By Marcus Willis • October 15, 2019

The stigma of the so-called sophomore jinx can be a motherfucker. Imagine you’re an artist who makes a debut album that comes out of nowhere with no attached expectations, and it blows the fuck up. Your genre-fusing first single becomes a cultural moment that unwittingly endears you to rock critics (who all love you in New York), Billboard, the GRAMMYs, and other hip-hop outsiders who would dig rap if only it weren’t so damn rappy. No matter what your next album sounds like, it’ll be an uphill battle to please label execs who just want another crossover smash.

This was the reality for Brooklyn-based trio Digable Planets, whose introductory hit single “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat),” with its Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers-plucked upright bass and trumpet, abstract hipness depictions, and grayscale, multicultural-beatnik-speakeasy video, made them the new poster children for the faddish jazz-rap tag that folks previously tried to tack on to A Tribe Called Quest and fellow NYC transplants Gang Starr.

The just-as-eclectically-titled debut LP Reachin' (A New Refutation of Time and Space) (1993), featuring an endless brick-and-mortar record store’s receipt worth of jazz-staple samples, infinitely repeatable hooks, and painfully literal bebop-lounge skits, further solidified and embraced the hyphenate classification.

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