De La Soul – 3 Feet High and Rising (1989)

When 3 Feet High and Rising dropped in 1989, it was like someone spray-painted a sunflower on a subway car. In a hip-hop landscape dominated by bombast, bravado, and boom-bap, De La Soul came floating in like cosmic pranksters, armed with rhyme schemes, wild imagination, and a flowerpot full of Day-Glo ideas.

Make no mistake—this wasn’t soft rap. It was smart rap. Surreal rap. Rap that read comic books, listened to Hall & Oates, and probably had a favorite philosopher. Posdnuos, Trugoy (RIP), and Maseo didn’t just break the mold—they made a collage out of it, cut it into cartoon shapes, and rapped over it with a wink.

Produced by the genius Prince Paul, 3 Feet High and Rising is as much a psychedelic mixtape as it is a hip-hop album. It’s a sonic funhouse, built on oddball samples, answering machine skits, game show interludes, and the kind of crate-digging wizardry that probably made sample clearance lawyers weep for decades. Johnny Cash, Steely Dan, The Turtles, Liberace—they all show up, chopped and flipped into a sonic playground where nothing is off-limits.

The opener, “The Magic Number,” lays down the gospel early: this group is different. It’s not about flexing muscle—it’s about flexing imagination. “Me Myself and I” followed, and it was a cultural explosion. The video alone, with its high school weird-kid energy and ironic Afrocentric swag, gave hip-hop a new costume to try on—and it fit beautifully.

But the real joy of this album is its refusal to be pinned down. “Tread Water” tells a fable about talking animals and self-reflection. “Eye Know” samples Steely Dan and Otis Redding to create one of the smoothest love tracks of the era. “Potholes in My Lawn” somehow makes complaints about stolen metaphors sound like a jazz-laced acid trip. There are songs here that feel like inside jokes from a dream, and somehow, we’re all in on them.

De La Soul weren’t just making music—they were inventing a universe. 3 Feet High and Rising gave birth to the “D.A.I.S.Y. Age” (Da Inner Sound, Y’all), a brief, blissed-out moment in hip-hop when it was cool to be quirky. This album made space for weirdos, thinkers, and poets in a genre that desperately needed them.

Of course, the industry tried to box them in, calling them “hip-hop hippies,” a label they quickly rejected. De La Soul didn’t want to live in a flower child stereotype—they were more complex than that. Their later albums got darker and deeper. But here, on this debut, they were sunshine in audio form.

Thirty-five years later, 3 Feet High and Rising still sounds like the future—that alternate universe where wit beats violence, creativity trumps conformity, and every song is a door to a different dimension.