Listening to De La Soul and Remembering the Simple Days
Three Feet High and Rising, and the World Before Noise
By Rafi Mercer
I listened to Three Feet High and Rising today. De La Soul. That bright, playful, impossible-to-categorise record from 1989. It reminded me of a time before the scroll, before the feed, before everything came with commentary.
Back then, music arrived slower. You found it in record shops, on mixtapes, on the radio late at night when you were supposed to be asleep. Albums like this felt like discoveries — private, almost secret. You’d listen from start to finish because that’s how you understood them. No skipping, no algorithms, just sequence and flow.
Three Feet High and Rising still carries that feeling. It’s inventive without trying too hard, joyful without gloss, subversive but smiling. The samples — Steely Dan, Hall & Oates, The Turtles — were stitched together into something new but unforced. Listening now, it feels like an artefact from a slower culture, one that left space for imagination.
Before the internet, you learned music by memory. You didn’t look up references — you heard them, you felt them, you guessed. You built your own mythology around sound. De La Soul built theirs too, and it still feels human. The jokes, the playfulness, the warmth — all of it feels handcrafted.
Today, hearing it again, I found myself missing that simplicity. The act of sitting with one record and letting it speak for itself. No notifications, no analysis. Just colour, rhythm, wordplay, and joy.
It’s funny how an album like Three Feet High and Rising can remind you that simplicity isn’t nostalgia. It’s perspective. The world may be louder now, faster, more connected — but sometimes connection means slowing down enough to hear what’s already there.
So here’s to De La Soul, to the sound of a freer world, and to the reminder that creativity once came without noise.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe here, or click here to read more.
