(“Ya mama got so much hair under her arm it looks like she got Buckwheat in a headlock.”)ĭigital Underground’s Sex Packets soon followed. The Compton gangster had that nasty funk. De La Soul’s style was comparatively high concept and outwardly subversive. King Tee’s raunchiness descended from Red Foxx, Richard Pryor, Rudy Ray Moore, and seminal South Central comic label, Laff Records. These first two skits underscore the aesthetic contrast of early East and West Coast hip hop. Yet Tee beat them to market by several months, making him the Leif Erikson of rap skits to De La Soul’s Columbus. Each innovation occurred independently of one another. But while De La unquestionably popularized the trope, the first full-fledged rap skit was probably “Baggin’ on Moms,” released in November 1988 by Compton gangsta rapper, King Tee.ĭe La Soul had finished recording 3 Feet High before Tee’s early West Coast classic hit stores. Interstitial padding quickly became practically mandatory.
They could be game shows, panoramic films, or self-aware parody. Rap albums could suddenly be more than song collections. Perfect scores in The Source validated the high concept experimentation. The skits offered three-dimensionality and surrealist levitation previously only seen in Slick Rick and Rammellzee. Sketch improv-style like comics performing in the subway.” “It was always the same: nothing written, all off the top of the head. We had the concept of kids in the schoolyard and got Mista Lawnge from Black Sheep, a few friends, and their nieces and nephews,” recalls Paul. “After we finished recording, we just picked a day to do the skits. If you didn’t know better, you’d assume it was stitched into the fabric from first conception. The same went for the group’s sophomore album, De La Soul Is Dead, which upped the complexity with a running satire about teenage thugs lampooning a De La tape they found in the trash. They spontaneously conceived everything that last day in the studio. We never thought it would become a rap album staple.”įor their interludes, De La Soul spoofed Day-Glo game shows and eccentric children’s records. It was just something we tried out and it evolved. “We did it to fill that void, to give our album some structure. “Rap records always had some dialogue in them, like, ‘Hey man, I’m gonna’ smack you in the face,’ or ‘Yo…let’s get it!’ but they weren’t sketches with a whole vibe to them,” Paul says. So when Paul proposed the 3 Feet High and Rising Game Show, the four plugs effortlessly fired off improv riffs about the Alligator Bob, the joys of Twizzlers, and the number of feathers on a Perdue Chicken. The Amityville trio had previously experimented with what they called “bug-out pieces,” goofing off at home. With De La Soul, the 21-year old counted as the veteran. His only real opportunity at comic glory came on a Stetsasonic radio spoof, where he flexed his patented Billy Dee Williams impression. But they were older and found the schemes juvenile. Paul had previously introduced similar ideas to his earlier group Stetsasonic. “I started thinking about those old game show formats where the host would always introduce some guy, who would be like, ‘I’m George and I like water skiing.’ It was geeky, but it gave people an instant sense of identity.”
“My problem with a lot of hip hop albums back then was that most MCs didn’t know who they were,” Paul continues. “We sat around listening to the record and I realized that we needed something to link it together,” says Prince Paul, remembering that late 1988 afternoon on Long Island. As the group prepared to hand their debut into Tommy Boy, an epiphany struck. The difference between the Batmobile and a Batmobile that can fly. But at the last second, producer Prince Paul sensed something was missing. 3 Feet High and Rising was sequenced and mixed.
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