De La Soul - Classic or Dud?

three feet high and rising was the first
hip-hop album i ever bought. buhloone
mind state was the second. it would be
cool to say bionix was the last one. but
it wasn't. it was good, though. the slick
rick one. 'held down.' 'bionix.' those
other ones.

hip-hop people reviewing bionix all said
it sucked. indie rock type people reviewing
it said it was another classic from de
la soul. those are the only people who
reviewed it.

-- DK, Thursday, August 22, 2002 3:46 PM (5 years ago) Bookmark Link

o.O

i had a thing for making paper since papier-mache

dude you were the one that told me 3 Ft High was dylan's first rap album

I heard De La Soul Is Dead in its entirety before I heard Three Feet High and Rising in its entirety, which is part of the reason why I hold this allegedly controversial CHALLENGING OPINION.

its totally not a challenging opinion wtf people - but buhloone mind state is better than both of them anyway

i say this as someone who has listed to those three albums more than anyone on this board im sure

production on Buhloone is less unique than on 1st 2. They're all great. 2nd>>>1st>>>3rd.

buhloone mind state remains my pick too

3>2>1

but theyre all great obv

1st > 3rd > 2nd

I heard De La Soul Is Dead in its entirety before I heard Three Feet High and Rising in its entirety, which is part of the reason why I hold this allegedly controversial CHALLENGING OPINION.

this is what I assume of anyone who holds same

lol no i had 3 feet around when it cam out it kinda marked my devolution from someone who just listened to the radio and had a few albums to a music obsessive. i remember seeing the video for me myself and i on bet at a friends house and being all wtf is this must have! then dead was the last tape i had before i got a cd player. i taped ringringring off the radio before the album came out and was all wtf at the new sound but it grew on me fast. then when buhloon came out it was just <3<3<3

3 feet is nice but they got sooo much better at everything

3 feet is nice but they got sooo much better at everything

I pretty much agree with this.

so do I. 1st and 2nd are both more "fun" (having guru guest on a track will do that, though har har). 3rd I guess a lil TOO good ie refined.

(tho i guess having biz guest cancels out guru)

omglol i am watching de la videos on youtube omg!

http://static1.videosift.com/thumbs/d/el/De_La_Soul_Me_Myself_And_I.jpg

this hair whaaaa!

2>4>1=3

For a long time I wrote off the AOI Bionix lps, but on repeat listen I think they are tight. I saw them perform at DEMF in 01 and they were great.

they got better at smooth jazz soul jams. but the 1st album is alive in a way those that follow are not and it's got the best wordplay by far. also, i like hippies and the color yellow.

Buhloone Mind State is better than the first two. It's like desert island material.

arsenio dissed us but the crowed kept clapping http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lR-p_yMTFDY

Wrote something a couple of years ago on Buhloone, although they never even came close to recording boilerplate material.

it's got the best wordplay by far

gabz its fine if you like that one best but this is just demonstrably false - buhloon is 100% double entendres metaphors and allusions

i like the kiddie metaphors more than the adult metaphors, but there's a fair amount of adult stuff on the 1st one too

as a prince paul fan i'm partial to the first three with BMS being tops

'i am i be' for all time
buhloone rules

i love stakes is high

When I listen to "I Am I Be" I get chills; like top ten song ever.

otm

discovering that third de la album was when they really clicked for me, i think, and i started to actually have ideas about their music for the first time that really felt like my own rather than sort of blindly buying into one narrative or another, which i did when i heard the first two records ... i liked them but not enough to think about them. buhloone was kind of like a breakthrough (breakathrough?) where i realized De La were great and worth giving a shit about on a personal, rewind-this-record-over-and-over level rather than just paying my dues as a rap nerd by touching all the canon bases or whatever

i dont know if i think its the 'best' any more but its definitely the one de la record i most fondly associate w/ being a teenager and really getting rap, climbing up a neighbor's fire escape to watch the sun set on a rooftop w/ it playing in the headphones. good times

buhloone is kinda impersonal to me.... i gotta admit i love de la is dead just for having so many songs that are the shit and this big smart ass unified concept and i love stakes is high cuz it was the first de la album i actually got when it dropped but all of em are the shit including aoi ones and grind date

