Thirty five years after its release, De La Soul’s debut album is firmly ensconced in the pantheon of unimpeachable classics, and Me Myself And I is a fixture on mainstream classic radio. So it’s easy to forget what a shock 3 Feet High and Rising represented on release. It was, gasped one US critic’s review, “unlike any rap you or anyone else has ever heard”. If that wasn’t entirely true – 3 Feet High and Rising certainly had antecedents, both in the easygoing humour of Biz Markie’s style and in the beat-digging, fast-cutting, eclectic sound of old-school DJs, as wont to play Dizzy Gillespie or the Monkees’ Mary Mary as James Brown and Funkadelic – it wasn’t far off the mark. The album certainly didn’t sound like anything else that was around at the time – even those by their friends in the Native Tongues rap collective.
