De La Soul – 3 Feet High and Rising (1989)
By Rafi Mercer
The first time I held 3 Feet High and Rising in my hands, the sleeve itself felt like a manifesto. Psychedelic doodles, bright colours, a playfulness that stood apart from the harder, greyer aesthetic of late 80s hip hop. I didn’t know at the time how rare this copy would become, or how often lawyers would attempt to erase it from circulation. All I knew was that the record felt like a door opening. And in 1989, doors were important.
Hip hop was already splintering then: Public Enemy were building walls of noise and anger, N.W.A. were reporting from the streets with defiant fury, Eric B. & Rakim were honing minimalism into pure rhythm. De La Soul, three Long Island kids under the tutelage of producer Prince Paul, chose another path. They built a collage of sound so dense and mischievous that it felt less like a record and more like a living room packed with ideas, spilling over with borrowed voices, TV snippets, snatches of French lessons, and riffs stolen from everywhere.
Sampling had been a tool before, but 3 Feet High and Rising made it into an art form. Listen to The Magic Number. The main loop is lifted from Bob Dorough’s Three Is a Magic Number, a children’s educational tune from the Schoolhouse Rock! series. Underneath it, the drums pulse with James Brown’s DNA, the backbone of so much hip hop. And yet, in De La’s hands, it feels fresh, almost anarchic — hip hop as Sesame Street carnival, schooling by groove.
Then there’s Eye Know, built on a sly, looping guitar riff from Steely Dan’s Peg and a vocal hook borrowed from Otis Redding’s (Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay. You hear pop sophistication and deep soul rubbing shoulders, and suddenly you’re smiling because the track feels both reverent and irreverent at the same time. The horns, the handclaps, the casual warmth of it all — it’s hip hop as a sunny day, a break from the aggression that often defined the genre.
And Say No Go. On paper it shouldn’t work: the bassline from Hall & Oates’ I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do) laid under an anti-drugs lyric. But it does, and brilliantly. The track bounces while delivering a warning, proof that humour and lightness didn’t mean lack of seriousness. De La Soul could pivot from cartoon skits to pointed social commentary without changing tone — because the groove held everything together.
Jazz, too, is in there, though often indirectly. On Cool Breeze on the Rocks, a short interlude, Prince Paul stitches together dozens of samples, from funk riffs to horn hits, creating something that feels closer to bebop collage than straight rhythm. And you can hear the influence of Herbie Hancock and Donald Byrd in the textures — not always explicitly sampled, but shaping the sensibility. Hip hop producers like De La and A Tribe Called Quest didn’t treat jazz as something to study, but as a resource to play with, a palette of tones that could expand the world.
Of course, the very thing that made the album revolutionary also made it a legal nightmare. Sampling laws were still untested, and by the 1990s the lawsuits began. De La Soul found themselves unable to reissue the album for decades. The record became a ghost — whispered about, bootlegged, passed hand to hand, remembered by those who had been there. My own copy, bought new in 1989, grew into something of an artefact. Each time I drop the needle, I’m reminded not just of the music but of an era when creativity ran faster than regulation.
Listening today, 3 Feet High and Rising is astonishing for its range. Me Myself and I may be the radio hit, a self-portrait laced with George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic funk, but the deeper cuts reveal the album’s true ambition. Potholes in My Lawn turns paranoia into poetry, its looping guitars wrapping around lyrics about stolen ideas. Tread Water features talking animals offering life advice, absurd but oddly poignant. Even the skits — those playful interruptions that many later artists would imitate — feel essential, part of the texture rather than distractions.
In a listening bar, this record is a test of openness. Drop it late in the evening and watch how the room reacts. Some patrons smile in recognition, others lean in to identify the samples, still others simply sway to the groove. It’s an album that blurs boundaries between background and foreground, forcing attention with its sheer inventiveness. And sonically, it rewards good systems: the low end is warm but tight, the layers of samples open like drawers, the voices sit in different corners of the stereo field. Through a finely tuned pair of Beolab 50s, you don’t just hear the collage — you walk through it.
The story of 3 Feet High and Rising is also the story of hip hop’s growth. It proved the genre could be playful, eclectic, unafraid of melody or humour. It widened the audience without diluting the craft. And it showed how sampling could be a way of telling history, of connecting seemingly unrelated pasts into something that sounded like the present.
Why does it endure? Because it was bold. Because it was generous. Because it turned the record collection into an instrument and proved that hip hop was as much about listening as it was about speaking. And because, like all great albums, it built a world you could live in for 65 minutes.
Every time I return to it, I hear something new — a background voice, a guitar lick tucked under the mix, a moment of laughter that had slipped by before. That is the mark of an album that never exhausts itself. And for anyone who loves the art of listening, it is essential.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe here, or click here to read more.