one joint i think is underrated for real is "held down" with cee-lo
http://youtube.com/watch?v=j-htszlfoDI

god, stakes is high is so fucking good, you people are clueless

just curious, how do you mean 'impersonal' - like to you personally, or the overall sound of the record?? to me tracks like 'i am i be' are exactly the opposite of that

stakes is the shit, its the first one that fits in the era of rap i came up on instead of weirdo early 90s daisy age skit rap... set the style for the whole late 90s rawkus underground shit too

i guess i mean impersonal that like dudes seem a lot less passionate on it compared to the other joints like is dead or stakes, and i dig angry de la more than like self satisfied chillin de la - buhloone just gets a lil too workmanlike without having the smarter grown folks shit you get from the aoi cds.... its still dope dont get me wrong but i think like beats rhymes & life does the same style about 10000x better

i dunno i feel like im talking outta my ass cuz i dont play that as much as the other cds so let me play it out & get back to yall with opinions4u

stakes is the shit, its the first one that fits in the era of rap i came up on instead of weirdo early 90s daisy age skit rap

duh. but i confess i don't own it. is most of the stuff better than 'all good'?

beats rhymes & life does the same style about 10000x better
damn! that's a lot of times better

stakes is high is great but it's the 1st one of theirs that had skippable tracks from the getgo.

aren't SiH and BR&L like the albums where they tried to sound like everyone else and therefore less deserving of any marginal distinction even if the flow was upped a notch?

all good was from mosaic thump, dum dum

u never heard 'stakes is high' or 'tha bizness' or 'itzsoweezee'???

xp damn thats a CHALLENGING OPINION gabb

stakes is high completely defined my summer when it came out. beats rhymes & life is its companion piece yes, but i will not rate them against each other.

'wait doesnt this sound like other rap???' = the mating call of dudes who dont actually like rap

i've heard stakes is high and tha bizness. is the rest better than those?

if liking someone other than de la is yr criterion of actually liking rap, then maybe you'd understand that someone who actually likes rap might prefer something other than those albums

i'm just saying people be rating 1,2,3 and forgetting 4. in reality, it's 3>4>2 people. forget 1 unless you want to be skipping tracks.

"reality"

nah dog i just think its lame to be all suspicious of shit because you heard it might * gasp * actually sound like * gulp * MID 90s RAP MUSIC instead of your lil tokenist daisy age bill cosby conscious cat dreamz

allmusic is OTM here:

Stakes Is High is often overshadowed by its predecessors in the De La Soul discography and, upon its release, it was lost in a summer of great import and consequence. Released on the same day as Nas' alter-ego epic It Was Written and sandwiched between albums like Jay-Z's Reasonable Doubt and OutKast's ATLiens, it's very possible that Stakes Is High didn't get its rightful burn in respective tape decks and CD players. Aside from that, hip-hop was fully embroiled in the East Coast vs. West Coast beef, something in which the Native Tongues vanguards were seeming nonplayers. But it's under these conditions that De La offered an album that was not only sonically excellent and creative and pure, but an album with the year's most relevant and prescient message. The stakes were indeed high. Inter-genre violence was bubbling beneath the surface, overshadowing the turn hip-hop was taking — a turn away from what was a mid-'90s renaissance of the late-'80s golden age excellence, quickly evolving into what is now known as the jiggy era. On "The Bizness" — a song featuring the quickly maturing Common before his lyrical touchstone One Day It'll All Makes Sense — Dave spits "Do not connect us with those champagne-sippin' money-fakers." Hip-hop was at a crossroads, a precipice — whatever you'd like to call it — and De La were concerned. "Supa Emcees" asked "Whatever happened to the MC?" and cautioned "MCing ain't for you!" "Dog Eat Dog" asserted that folks were "fucking my love in all the wrong places" — an obvious metaphor. "Baby Baby Baby Baby Ooh Baby" is a sharp satire of the Bad Boy-style hip-hop that was beginning its reign, fit with a beat as Hitmen-esque as an '80s R&B revision with Posdnuos rhyming in a conspicuously Biggie-like cadence. No, this was not an unabashed hip-hop classic like 3 Feet High and Rising and De La Soul Is Dead, or as provocative and fresh as some of its 1996 peers. It was, however, an entertaining and unapologetic De La album that placed hip-hop in front of a mirror. It's also an album that did its part to solve what De La were articulating as a problem, ushering in what would become the newer version of the Native Tongues, with multi-production from a young Jay Dee, Mos Def's introduction to most listeners, the aforementioned Common cameo, and hooks from Erykah Badu and Zhané, artists leading the burgeoning neo-soul movement of the time. It was as if De La were providing an antidote. Stakes Is High is an important album of this era, an album of great production and the most skilled of MCs who diagnosed symptoms of what they believed were hip-hop health complications — but it offered the medicine.

