the Wife = White Fans / Critics who adopted Rebirth of Slick
Fucking gold.
Having a metaphor for 'the wife' kinda opens it up a bit.
Could we consider De La Soul "Stakes is High" and 'the wife' would = Prince Paul? I'm not aware that bad blood had anything to do with "Stakes Is" being the first De La LP to NOT be produced by Prince Paul, but it was the first one without him, I think.
Regarding popularity...I can't recall how it was initially received amongst the sheeple. I always dug the shit out of it...it was truly my 'listening pleasure while [I was] doin [my] chores" BITD...sorry, I'll see myself out on that one.
Right on.
See to reduce HMD to "a record that wasn't popular when it came out but was then discovered" is blaspheme. Aside from being a masterpiece, that record was literally thrown in his wife's face. It is more than a revenge record, it's a "here you want something? Take this muthafucka!" Of epic proportions. Any pick in this thread should at least be operating on a secondary level like that. Most, if not all of the records listed in this thread aspired to be good and then didn't hit the mark commercially, or never garnered commercial respect in the first place like Marvin PreHMD did. HMD aspired to be a dagger in the neck of a lady, a record company, maybe even his own career. I get the sense from the biographies I read that at that moment he truly did not give a fusk.
I feel that Blowout Comb brilliantly/disastrously alienated the sector of fans that built the group. and it was done on purpose.
I was gonna mention Stakes but I don't think it's a good fit really.
Initially dissed by De La fans (yes, it was), then embraced by De La fans.
That's where the similarity to HMD starts and ends; it lacks all the other elements, backstory, etc.
BTW is ultimate commercial success one of the elements? I'm guessing no, but it seems to be seeping into the discussion here for some reason.
BTW is ultimate commercial success one of the elements? I'm guessing no, but it seems to be seeping into the discussion here for some reason.
I'd say so.
Gold albums arent slept on.
so initially slept-on by fans and gen pop alike, then eventually embraced by both?
Isnt this more of a Godfather Don little dude fetishization vs. folks actually reppin?
This did way better on the streets and radio than Funk Your Head Up.
what about that Prince Paul album where he tried to sound like NERD or something...it was definitely a failure..."Politics of Business"...it was a really bitter concept of an album(I think he didn't like the current sound of hip hop around then, and so he did his own take on it, and it was hard to tell if he was mocking/tongue in cheek/or it just sucked), and he didn't really pull it off. And it wasn't acclaimed later on, so I guess it doesn't fit...
Another wierd concept "fuck you" hip hop album that really sucked was Canibus's album "C true hollywood stories", which I think was a retaliation toward eminem and was horrid and juvenile, seemed like something someone would submit to a record company as a buzz off type thing.
The Love Movement, although I guess we're not there yet
this is actually a pretty good contender, too.
dudes are posting random mid-weight records that were ???obviously??? panned or ignored upon release, there's much more about HMD than that...
I bought 95% of these albums the day they came out and loved them. So, I don't think that was the point of this thread.
You can say what you want, but most of you guys were not feeling Paul's Boutique when it came out. It was out for a year or two before half of y'all even "got it".
BTW is ultimate commercial success one of the elements? I'm guessing no, but it seems to be seeping into the discussion here for some reason.
I'd say so.
Gold albums arent slept on.
so initially slept-on by fans and gen pop alike, then eventually embraced by both?
Isnt this more of a Godfather Don little dude fetishization vs. folks actually reppin?
This did way better on the streets and radio than Funk Your Head Up.
BTW is ultimate commercial success one of the elements? I'm guessing no, but it seems to be seeping into the discussion here for some reason.
I'd say so.
Gold albums arent slept on.
so initially slept-on by fans and gen pop alike, then eventually embraced by both?
Isnt this more of a Godfather Don little dude fetishization vs. folks actually reppin?
This did way better on the streets and radio than Funk Your Head Up.
I guess the Stretch & Bobbitto show didnt get to y'all.
