De La Soul - 3 Feet High And Rising

Released in March 1989, 3 Feet High And Rising did not sound like anything else in hip-hop, and for a while it made everyone else sound like they were not trying hard enough. Posdnuos, Trugoy and Maseo were three kids from Amityville, Long Island. Prince Paul was the producer who understood exactly what to do with them. Together they built an alternate universe out of game-show skits, French lessons, Hall & Oates, Steely Dan, Johnny Cash and a hundred other things nobody had thought to touch.

"The Magic Number," "Eye Know," "Say No Go," "Buddy" and "Me, Myself And I" are the famous ones, and any of them would carry an album on its own. The real achievement is the shape of the whole thing: twenty-three tracks with skits woven through them, sequenced to play like a broadcast from a friendlier place than 1989 rap was expected to describe. The Native Tongues collective effectively begins here, and the influence runs straight through to almost everything sample-based that followed. It remains the only De La Soul album certified platinum.

It also became famous for the wrong reason. The Turtles sued over an uncleared sample, the band lost, and the resulting clearance mess kept the catalogue off streaming until 2023 and out of print on vinyl for years. That this record is available at all is the news.

Reissued by AOI Records and Chrysalis on 180-gram opaque yellow vinyl with the comic insert. Long overdue and worth every year of the wait.