Amazon.com
Like De La Soul's Three Feet High & Rising,
the Pharcyde's 1992 debut came at a time when hip-hop was headed in one
direction, but the group was going somewhere else entirely. A crew of
spunky b-boys armed with a self-deprecating sense of humor, the
Pharcyde made an album that was fresh and profoundly honest. "Ya Mama"
is a clever array of mother jokes set to cartoonish beats; "On the DL"
has each MC unguardedly making self-denigrating confessions (like Fat
Lip admitting to masturbating--previously a hip-hop no-no); and
"Passin' Me By" is an ode to hopeless crushes on unattainable women.
The group's playfulness was also infused with smarts, too, most visibly
on "Officer." Recorded around the time of the Rodney King verdict, the song was an indictment of racial profiling--shrouded, of course, in a comic tale that parodied Public Enemy's "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos." With animated beats from J-Swift (the West Coast version of Prince Paul)
and four distinct rhyming styles, particularly Slim Kid Tre's
melodiousness and Fat Lip's nerdiness, this album captures an innocence
rarely seen in the music's posturing ways. It's something that this
album captures forever. --Joseph Patel
