Stakes Is High by De La Soul
Stakes Is High is De La Soul's fourth full-length album, released during the summer of 1996. The album marked a change in the groups sound and direction as it was their first release not to be produced in collaboration with Prince Paul. Stakes Is High was mainly produced by the group themselves with additional tracks provided by Jay Dee, DJ Ogee, Spearhead X and Skeff Anslem. It received mostly strong reviews but little commercial success. Stakes Is High was responsible for introducing rapper/actor Mos Def to a wider audience, on the cut "Big Brother Beat". Common also makes an appearance on "The Bizness". Stakes Is High marked the first time the group did not collaborate with long-time producer Prince Paul on an album. On Stakes Is High, De La Soul also attempted to bridge the growing gaps between the original members of the Native Tongues collective, although none of those artists make an actual appearance on the album. After the album's release, the group toured extensively and remained rather quiet before returning in 2000 with the first installment in their "Art Official Intelligence" series, Mosaic Thump.
On their fourth album, <i>Stakes Is High</i>, De La Soul provide the missing link between their unconventional attitude toward ’80s hip-hop and the upcoming revolution in ’90s “indie rap”—the idiosyncratic rappers like Black Star and Company Flow that took their ball and ran with it. It marked a moment where they could have just as easily fallen off—stakes were indeed high, and they subsequently moved away from Prince Paul’s screwball energy toward self-produced boom-bap and classically technical lyricism and punchlines. “I think when Paul was leaving, it was a little scary,” Trugoy the Dove told Apple Music in 2018. “The approach, being on our own, it was scary. It was the first time we invited that many outside producers into our space.” Yearning for the days when MCs were MCs, the album is rooted in the trio’s deserved mythology as rap veterans and an undying devotion to the genre’s tenets. Raps Posdnuos, “While you others represent, I present my rep.” Naturally, its incisive bars about bars would be sampled by a phalanx of artists (Beastie Boys, Gang Starr, Jeru the Damaja, Quasimoto, Deltron 3030) and provided many through lines to the independent rap of the late ’90s: one of the first recorded appearances of Mos Def (“Big Brother Beat”), a guest appearance from Common (“The Bizness”) and a beat (“Stakes Is High”) from a little-known producer who would ultimately call himself J Dilla and change the world with his loping, human production.
