Apple Music 100 Best Albums

3 Feet High and Rising

De La Soul

A playful 63-minute blueprint for hip-hop’s odd future.

Transmitting live from Mars—or, more specifically, the Long Island suburbs—De La Soul emerged fully formed and casually bugged-out in 1988 with “Plug Tunin’,” a 12-inch that mixed off-the-wall wordplay with the most off-kilter samples hip-hop had ever seen. On their subsequent debut album, Trugoy, Posdnuos, DJ P.A. Pasemaster Mase, and producer Prince Paul laid out a playful 63-minute blueprint for rap’s odd future. They were outcasts before Outkast, the roots of The Roots.

De La’s genre-agnostic approach to crate-digging imbued hip-hop with alien moods and new textures rather than just blips of James Brown and Funkadelic (though the latter’s rubbery melody would drive “Me Myself and I,” the band’s lone US Top 40 moment). Their playground included Schoolhouse Rock!, Steely Dan, learn-to-speak-French records, Johnny Cash, and a Liberace cassette they found in the studio. And their freewheeling poetry broke sentences apart into expressionist clouds that ranged from pure poetry to inspired nonsense. Proudly eccentric and preaching their message of self-expression while dressed in African medallions instead of fat gold ropes, they became the bohemian model for years of alternative-minded rappers.

Baduizm

Erykah Badu

Socially conscious, free-flowing hip-hop soul that embodied a cultural shift.

In 1997, as the Soulquarians—a new collective of socially conscious hip-hop soul songwriters that included Common, The Roots, D’Angelo, and more—began to emerge from the underground, Baduizm shifted the entire R&B landscape. A 25-year-old Texan with a seemingly preternatural sense of groove and a jazzy twang that evoked a modern-day Billie Holliday, Badu brought an approach to songwriting that embodied the sound of neo-soul.

“I just knew I wanted to express myself in a bigger way.”

Erykah Badu

Her approach to spirituality in her music was down-to-earth—as was her style, with flowing dresses and an omnipresent head wrap. But her music was otherworldly, even as she sang conversationally about the concerns of the everywoman, whether working poverty and sociopolitical pressures or the dirty deeds of unworthy lovers. Propelled by the slow groove of her rotating backing band, including bass legend Ron Carter and a then little-known Philadelphia group called The Roots, the cohesion and promise of Baduizm embodied a cultural shift towards Afrocentricism, creating a sonic through line of Black music from ’30s blues to ’70s jazz to soul on the precipice of a new millennium.