For me, the best album in hip-hop history stays “De La Soul is dead”, the group’s legendary second album from 1991. As I said in my “Off the Wall” vs. “Thriller” article, a key part of a great album is making a thesis and combining the songs, sound, and feel of that thesis. If it’s cohesive, it means the songs flow together to create a statement. Historically, hip-hop has given us many amazing, consistent albums, from Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Kanye’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Raekwon’s Onlybuilt 4 Cuban Linx, and A Tribe Called “Low Level Theory” by Quest, “The Chronic” by Dr. Dre, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and Nas’ Illmatic. This is not a complete list. There are a lot of hip-hop albums that are consistent. For me, the best of them is “De La Soul Is Dead”, because the thesis of this album is even deeper than most albums that have it – “Dead” challenges the definition of what De La Soul is and in that sense the meaning black.

“De La Soul Is Dead” is like a sequel that requires you to observe the first film to actually understand the deeper undertones of the second film. On their 1989 debut album “3 feet high and soaring”, De La — which includes late rapper Trugoy the Dove, rapper Posdnous and DJ/rapper Maseo — introduced themselves as hip-hop hippies. They emerged at a time when hip-hop was still centered around urban MCs talking about life in the hood. De La was from the suburbs of Long Island and they never tried to hide that in their music or vibe. But being open about who they were made people think they were soft. Sometimes when they were on tour, people would try to fight the guys because they thought they couldn’t fight. Their producer, Prince Paul, talked about this when I talked to him on an episode of Being Black the 80s about De La Soul’s “My Brother’s A Basehead.”

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But being perceived as soft had an excellent deeper resonance, no less than in the late Eighties. At that time, it appeared like the hood was the heart of being black, and being a hood meant you were tough. Being a gang, no less than in a hip-hop context, meant you were tough as hell, world-weary, cold-hearted, and prepared for anything. Being seen as easy was a metaphor for being black.

On their second album, De La got down to break the belief that they were fragile – they wanted to vary the way people thought of them. I do not know of many albums in the history of hip-hop that were so focused on the idea of ​​changing the way people perceived the character of the group itself. Sometimes artists openly change their aesthetics, but that is not the point. This is De La saying you do not understand who we actually are after which trying to clarify who they’re.

The album is crammed with De La’s signature fun and eclectic samples, in addition to plenty of great, complex rhymes and skits from the guys, which adds as much as De La arguing, somewhat angrily, that they don’t seem to be hippies and they don’t seem to be gentle – I can not I consider a rap group recorded an album with the caption: . Consequently, they are saying: yes, we usually are not a gang, nevertheless it is still difficult for us and we’re still black.

Other hip-hop albums have touched on the challenges of dealing drugs and coping with the police, but on “Dead,” De La took on a very different set of challenges. In one song they told us a story about sexual abuse in the family. In one other song, they told the story of Brother Posdnous’s very real addiction to crack. (I’m going deeper into this topic on my podcast, “Being Black: The ’80s.”) In one other song, the guys got incredibly disgusted once they went to Burger King. It’s definitely not on the same level as the other songs, but I say this album is often about their problems because, hey, life in the suburbs will be tough.

“Dead” is a conversation with audiences and critics about who we thought they were based on their first album and who they are surely, which comes from the belief that they usually are not fragile. In an excellent series of sketches, or interludes, a gaggle of three boys find the tape we’re listening to and criticize it. One of them hates it, which is hysterical, and the other one likes it. Of course, the one who hates repeatedly attacks the one who likes it. It’s an incredible meta-commentary on the audience surrounding their album, the nature of hip-hop skits (which were ubiquitous at the time), and the importance of being hard or soft in the culture.

Thanks to “Dead”, De La definitely managed to vary people’s opinion about them – they got rid of the hippie/soft label. They killed the old De La Soul image and did it by creating loads of amazing songs that I still like to at the present time. There are many great albums in the history of hip-hop, but none like the De La Soul album about De La Soul, which aimed to vary the way people thought of De La Soul. We didn’t use the word meta back then, but when we did, “Dead” could be the best meta hip-hop album.