12/30/2023 0 Comments Vinyl me please tribe records![]() ![]() I grew to love rap in the 1980s especially because of the sounds supporting it. Delete them, and you also take away the album’s Mouse Trap-game structure and moments to catch your breath.Īnother really important thing 3 Feet High and Rising did was raise the tenets of DJ culture (turntablism, plunderphonics, what have you) to a critical and commercial peak reached by few others. Yes, delete them and you still have a literate, nuanced 13-song yin to the belligerent 13-song yang of Licensed to Ill, with vocal interplay that approached the Beastie Boys’ bar and probably cleared it. De La’s summative imagination also bled into the then-new paradigm of the skit, as almost half of the tracks on here are musical or acted interludes. “Ghetto Thang” uses rapid-fire imagery and loping sources like The Blackbyrds to comment on poverty, while “Say No Go” notoriously has Hall & Oates giving a party vibe to the war on drugs. The album has its gritty moments, but even these are delivered lovingly. ![]() Its chapters include heated discussions with talking animals instead of cops, and its scenes of casual sex often embrace innocence and romance and contraception. Unique for their time, De La Soul’s lyrics form an instruction manual on individualism: fun, personality, even self-care. It also undermined the legitimately important things you experience on 3 Feet High and Rising, the first of which is the birth of backpack rap. These visuals, and the wholly leftfield raps they supported, anachronistically pigeonholed De La Soul as rap’s hippies and the album as “psychedelic.” It’s a vibe they famously lashed out against on De La Soul is Dead two years later and have tried to make peace with up through today. The imagery ended up leaning very heavily and literally on De La Soul’s references to the daisy, along with Day-Glo colors and images of the trio in their decidedly catch-as-catch-can wardrobe. Tommy Boy Records took a flyer on De La and Prince Paul’s work, its title 3 Feet High and Rising lifted from a Johnny Cash sample used in signature song “The Magic Number.” With a catalog and artist list snaking into forms of synth-driven dance music, the label made the fateful decision to involve London’s Grey Organisation in designing cover art and more for this debut LP. Alongside the like minds they found in A Tribe Called Quest, Jungle Brothers, and others in the loose rap collective called Native Tongues, De La Soul were pioneers of Black joy. Childish and fantastical? Sure! Yet the results comprised a playful alternative to rap’s already long-standing use as a tool for braggadocio and its growing late-1980s appeal to gangsters and activists. Their earliest origin stories included suggestions that they were live representations of alien microphone cables-Plugs One, Two, and Three-transmitting ideas from Mars that were centered around a philosophy called Da Inner Sound, Y’all, abbreviated to D.A.I.S.Y. From these humble beginnings bloomed the trio working together as De La Soul. To a man, Kelvin “Posdnuos” Mercer, David “Trugoy the Dove” Jolicoeur, and Vincent “Pasemaster Mase” Mason have all said they were just messing with words, contemporary musical tech, and their families’ eclectic musical tastes when they got a demo of a song they called “Plug Tunin’” in front of Amityville, New York schoolmate and Stetsasonic DJ “Prince Paul” Houston. I’m curious how many of rap’s early stars really set out to be stars. De La Soul were really just Fucking Around on 3 Feet High and Rising, and unfortunately they-and we along with them-Found Out. America, land of capital, where the importance of said album is not just measured in message and style, but also in its litigious nature and the chilling effect it had on just about everything that followed. America, land of opportunity, where a couple of small-town high school friends can find genuine happiness in a music studio and eventually create one of the world’s most beloved albums. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |