FEATURE:
Change in Speak
De La Soul’s Seismic and Groundbreaking Debut, 3 Feet High and Rising, at Thirty-Five
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ON 3rd March…
it will be thirty-five years since De La Soul’s iconic and revolutionary debut album, 3 Feet High and Rising, was released. Released through Tommy Boy, it is one of the most important Hip-Hop albums ever. For so many years it was unavailable through streaming services. That recently changed. It was also issued on a range of physical formats, meaning old and new fans of the album could listen to it. At a time in Hip-Hop when there was an angrier and more political sound reigning – with groups like N.W.A. and Public Enemy -, New York’s trio (Kelvin ‘Posdnuos’ Mercer, David ‘Trugoy the Dove’ Jolicoeur, and Vincent ‘Maseo’ Mason) offered something more peaceful and positive. Heralding in the ’Daisy Age’, this was a different approach. Relying more on skits and humour, there was this contrast with the more direct and brutal sounds of what was around them. Even so, 3 Feet High and Rising was a massive critical and commercial success. I wanted to look inside the album ahead of its thirty-fifth anniversary next month. I am going to get to some reviews of 3 Feet High and Rising. There are incredible articles that dive inside the album and how it was made. You can get the album here. I will finish with a couple of reviews for this landmark album. I am going to start out with some features about one of the greatest albums ever released. Record Collector looked at the mighty 3 Feet High and Rising last year:
“What does ‘Tush eht lleh pu’ mean?” It was the summer of 1989, and that innocuous rebuttal was just about the most aggressive moment on De La Soul’s game-changing debut album 3 Feet High & Rising. From now on, hip-hop was going to be a Day-glo sampladelic cartoon strip of good vibes. This was the Daisy Age (“da inner sound y’all”) and that meant saying goodbye to all that crazy cop shootin’ gangsta shit. Or so we thought.
Long Island high school friends, Posdnuos, Trugoy and Maseo (two of them still in their teens, the other just turned 20), spelled their names backwards, too, but under the patronage of wizard DJ/producer Prince Paul, they were about to kickstart the future. Despite vinyl being their primary source material, they unwittingly accelerated the rise of CD culture into the bargain by cramming 24 tracks onto a 67-minute slab of vinyl. But more than anything, they completely revolutionised hip-hop. Scroll through the tributes to the tragic news that Dave “Trugoy The Dove” Jolicouer had died last month, just a few weeks after speaking to RC for the interview to go with this review, and you’ll have everything you need to know about the high standing in which De La Soul were held.
Back when the trio emerged, the hip-hop landscape could be roughly divided into two teams. On one side the righteous rage of Public Enemy and the gun-toting misogyny of NWA; on the other, flashy gold chains and New Jack Swing. In De La Soul’s wake came Del tha Funkee Homosapien, Digable Planets, Da Bush Babees, Dream Warriors (how come they all began with a ‘D’?), a transformation unthinkable without 3 Feet High & Rising. Spiritual cousins, Jungle Brothers and A Tribe Called Quest, would soon charge forward, baton in hand, helping to reinvent a medium whose cliched rhyme and posturing was already wearing thin.
Just a few weeks before his death, Dave “Trugoy The Dove” Jolicoeur recalled the dawn of a new hip-hop era.
The early records have been absent from streaming services, meaning there is a new generation of hip-hop fans who probably haven’t ever heard them.
Early in our career, there was no such thing as streaming services, no language about internet or downloading. So, it has meant a lot of renegotiating and unfortunately, it didn’t seem that labels who held our catalogue had any interest in doing that. Our parent company, Tommy Boy, had folded and our music was being bounced around so much we were never sure who the right people were to sit down with. But it’s good that new listeners will hear it now. At our shows, there’s always been quite a range in the demographic – people bringing their kids, younger faces – and it still excites us when people stumble upon our music. With The Magic Number being in the Spider-Man movie [it featured over the end credits of Spider-Man: No Way Home], that seems to have flicked a switch for younger people.
