De La Soul: 3 Feet High And Rising (2LP, magenta vinyl) [CHRYSALIS]

Why you'll love it

This 2LP set puts the album on heavyweight 180g magenta vinyl, pressed in Canada. It went platinum, ranked 103 on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time in 2020, and the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry in 2010.

This edition

• 2LP set
• Magenta vinyl
• 180g vinyl
• Pressed in Canada

About the album

The title borrows from a Johnny Cash song, "Five Feet High and Rising," which tells you something about how wide De La Soul cast the net. Posdnuos, Trugoy and Maseo teamed up with producer Prince Paul on Long Island and made a debut that sounded like nothing else in 1989: playful, clever and gloriously odd, arriving just as rap was turning hard and confrontational.

Prince Paul and the trio built the album from a mountain of samples, reaching past funk and soul into doo-wop, psychedelic rock and children's records, with a Casio RZ-1 drum machine keeping time. Skits run through it like a radio show from another planet. "Me, Myself And I" became the big hit, "The Magic Number" and "Buddy" kept the party going, and "Eye Know" floats along on a sunny whistle. The recurring "D.A.I.S.Y. Age" (Da Inner Sound, Y'all) gave the group its flower-power image.

Critics have called it the first psychedelic hip-hop record, and Robert Christgau said it was unlike any rap album anybody had ever heard. The group spent years insisting they were never hippies, a point somewhat undermined by the daisies on the cover.

Also at Kops: more De La Soul on vinyl · browse Hip Hop / R&B

Tracklist

Listen

On Chrysalis / AOI Records (cat# RMM-048-1), a reissue of the 1989 album.