DocMcCoy"Go and laugh in your own country!" 5,913 Posts
Dante said:
cai said:
Dante said:
The Love Movement, although I guess we're not there yet
this is actually a pretty good contender, too.
dudes are posting random mid-weight records that were ???obviously??? panned or ignored upon release, there's much more about HMD than that...
Yeah, I'm leaning towards this as well. Worth noting also how influential it's turned out to be. When it came out, I called it "a dog's breakfast of solipsistic emo/electro-pop that's neither one thing nor the other". I still don't think it's great, but now I'm more inclined to concede that it might just be a case of me not getting it. Sometimes that's going to happen no matter how much you work at it or how much you like the artist concerned, but it's since become apparent that there's a whole bunch of other people who didn't have that problem.
I think there's also an argument to be made that it comes closer than most to ticking the HMD box marked "dark, cathartic and emotionally heavy". Sudden death of a parent, collapse of a long-term relationship, "it's lonely at the top", etc.
I was actually wondering the other day whether it was time to go back and revisit that album in the context of what West did next and the fact that MBDTF (which, had it backfired commerically would surely have been up there as the number one contender for this) explores many of the similar themes. Don't think I've heard a single track from it since early 2009 - even the endless playing of Kanye on MTV channels seems to entirely skip this album.
You're right, it was 4 mics. Still a pretty good review tho from an influential mag.
But its not a 4 mics album.
Might not be.
Then again it is a (debut) album produced by Buckwild, Showbiz and Lord Finesse, plus Big L has a super ill voice. So glad i saw him live before he passed, RIP.
Anyway, just tryin to abide the HMD rules, sir. Which by the way should exclude debut albums imo.
For any album to be in this convo, we need to go back to "Here My Dear" for a moment and recall:
1) It's a Marvin Gaye album. MARVIN GAYE. By this point, his career was considered in decline but *that's compared to the guy who just dropped "What's Going On" and "Let's Get It On" earlier in the decade.* Also, "I Want You" was well-received even if it wasn't as monster as the two previous studio albums.
So you have to first start by asking: who the fuck in hip-hop would have been Marvin Gaye's equivalent.
Right off the bat, the eliminates at least 90% of the groups that have come into this conversation so far. Sorry Thes but that includes Digable. Never, ever were they a first tier hip-hop group in the same way that Gaye was first-tier in soul. Outkast and Kanye can stay in here.
2) HMD, at the time, was an album that people simply didn't get, right? It inspired some instant WTF reactions from the public and critics and it took "Sexual Healing" to bring Marvin back into popularity. So you need an album that really threw people for a loop on some "WTF is this?"
No De La Soul album comes remotely close. "Buhloone Mindstate" might have been "weird"...sort of? But by De La standards, it wasn't really left-field for them and in the grand scheme, it really wasn't that strange of an album, not then, certainly not now. Same with "Stakes Is High." De La have never released a straight up "WTF?" album. Neither has Outkast. They've released "less than stellar" albums (well, just one: the "Idlewild" soundtrack) but no one's really looked at an Outkast album through a WTF lens. That's kind of the great thing about being Outkast - they can get away with a lot that most others wouldn't be able to. But it's also what makes them harder to include in this exercise.
However: Kanye's "808s and Heartbreak" is a definite WTF album, arguably the biggest WTF album in recent memory given how it followed on Kanye's biggest hit of the time ("Graduation Day"). So +1 for "808s".
3) You would also need a pretty intense backstory and I can't imagine anything more intense than "here's my divorce settlement album." I'm not sure that exists in any other genre but I have a feeling there's some rock or country album that might be in that arena. But in hip-hop, I'm not sure there's any album recorded under bizarre enough circumstances that comes close.
"808s" was recorded after Kanye lost his mother in a bizarre plastic surgery incident and he broke up with his girlfriend. There's a backstory there. But it's not that strange or weird. So -1 for 808s.
4) It has to be an album that's since been completely redeemed, embraced and celebrated to the point where it becomes a point of making someone else feel like a dumb ass if they even question that album's greatness. In that respect, I'm more sympathetic to something like "Blowout Comb" but again, it fails the previous criteria.
