Anna Minard, our city hall reporter, claims to "know nothing about music." For this column, we're forcing her to listen to all the records that music nerds consider important.
We start on an old-timey game show. Are you ready? "How many fibers are intertwined in a Shredded Wheat biscuit?" The purpose of the game, other than answering questions, winning, and getting money, are left unclear. We enter the world of this album through a skit, and leave it through a skit, but the theme doesn't swim throughout every song, it doesn't feel like a concept album. We've just turned on some old TV in a room somewhere, and the channel changes itself.
De La Soul play a game very well: The rhymes and beats sound smooth and rich yet easy and casual, like everything's rolling off the tongue. Like this is how they spit grocery lists, what their voice-mail message sounds like, what happens when you get a fake hairbrush microphone near their faces at a party. But the words roll so fast! Faster than they seem—if you are a rap-along-in-your-car kind of person, you are totally screwed a lot of the time, though you may not realize it at first. Save it for the professionals here and just enjoy.