Thirty five years after its release, De La Soul’s debut album is firmly ensconced in the pantheon of unimpeachable classics, and Me Myself And I is a fixture on mainstream classic radio. So it’s easy to forget what a shock 3 Feet High and Rising represented on release. It was, gasped one US critic’s review, “unlike any rap you or anyone else has ever heard”. If that wasn’t entirely true – 3 Feet High and Rising certainly had antecedents, both in the easygoing humour of Biz Markie’s style and in the beat-digging, fast-cutting, eclectic sound of old-school DJs, as wont to play Dizzy Gillespie or the Monkees’ Mary Mary as James Brown and Funkadelic – it wasn’t far off the mark. The album certainly didn’t sound like anything else that was around at the time – even those by their friends in the Native Tongues rap collective.

That album sounded like it existed in its own world, De La Soul presenting as rap’s weird kids running amok in the back of the classroom. It was uninterested in the genre’s standard brash posturing. As if to underline that fact, Dave Jolicoeur rapped under the name Trugoy the Dove: “trugoy” is “yogurt” backwards (“I eat it a lot,” he explained). Rather than using the same slang as everyone else, Trugoy and fellow MCs Kelvin “Posdnuos” Mercer and Vincent Lamont “Maseo” Mason Jr invented their own: their rhymes were “a phrase called talk”, a rapper they admired was a “public speaker”, if something was “Dan Stuckee”

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