"808s" hasn't been redeemed in this fashion either. I think people will acknowledge it's a better album than they may have once thought, but it's hard to imagine people really putting it on a pedestal as "unsung genius" or whatever. But hey, we should check back in 20 years and see.
For any album to be in this convo, we need to go back to "Here My Dear" for a moment and recall:
1) It's a Marvin Gaye album. MARVIN GAYE. By this point, his career was considered in decline but *that's compared to the guy who just dropped "What's Going On" and "Let's Get It On" earlier in the decade.* Also, "I Want You" was well-received even if it wasn't as monster as the two previous studio albums.
So you have to first start by asking: who the fuck in hip-hop would have been Marvin Gaye's equivalent.
Right off the bat, the eliminates at least 90% of the groups that have come into this conversation so far. Sorry Thes but that includes Digable. Never, ever were they a first tier hip-hop group in the same way that Gaye was first-tier in soul. Outkast and Kanye can stay in here.
2) HMD, at the time, was an album that people simply didn't get, right? It inspired some instant WTF reactions from the public and critics and it took "Sexual Healing" to bring Marvin back into popularity. So you need an album that really threw people for a loop on some "WTF is this?"
No De La Soul album comes remotely close. "Buhloone Mindstate" might have been "weird"...sort of? But by De La standards, it wasn't really left-field for them and in the grand scheme, it really wasn't that strange of an album, not then, certainly not now. Same with "Stakes Is High." De La have never released a straight up "WTF?" album. Neither has Outkast. They've released "less than stellar" albums (well, just one: the "Idlewild" soundtrack) but no one's really looked at an Outkast album through a WTF lens. That's kind of the great thing about being Outkast - they can get away with a lot that most others wouldn't be able to. But it's also what makes them harder to include in this exercise.
However: Kanye's "808s and Heartbreak" is a definite WTF album, arguably the biggest WTF album in recent memory given how it followed on Kanye's biggest hit of the time ("Graduation Day"). So +1 for "808s".
3) You would also need a pretty intense backstory and I can't imagine anything more intense than "here's my divorce settlement album." I'm not sure that exists in any other genre but I have a feeling there's some rock or country album that might be in that arena. But in hip-hop, I'm not sure there's any album recorded under bizarre enough circumstances that comes close.
"808s" was recorded after Kanye lost his mother in a bizarre plastic surgery incident and he broke up with his girlfriend. There's a backstory there. But it's not that strange or weird. So -1 for 808s.
4) It has to be an album that's since been completely redeemed, embraced and celebrated to the point where it becomes a point of making someone else feel like a dumb ass if they even question that album's greatness. In that respect, I'm more sympathetic to something like "Blowout Comb" but again, it fails the previous criteria.
"808s" hasn't been redeemed in this fashion either. I think people will acknowledge it's a better album than they may have once thought, but it's hard to imagine people really putting it on a pedestal as "unsung genius" or whatever. But hey, we should check back in 20 years and see.
When De La's first single came out it was definatfly a "WTF is this?" Moment in rap history. Not that it was first abstract rap song (see Dr. Jeckle & Me. Hydes "freshest rhymes in the world",rammellzee and k-robs "beat bop" ect. Ect. But I think it was a kinda lost art at the time and Paul And them set out for it to make people say wtf. And they did...then the rap fans were like WTF are white college kids in Vermont putting it in rotation to they're Grateful Dead rares.
When De La's first single came out it was definatfly a "WTF is this?" Moment in rap history. Not that it was first abstract rap song (see Dr. Jeckle & Me. Hydes "freshest rhymes in the world",rammellzee and k-robs "beat bop" ect. Ect. But I think it was a kinda lost art at the time and Paul And them set out for it to make people say wtf. And they did...then the rap fans were like WTF are white college kids in Vermont putting it in rotation to they're Grateful Dead rares.
"a kinda lost art" was being done by Ultramagnetic/Kool Keith the previous year.
Plug Tunin' was a "oh shit wtf is this" but lyrically not so much.
