It must be frustrating beyond belief to be cursed by your own precocious creativity. But that's life for De La Soul. As teenagers, they made an album that not only changed the face of their genre, but altered the pop music landscape. You'd be proud, of course, but probably a tad worried, too: and releases like this compilation would probably leave you wondering if anything you'd done since had ever really been worthwhile.
'3 Feet High & Rising' arrived in 1989 and blew the burgeoning preconceptions about what rap music was, what it could be, and who it was for, out of the water. Freeing producers to sample from literally any source they cared to imagine, De La and their similarly youthful studio cohort, Prince Paul, made a record that took whatever rules there were and set fire to them, burning up the reputations of many previously lauded peers in the process.
That record is represented here by half a dozen tracks, of which only opener 'Me Myself And I' has dated at all: that song's pilfering of P-Funk, so fresh in '89, has acquired a sheen on conventionality conspicuously absent from the mesmeric likes of 'Say No Go', 'Eye Know' or 'The Magic Number'. The latter, which samples everyone from Led Zeppelin to Johnny Cash and straps them all to a riff from a kids' record, would have been enough to earn De La endless respect on its own.
Yet the band's doom was to have to spend subsequent years defending their hip hop credentials after '3 Feet...' made them the first of that most hated breed - Rap Bands For People Who Don't Like Rap. The follow-up, 'De La Soul Is Dead', very consciously sought to show there was more to the trio than dayglo imagery and their jocular but misunderstood "DAISY Age" concept. In this respect, their key albums were the next two, 'Buhloone Mindstate' and, in particular, 'Stakes Is High', the latter's 1996 release seeing them crowned kings of the lyrical rap underground that had emerged as the genre had gone mainstream in the post-gangsta/bling era. Yet those records supply only three of this compilation's 17 tracks.
'The Best Of...' is nicely structured, songs appearing in chronological order, which at least ensures part-time fans will note, from the consistency, that De La have never "fallen off". Indeed, the final salvoes from the still incomplete 'Art Official Intelligence' trilogy are arguably stronger compositionally and conceptually than the early tracks that made their complex reputation. 'Oooh', 'All Good?' and 'Watch Out' all combine hooks, accessibility and verbal ingenuity to suggest that the best of De La Soul may well be yet to come.
6/10 for the compilation. 9/10 for the actual music.
