interludes, De La Soul’s debut took the shape of a hybrid pop/comedy
album—retaining the casual lunacy of Let’s Get Small without lapsing into the novelty of “Like a Surgeon.” It’s in the
game-show parody framing 3 Feet High and Rising that the hiphop
generation, after much fretting over hardness and authenticity, found
itself on wax.
“I think we were of that generation where as kids we would sneak
down to the basement and listen to our parents’ Redd Foxx and Richard
Pryor albums at a low volume,” Trugoy says. “It was a shared experience
we had before we even met one another.”