Stakes Is High: De La Soul's dark turn, thirty years on

Stakes Is High is the De La Soul album that came out swinging and took the hits. It landed on July 2, 1996, on Tommy Boy, the group's first record without Prince Paul and their first with J Dilla, then credited as Jay Dee, behind the title cut. 2Pac answered it on "Against All Odds". Treach held his grudge for about fifteen years. The record sold poorly. It is also the one Posdnuos says he can listen to from beginning to end the most, which is a lot to say about the darkest, most serious record in their catalogue. The 30th-anniversary edition is scheduled for October 23, with instrumental tracks and additional songs.

The group started at the top. 3 Feet High and Rising arrived in 1989 as an instant classic and a global smash, and the hippies-of-hip-hop tag followed them for years. De La Soul Is Dead came in 1991, then Buhloone Mindstate in 1993, a fraught cult record that left them unsure where they stood. Stakes Is High was the fourth album and the pivot, and the first without the producer who had shaped the previous three. What came after is a long, spread-out run: the Art Official Intelligence records in 2000 and 2001, The Grind Date in 2004, and the Anonymous Nobody in 2016. Trugoy the Dove died in 2023. Cabin in the Sky, the group's most recent album, is posthumous, and Posdnuos calls him "our life partner".

Stakes Is High was made without Prince Paul because the group did not think the beats he turned in matched the record's mood, so they produced it themselves, with Jay Dee, DJ Ogee, Spearhead X and Skeff Anslem adding tracks. Posdnuos calls it a critical point in their career. Buhloone Mindstate had come out at a weird time, Wu-Tang and Tribe had both just released records, and the group did not know where it stood. That uncertainty drives the record. The album is an argument about rap: who owns it, what the money did to it, what gangsta rap was selling. "We just expressed ourselves," Posdnuos says. "We had fun doing it."

The beats carry the first part of the case. They are sample-heavy and often warm, funk loops with room left in them, and then the title track arrives and Jay Dee strips the comfort back to a hard, defiant frame. The interludes do the rest of the talking. The intro collects voices remembering where they were the first time they heard Criminal Minded, which sets the terms in the first minute: this record is about what rap means to the people who live inside it. "Long Island Degrees" closes with a man explaining, at length, why he hates rap. On "Betta Listen", Posdnuos and Maseo talk past each other about a club. "Pony Ride" ends on an excerpt from Crumb, where Maxon Crumb describes living on the streets, and the phrase the album is named for comes out of his mouth.

Elsewhere it is a guest list and a set of boasts. "The Bizness" hands a verse to Common, who fits their pacing without breaking it. "Big Brother Beat" does the same for Mos Def, the verse that introduced him to a wider audience. "4 More" brings Zhane in. The title track opens and closes on dice-game chatter and a man talking about the O. J. Simpson trials, the most 1996 thing on the record. "Sunshine" ends the album on a young man's voice and no resolution.

Anyone who wants 3 Feet High and Rising again should look elsewhere. This one is for the listener who wants the group's hardest, most serious pass at what rap was becoming, and who will sit still while the record keeps interrupting its own songs to make a point. Put it beside the rap it was measured against in 1996 and it does not flinch.

What does not work is the traffic. The short spoken pieces between songs stop momentum more often than they build it, and the joke at the end of "Betta Listen" only works once. The production is split between the group and four outside beatmakers, and the pieces do not always sit in the same room. A few of the lectures about the state of rap have aged worse than the beats under them. The anniversary edition promises instrumentals and additional songs; nothing more about the extras has been announced, and the instrumentals are the part worth waiting for, because much of this record's case is made in the samples.

It lands at 3.5: hard, uneven, and still winning most of its arguments. It is not the De La Soul album to start with, but it is the one that shows what they were willing to spend.

The tracklist

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