3 Feet High & Rising sounded like a new dawn, and was a catalyst for a change on the hip-hop scene with artists like Jungle Brothers and A Tribe Called Quest following up with incredible albums of their own. Did it create intense rivalry between the artists?
I don’t know if hip-hop needed to change, but it felt like it needed an awakening, fresh air. I remember the release party for the album – there was KRS-One, Big Daddy Kane, Slick Rick and they were like gods at the time, and they were saying stuff like, “Man, this is so fresh, we need more of this!” So, it definitely felt like a new chapter. There were moments when we were recording in the same building with Tribe. I can remember us thinking, “Oh God, how are they doing this?! This is fucking amazing!” So, you start questioning yourself, going back to the other guys saying, “Right, we’re gonna have to make some dope shit or we’ll get left behind!” Those times exemplified what hip-hop is really about. It became a competition, MCs versus MCs, DJs versus DJs, or sometimes more serious rivalries like LL Cool J versus Ice T. The same thing was happening with our crew. Hearing what Tribe were doing spurred you on to do something even better.
One of the most striking aspects of your music at the time was its eclecticism, the incredible range of samples you used. These days are you still inclined to draw from mum and dad’s record collections?
Yeah, we still dig through those old record collections. Sampling is still part of our musical culture. That’s what inspires and moves us. We have tonnes of vinyl we still go back to. For …And The Anonymous Nobody [2016] it was all about creating, using a live band, but at our core, we like to go into the garage or the basement and dig through tons of old vinyl for inspiration”.
It is impossible to state how important 3 Feet High and Rising is in terms of shaping Hip-Hop. Even if the Daisy Age did not last too long, it definitely influenced many other artists. In 2019, for its thirtieth anniversary, Albumism dissected this phenomenal album. They mention the importance of the production by Prince Paul and the sampling that helps define and colour the songs:
“Released 30 years ago, 3 Feet High and Rising was unlike anything that had been released before it. It was a strange and sprawling piece of work that was the product of four young men making the bold and brave statement that it was okay to be different in hip-hop.
It’s hard to oversell how 3 Feet High and Rising was borderline alien compared to anything that had been released before it. There had been other crews that were left of center, like Ultramagnetic MCs and the Jungle Brothers, (more on them in a sec), but De La Soul were positively indecipherable. Pos, Dove, and Mase, along with producer “Prince” Paul Huston came together to craft the definitive oddball hip-hop album that created the lane for others who wanted to “try something different.” And while making the album, Prince Paul encouraged De La to experiment as much possible, try new things, and not be afraid to make mistakes. It’s this wide-eyed and liberated attitude that give 3 Feet High and Rising a lot of its charm.
It made sense that they came together with the aforementioned Jungle Brothers and the fledgling group A Tribe Called Quest to form the groundbreaking Native Tongues clique. The crew became synonymous with outside-of-the-box thinking in regards to hip-hop music, and 3 Feet High and Rising is the foundation for their movement.
When I first heard 3 Feet High and Rising, I didn’t quite get “it.” I was 13, and the album was a bit too odd for me at the time. The group used obscure slang and their lyrics and skits seemed to be filled with in-jokes that were inscrutable except to those in their immediate crew. A classmate had to explain to me that “Potholes In My Lawn” was about people stealing their rhymes; I would have had no idea otherwise. Still, I’d dug the singles, especially the “Buddy” remix, which I’d gotten to know through its low-budget but madcap video. What a difference a couple of years made, as I revisited 3 Feet High right around the time that its successor De La Soul Is Dead (1991) surfaced, now more open to its idiosyncrasies and bizarre moments.
Much of the attention of 3 Feet High centers on its production, handled by Prince Paul. Specifically, it centers on the sample sources for the album. A lot of hip-hop artists mainly subsisted on samples from James Brown and Ultimate Beats and Breaks Records. De La Soul and Prince Paul were one of the first groups to utilize records from eclectic sources as the bricks and the mortar for their tracks. They sampled songs from relatively obscure artists like the Mad Lads and Cymande, and untouched musical ground like Steely Dan and Liberace. The album’s title is taken from a line in an early Johnny Cash song. The type of creativity that De La used on this album is functionally infeasible for a major label hip-hop release in 2019, due to the massive costs associated with the sample clearances. It’s one of the biggest reasons why Tommy Boy Records only recently worked out a deal to get the album onto streaming services.