I haven't really listened to anything The Roots have put out since Phrenology, but they seem like the kind of group that 10-20 years from now some people will be looking at their later albums and raving about them in a revisionist sort of way. But I don't think they've ever lost their status as a critics' darling and there's no weird back story to any of their work as far as I know.
When De La's first single came out it was definatfly a "WTF is this?" Moment in rap history. Not that it was first abstract rap song (see Dr. Jeckle & Me. Hydes "freshest rhymes in the world",rammellzee and k-robs "beat bop" ect. Ect. But I think it was a kinda lost art at the time and Paul And them set out for it to make people say wtf. And they did...then the rap fans were like WTF are white college kids in Vermont putting it in rotation to they're Grateful Dead rares.
"a kinda lost art" was being done by Ultramagnetic/Kool Keith the previous year.
Plug Tunin' was a "oh shit wtf is this" but lyrically not so much.
When De La's first single came out it was definatfly a "WTF is this?" Moment in rap history. Not that it was first abstract rap song (see Dr. Jeckle & Me. Hydes "freshest rhymes in the world",rammellzee and k-robs "beat bop" ect. Ect. But I think it was a kinda lost art at the time and Paul And them set out for it to make people say wtf. And they did...then the rap fans were like WTF are white college kids in Vermont putting it in rotation to they're Grateful Dead rares.
"a kinda lost art" was being done by Ultramagnetic/Kool Keith the previous year.
Plug Tunin' was a "oh shit wtf is this" but lyrically not so much.
I figured i need not even mention ultra.
and i'll agree the beat was so next shit it was tough on the lyrics...but they had more wtfness then anything else out right then.
Comments
I was gonna mention Stakes but I don't think it's a good fit really.
Initially dissed by De La fans (yes, it was), then embraced by De La fans.
That's where the similarity to HMD starts and ends; it lacks all the other elements, backstory, etc.
BTW is ultimate commercial success one of the elements? I'm guessing no, but it seems to be seeping into the discussion here for some reason.
I'd say so.
Gold albums arent slept on.
so initially slept-on by fans and gen pop alike, then eventually embraced by both?
Or slept on by fans initially (tho not gen pop) and eventually embraced by both?
:hijack:
Isnt this more of a Godfather Don little dude fetishization vs. folks actually reppin?
This did way better on the streets and radio than Funk Your Head Up.
what about that Prince Paul album where he tried to sound like NERD or something...it was definitely a failure..."Politics of Business"...it was a really bitter concept of an album(I think he didn't like the current sound of hip hop around then, and so he did his own take on it, and it was hard to tell if he was mocking/tongue in cheek/or it just sucked), and he didn't really pull it off. And it wasn't acclaimed later on, so I guess it doesn't fit...
Another wierd concept "fuck you" hip hop album that really sucked was Canibus's album "C true hollywood stories", which I think was a retaliation toward eminem and was horrid and juvenile, seemed like something someone would submit to a record company as a buzz off type thing.
but if we must....
[i'm basing it pretty much solely on "wedding crasher" vs. "you can leave, but it's going to cost you"
this is actually a pretty good contender, too.
dudes are posting random mid-weight records that were ???obviously??? panned or ignored upon release, there's much more about HMD than that...
how is this hiphop?
U cant or wont find a parallel for what Marvin did to his wife on a conceptual Hip Hop album.
It would even try to match that dimension.
I think the re-evaluation is more intriguing within the genre.
You can say what you want, but most of you guys were not feeling Paul's Boutique when it came out. It was out for a year or two before half of y'all even "got it".
Not in Boston.
Yeah, I'm leaning towards this as well. Worth noting also how influential it's turned out to be. When it came out, I called it "a dog's breakfast of solipsistic emo/electro-pop that's neither one thing nor the other". I still don't think it's great, but now I'm more inclined to concede that it might just be a case of me not getting it. Sometimes that's going to happen no matter how much you work at it or how much you like the artist concerned, but it's since become apparent that there's a whole bunch of other people who didn't have that problem.
