De La Soul "3 Feet High and Rising" [1989]

A tragic case of being far less than the sum of its parts, "3 Feet High and Rising" is a maddeningly sloppy collage of AM Top 40 snippets thrust together haphazardly, over which they let these soft-bellied boys from the New York suburbs flop around limp rhymes about uncomfortable high school sex, unconvincing odes to the street and other ill-advised vignettes about as deep as a Saturday morning cartoon (to say nothing of the tremendous stink-bomb of a game-show skit running periodically throughout the album). Adding insult to injury is the annoying Keith Haring-style day-glo packaging, served up as some lame late-80s version of "flower power." Except there wasn't any war De La Soul was fighting, save for the one they were winning against quality hip-hop and comedy.