"3 Feet High and Rising": De La Soul's Track by Track Guide to Groundbreaking 1989 LP

"Ghetto Thang"

Mase: "We had 'Ghetto Thang' as an idea for a long time. We had that tune on the keyboard — "
Trugoy: "It was one of those times in Mase's den on Smith Street where we always sat there and created ideas and Mase's mom would come into the den having juice and cookies for us." [All laugh]
Mase: "I gotta get out of here."
Posdnous: "I'm gonna mess your head up: The original title for 'Ghetto Thang' was 'Soft Violins,' because we were playing with the violin sound on the keyboard. It was just once again, one of the routines we were trying to come up with in the house. By the time we were with Tommy Boy we were able to give it a better beat, give it a better keyboard, and it wound up becoming a song that talked about things that happen in the ghettos of America. We said, 'Let's make sure we have something like "The Message" from Grandmaster Flash, like, wow, that's a whole other level of looking at things.' I think it was important for us, already being known from our singles as being funny and witty, to have something like that added as well."

"Transmitting Live From Mars"

[This song was the subject of a lawsuit presented by the Turtles over copyright infringement]

Posdnous: "Trouble, basically. My pops had this 45 — I don't know why he had this record — it was this French instructional record. I thought it would sound cool with this Wilson Pickett cover of 'Hey Jude,' and then Paul had the Turtles record ['You Showed Me'], so he said let's put that with it, so we just added it all together. It's just amazing how big that skit became, even beyond legal matters. When we played Paris they would go crazy over that. It wound up introducing us to Serge Gainsbourg, who we wound up sampling on later records."
Trugoy: "We didn't think any sample on the album would be a problem, because we gave all the information to Tommy Boy, but to hear that a skit was actually the problem was crazy."

"Eye Know"

Posdnous: "When me and Dave worked in the mall, we would just hear songs playing in the loudspeakers. They would always play [Steely Dan's] 'Peg' and we were, even then, aspiring to be a group, and we were like, 'Yo, that could be a dope song to use.' So, when it came about time to use it, we took that part 'I know I'll love you better,' we took the Lee Dorsey beat, we used the horns from another Mad Lads record, and that was it. It was fun. It was kinda my first time programming a beat."

"Take It Off"

Trugoy: "That was another one of those moments where there were 25 people in the studio. There was a song out there at the time called 'Kick the Ball' and it used the same Headhunters beat, so we basically mimicked the sound of their single and, instead of saying 'kick the ball,' we said 'take it off' and thought about all the cliché hip-hop stuff that people should just change and find some individualism or some of their own personality, as opposed to falling in line with what hip-hop was supposed to be. It was something we felt strongly about. We felt like there shouldn't have been guidelines for hip-hop."

"A Little Bit of Soap"

Posdnous: "Once again, just going through records. The original song was called 'Little Bit of Soap,' so we just decided to flip it in a funny way to talk about how someone could smell bad."