As mentioned earlier, the album’s subject matter can be hard to decipher, but the group spends the album positioning themselves as rejecting the traditional definition of what it means to be a rapper. “Me Myself and I” remains the group’s anthem in that sense, expressing the importance of substance above traditional style, and how if the music dope, their dress doesn’t really matter. The point was hammered home in the video for the song, which was about rejecting the ultra-machismo driven image of what many associated with being a rapper. The group came to dislike the track, and for years prefaced live performances of it with chants of “We hate this song. We hate this song. We hate this song, but you love this song.”
For all the attention that 3 Feet High receives for the group’s abstract approach and their beats, Pos and Dove don’t get enough credit as innovative emcees. The two really experiment stylistically, crafting non-traditional rhyme schemes and patterns, switching deliveries and flows mid-song. They display this aptitude right from the get-go with their first single “Plug Tunin’,” and continue on songs like “Magic Number,” “Change in Speak,” “Living in a Full Time Era,” and “D.A.I.S.Y. Age.”
3 Feet High is also associated with the “D.A.I.S.Y.” image aka Da Inna Sound Y’all, first alluded to on songs like “Potholes” and further championed on “Me Myself and I.” Tommy Boy made this a central part of their marketing scheme for the group, often championing De La as “hippies.” De La noticeably bristles at the hippie label and the marketing scheme in general, and notoriously spent their tours getting into fights with locals who assumed that the group was soft because they were associated with “daisies”.
I want to get to a review from Pitchfork. I find it impossible that anyone would find anything to fault about De La Soul’s debut album! Luckily, the vast majority of critics have the album resounding love. I wanted to take some sections from Pitchfork’s impassioned and hugely positive review of the 1989 album that is a true classic:
“In 2011, 3 Feet High and Rising was added to the Library of Congress National Registry of Recordings. Even that honor prompted no action from Warner Brothers. So on Valentine’s Day in 2014, De La Soul gave away digital files of their entire Warner catalog to their fans. That sharing has been the only official digital release of these records, which remain locked away in that null existence between copyright orphanhood and full viability.
Questlove told New York Times reporter Finn Cohen, “I mean, 3 Feet High and Rising is very much in danger of being the classic tree that fell in the forest that was once given high praise and now is just a stump.” We are left to ask: as history is made and remade, who can be heard in America?
On the album’s proper opener, “The Magic Number,” over a sample of the “Schoolhouse Rock” theme song and a chopped version of John Bonham’s huge drum break from “The Crunge,” Pos and Trugoy had rocked a virtuoso, rapid-fire manifesto full of mind-spinning wordplay. Pos positioned hip-hop as the new insurgency:
Parents let go cause there’s magic in the air
Criticizing rap shows you’re out of order
Stop look and listen to the phrase, Fred Astaires,
And don’t get offended while Mase do-si-do’s your daughter
Trugoy described his creative process:
Souls who flaunt styles gain praises by the pounds
Common are speakers who honor the scroll
Scrolls written daily creates a new sound
Listeners listen ‘cause this here is wisdom.
By the end, Mase and Paul were scratching snippets at a fast and furious rate—Steinski, Syl Johnson, and Eddie Murphy all fly by before Johnny Cash suddenly drops in to give the album its title: “How high’s the water, mama? Three feet high and rising.” The line was taken from a reverb-drenched performance of “Five Feet High and Rising,” a blues in the grand tradition of Mississippi River flood songs.
De La Soul were making a point about the power of culture to mobilize people to action or immobilize them with fear. It was an idea they explored more explicitly on their fable, “Tread Water.” There were animals, squeaky organs, friendly humming—at the time, journalist Harry Allen called it the most African song he’d heard in hip-hop—but “Tread Water” also offered perhaps the most ambitious hope on the record, that De La’s music might help us all elevate our heads above the water. In this polar-cap-melting, politically disastrous age, the song feels prophetic.
