Philaflava.com ::

The 90's had way too many albums to just do one poll. Probably will do one more of these.. As was stated, the first poll was simply taking the highest 1 or 2 voted albums for each individual year and putting them against each other. Might do one more of these and then take the highest voted from all 3 and do one final poll. It's nothing to get all bent out of shape about, just some fun for us who love 90's Hip Hop. All in good fun..

Chose 3 albums from the list.

This shit is almost harder than the first

Ok, now you're just trolling us. This could be 4 diff polls.

Pick one for me.

Brand Nubian - One For All
Gang Starr- Daily Operation
De La Soul Bulhoone Mind State
O.C.- Word Life
Beatnuts - Street Level
Pete Rock and Cl Smooth- The Main Ingredient

Philaflava wrote:Ok, now you're just trolling us. This could be 4 diff polls.

Pick one for me.

Brand Nubian - One For All
Gang Starr- Daily Operation
De La Soul Bulhoone Mind State
O.C.- Word Life
Beatnuts - Street Level
Pete Rock and Cl Smooth- The Main Ingredient

Good news, you get 3 choices!

BTW, you started this shit with the 92 poll.. lol Let's not forget I just ran with the great idea.. Mad fun tho

Brand Nubian- One For All
Beatnuts- Street Level
Smif N Wessun- Da Shinin

Extremely difficult, but I chose The Main Ingredient. Could have easily chose The Beatnuts, Black Sheep, Common Sense or N.W.A.

Why the hell would you include 8 Ball & MJG, Juvenile and BG??? smfh

Daily Operation
Life After Death
The Sun Rises in the East

Primo had a hand in all 3

WiCkEd22 wrote:Extremely difficult, but I chose The Main Ingredient. Could have easily chose The Beatnuts, Black Sheep, Common Sense or N.W.A.

Why the hell would you include 8 Ball & MJG, Juvenile and BG??? smfh

Go back, because you have 3 votes! Those you mentioned that you were not feeling had votes in the individual polls and were included for integrity. Believer me, things I didn't vote for and wouldn't have got love here so had to keep it right. Music is an objective thing. What me or you are into isn't what everyone else likes. Gotta respect that.

pradadon wrote:

WiCkEd22 wrote:Extremely difficult, but I chose The Main Ingredient. Could have easily chose The Beatnuts, Black Sheep, Common Sense or N.W.A.

Why the hell would you include 8 Ball & MJG, Juvenile and BG??? smfh

Go back, because you have 3 votes! Those you mentioned that you were not feeling had votes in the individual polls and were included for integrity. Believer me, things I didn't vote for and wouldn't have got love here so had to keep it right. Music is an objective thing. What me or you are into isn't what everyone else likes. Gotta respect that.

OK cool. I guess I just thought this was a HipHop thing, not Rap. *shrugs*

3 votes??

01. Pete & CL - The Main Ingredient
02. Beatnuts - Street Level
03. N.W.A. - Efil4zaggin

Hold on, Efil4zaggin is Hiphop, not Rap?

step son wrote:Hold on, Efil4zaggin is Hiphop, not Rap?

Went with the ones I'd choose if I had to listen to 3 today...

Jeru 'Sun Rises...'
Mobb Deep 'Hell On Earth'
Jay Z 'Vol 2'

Efil4zaggin
Hell on Earth
Dah Shinin'

De La Soul Is Dead
Daily Operation
Word Life

yeah, it's definitely harder than the first one. 5 choices would be perfect.

wanted to vote for brand nubian's "one for all", but since "a wolf in sheep's clothing" had no votes until now, I had to change my opinion. such a great album...

This was a nightmare to pick
went with black sheep, Beatnuts and Brand Nubian

Dah Shinin, narrowly ahead of Street Level.

In the interest of not picking two De La Soul albums went with:
Stakes Is High
Uptown Saturday Night
Dr. Octagon

DLSID could've easily displaced Doc Oc.

Mine being the lone Uptown Saturday Night vote is an atrocity rivaled only by the general consensus that the group at some point in their career "fell off."

I am in the camp that feel De La Soul Is Dead is their 3rd best album too.

I'd rank it 2nd.

Stakes Is High
DLSID
Buhloone
3 Feet
AOI Bionix
Grind Date
AOI
And the Anonymous Nobody

Philaflava wrote:I am in the camp that feel De La Soul Is Dead is their 3rd best album too.

Same here.

With each passing year, I enjoy the debut more and more. I'd say that it's easily my favorite these days.

Versive wrote:I'd rank it 2nd.

Stakes Is High
DLSID
Buhloone
3 Feet
AOI Bionix
Grind Date
AOI
And the Anonymous Nobody

Every so often I give Stakes another go but aside from about 3 tracks (title track, The Biznizz + something else) I find it kinda boring tbh. Never heard all of the AOI albums but Grind Date is pretty fucking good. Certainly better than any album recorded 15 years after the artists debut should be.

DLSID
3 feet high
Buhloon
Stakes is high


the rest....

I'm with Step that I always found stakes is high good, but ultimately kinda boring compared to the prior three albums , which are all pretty much classics to me.

Stakes Is High is my favorite rap album, and in my opinion the definitive Long Island hip-hop album.
I can totally see why a good amount of people find it boring. (But the idea that there are only 3 good songs is crazy to me.)
At the same time, I have AOI Bionix above Grind Date mostly because of these two songs:

3 Feet High will always be my favorite De La Album. I think there are stand out tracks on the other albums but as a whole 3 Feet is my favorite since it came out.

Versive wrote:Stakes Is High is my favorite rap album, and in my opinion the definitive Long Island hip-hop album.
I can totally see why a good amount of people find it boring. (But the idea that there are only 3 good songs is crazy to me.)

I feel like, for me at least, my view on it has to do more with when it came out. When the first three came out, I was in that young and impressionable stage of music listening. By the time Stakes is high dropped I was 20 and , in my eyes, it was a departure from their old sound (Prince paul) which I wasn't crazy about. That said, I do like that album and think it certainly has more than 3 good songs on it. But I'll always choose that prince paul shit over anything else they ever did.

Right, that's one of the things I get about the consensus view that their work with Paul is better. I didn't start listening to them until years after the first four albums dropped, so my perspective is obviously informed by that.

The other thing, also related to production, is that the beats are indeed kind of boring for lack of a better word. They're super lo-fi compared to Paul's collage-type work, they rarely bump in a conventional sense, and though my grasp on music theory is tenuous at best, I'd say it sounds like most of them are in minor keys. Dog Eat Dog comes to mind. Even when De La was at their darkest on DLSID, the music still had an innocence about it. To me, Stakes Is High sounds grown up and disenfranchised, but mature about it. If that makes sense.

Possibly worth noting in defense of of Stakes Is High that Prince Paul has called it his favorite De La album.