I think there's also an argument to be made that it comes closer than most to ticking the HMD box marked "dark, cathartic and emotionally heavy". Sudden death of a parent, collapse of a long-term relationship, "it's lonely at the top", etc.
This album got five stars from The Source when it dropped iirc...
But its not a 4 mics album.
Might not be.
Then again it is a (debut) album produced by Buckwild, Showbiz and Lord Finesse, plus Big L has a super ill voice. So glad i saw him live before he passed, RIP.
Anyway, just tryin to abide the HMD rules, sir. Which by the way should exclude debut albums imo.
1) It's a Marvin Gaye album. MARVIN GAYE. By this point, his career was considered in decline but *that's compared to the guy who just dropped "What's Going On" and "Let's Get It On" earlier in the decade.* Also, "I Want You" was well-received even if it wasn't as monster as the two previous studio albums.
So you have to first start by asking: who the fuck in hip-hop would have been Marvin Gaye's equivalent.
Right off the bat, the eliminates at least 90% of the groups that have come into this conversation so far. Sorry Thes but that includes Digable. Never, ever were they a first tier hip-hop group in the same way that Gaye was first-tier in soul. Outkast and Kanye can stay in here.
2) HMD, at the time, was an album that people simply didn't get, right? It inspired some instant WTF reactions from the public and critics and it took "Sexual Healing" to bring Marvin back into popularity. So you need an album that really threw people for a loop on some "WTF is this?"
No De La Soul album comes remotely close. "Buhloone Mindstate" might have been "weird"...sort of? But by De La standards, it wasn't really left-field for them and in the grand scheme, it really wasn't that strange of an album, not then, certainly not now. Same with "Stakes Is High." De La have never released a straight up "WTF?" album. Neither has Outkast. They've released "less than stellar" albums (well, just one: the "Idlewild" soundtrack) but no one's really looked at an Outkast album through a WTF lens. That's kind of the great thing about being Outkast - they can get away with a lot that most others wouldn't be able to. But it's also what makes them harder to include in this exercise.
However: Kanye's "808s and Heartbreak" is a definite WTF album, arguably the biggest WTF album in recent memory given how it followed on Kanye's biggest hit of the time ("Graduation Day"). So +1 for "808s".
3) You would also need a pretty intense backstory and I can't imagine anything more intense than "here's my divorce settlement album." I'm not sure that exists in any other genre but I have a feeling there's some rock or country album that might be in that arena. But in hip-hop, I'm not sure there's any album recorded under bizarre enough circumstances that comes close.
"808s" was recorded after Kanye lost his mother in a bizarre plastic surgery incident and he broke up with his girlfriend. There's a backstory there. But it's not that strange or weird. So -1 for 808s.
4) It has to be an album that's since been completely redeemed, embraced and celebrated to the point where it becomes a point of making someone else feel like a dumb ass if they even question that album's greatness. In that respect, I'm more sympathetic to something like "Blowout Comb" but again, it fails the previous criteria.
"808s" hasn't been redeemed in this fashion either. I think people will acknowledge it's a better album than they may have once thought, but it's hard to imagine people really putting it on a pedestal as "unsung genius" or whatever. But hey, we should check back in 20 years and see.
When De La's first single came out it was definatfly a "WTF is this?" Moment in rap history. Not that it was first abstract rap song (see Dr. Jeckle & Me. Hydes "freshest rhymes in the world",rammellzee and k-robs "beat bop" ect. Ect. But I think it was a kinda lost art at the time and Paul And them set out for it to make people say wtf. And they did...then the rap fans were like WTF are white college kids in Vermont putting it in rotation to they're Grateful Dead rares.
I haven't really listened to anything The Roots have put out since Phrenology, but they seem like the kind of group that 10-20 years from now some people will be looking at their later albums and raving about them in a revisionist sort of way. But I don't think they've ever lost their status as a critics' darling and there's no weird back story to any of their work as far as I know.
the problem with critical is the production wasnt abstract enough for the rhymes