nah dog i just think it's lame to make MID 90s RAP MUSIC when the shit you made before and after doesn't sound much like it or to listen to the de la or tribe version when there's a lot better MID 90s RAP MUSIC

de la or tribe version

but they were in the top tier of MID 90s RAP MUSIC

There are lots of bits on this that wouldn't feel out of place on the early albums. "Will Be" even sounds like a DLSID outtake.

yea i don't think it's a career highlight like 'we got it from here' was for tribe, but it's good enough to make that album a non-ridiculous comparison

the final stretch of the album, starting with "en eff," is incredibly strong.

otm, those six and "Run It Back" are my favorites. title track is so good, I figured the sample was some 70s rock song but didn't realize it was THAT song lol

"Will Be" has an almost "Roller Skating Jam Named Saturday" vibe, wish it were longer

yea i don't think it's a career highlight like 'we got it from here' was for tribe, but it's good enough to make that album a non-ridiculous comparison

there is also the fact they were both released after one of the three founding members passed away

and released in November after Election Day.

anyway this thing is fire, immediately one of my 2025's best.

Maseo currently playing records on TikTok

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZPHThPvEP8h9F-Bo19Q/

loving this album.

De La Soul on NPR Tiny Desk went up today, it’s so good you guys

and repping Dave w the mic & the nameplate & mase’s shirt <3 <3 ;_;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AVYDHTOixU

yes very good, thank you for sharing!

remember when de la was having licensing issues and so posted all of their music for free a few years back? and there was so much activity their download spot got deactivated? yeah, i remember thar too! it was an exciting time to be a fan, so i purchased extra juice on my dropbox so there could be an active link for folks here to grab some golden era classics. even with that, the link saw too much activity and i was charged extra on my account. i didn't care, i'm glad folks here got access; everyone needs to hear that stuff at least once imo. the rub was not when none of you said thank you (and honestly why would you? it was just a random dropbox link), but when i was later accused of being racist while mourning dave's passing in earnest.

you probably could have just linked the Russian bootleg site that they’d downloaded the mp3s from tbf

Last year's album, I'm happy to report, still rips.

curious if anyone's got it on vinyl, heard the pressing quality was not so good, but there are like 6 different variants out there

Discogs reviews suggest the yellow pressing is bad, others are better. But holding off till I hear more info. Album itself is killer, looking forward to owning it tbh.

I love this album, one of their three best.

Yeah, it's too bad this seemed to get mostly ignored last year.

I got the blue pressing and it sounds fine, not great. But what a fantastic album. The title track goes so hard in the wake of bereavement and asks all the right questions. Ending on a Dave track is even more of a gut-punch than Giancarlo Esposito's repeated call of "Dave? Dave? Dave?" in the opening skit.

Hopefully more people will catch up to it. I actually went to the album launch in their pop-up shop and it was crazy how many fans tried to get in - you'd think that would reflect bigger attention later on, but I just checked the yearendlists site and they only had four mentions, three of which were in the bottom echelons of said lists:

#8 The 25 Best Albums of 2025: The Ringer
#39 Top 50 Albums of 2025: Anthony Fantano: The Needle Drop
#40 The 50 Best Albums of 2025: Complex
#51 Top 55 Albums of 2025: Brooklyn Vegan

Pete Rock even discussed his contributions in his talk last year, and he was very proud of what De La Soul did with it.