Today’s debate over sampling is mostly mind-numbingly narrow, shaped largely by big-money concerns that are ahistorical, anti-cultural, and anti-creative. The current regime rewards the least creative class—lawyers and capitalists—while destroying cultural practices of passing on. Post-hip-hop intellectual property law rests on racialized ideas of originality, and preserves the vampire profits of publishing outfits like Bridgeport Music, that sue sampling producers while preventing artists like George Clinton from sharing their music with next-generation musicians, and large corporations like Warner Brothers that continue to disenfranchise Black genius.
By contrast, the processes of sampling and layering on 3 Feet High and Rising and other hip-hop classics of that era demonstrate the opposite: expansively, giddily democratic—Delacratic, even—values.
Pos’s production on “Eye Know” put Steely Dan into conversation with Otis Redding and the Mad Lads, his work on “Say No Go” Hall and Oates with the Detroit Emeralds. The musical chorus of “Potholes in My Lawn” pointed not only to Parliament’s 1970 debut Osmium, but to the African American roots of country and western music.
Together, the sampled sounds of the Jarmels, the Blackbyrds, the New Birth, and even white artists like Led Zeppelin, Bob Dorough, and Billy Joel, make a strong case that all of American pop is African-American pop, from which everyone has been borrowing. Sampling—De La Soul sampling Parliament, Obama sampling Lincoln, Melania sampling Michelle—is nothing less than the American pastime, the creative reuse of history amid the tension between erasure and emergence that is central to the struggle for the republic. No one can ever do it as big as De La Soul did”.
Thirty-five years after its release, 3 Feet High and Rising remains one of the most important albums ever released. That idea of heralding in a more positive sound of Hip-Hop. AllMusic gave Del La Soul’s debut some incredibly positive words. So innovative, funny, compelling and eclectic, the majestic and timeless 3 Feet High and Rising sound be heard by everyone. If you have not heard the album in a while, I would urge you to spend time today revisiting it:
“The most inventive, assured, and playful debut in hip-hop history, 3 Feet High and Rising not only proved that rappers didn't have to talk about the streets to succeed, but also expanded the palette of sampling material with a kaleidoscope of sounds and references culled from pop, soul, disco, and even country music. Weaving clever wordplay and deft rhymes across two dozen tracks loosely organized around a game-show theme, De La Soul broke down boundaries all over the LP, moving easily from the groovy my-philosophy intro "The Magic Number" to an intelligent, caring inner-city vignette named "Ghetto Thang" to the freewheeling end-of-innocence tale "Jenifa Taught Me (Derwin's Revenge)." Rappers Posdnuos and Trugoy the Dove talked about anything they wanted (up to and including body odor), playing fast and loose on the mic like Biz Markie. Thinly disguised under a layer of humor, their lyrical themes ranged from true love ("Eye Know") to the destructive power of drugs ("Say No Go") to Daisy Age philosophy ("Tread Water") to sex ("Buddy"). Prince Paul (from Stetsasonic) and DJ Pasemaster Mase led the way on the production end, with dozens of samples from all sorts of left-field artists -- including Johnny Cash, the Mad Lads, Steely Dan, Public Enemy, Hall & Oates, and the Turtles. The pair didn't just use those samples as hooks or drumbreaks -- like most hip-hop producers had in the past -- but as split-second fills and in-jokes that made some tracks sound more like DJ records. Even "Potholes on My Lawn," which samples a mouth harp and yodeling (for the chorus, no less), became a big R&B hit. If it was easy to believe the revolution was here from listening to the rapping and production on Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, with De La Soul the Daisy Age seemed to promise a new era of positivity in hip-hop”.
On 3rd March, 1989, an album was released into the world that would shake up the Hip-Hop world. There was not a lot of comparisons or like-minded albums at that time. It was both unusual and radical that an album like 3 Feet High and Rising would sit alongside very different sounding albums. Enduring and succeeding as this positive and peace-loving album, 3 Feet High and Rising is faultless in my eyes! I vaguely remember when it came out and how people reacted to it. It still moves me…
THIRTY-FIVE years later.