Long before the "life music" of Arrested Development and PM Dawn rose over the hip-hop landscape, the Jungle Brothers envisioned the hood as a lush, communal, Afrocentric utopia where knowledge and spirituality sprout from the cracks in the asphalt and all brothers and sisters are lifted up. In contrast to the battle-front dispatches of the gangsta school, the JBs dwelled in an alternative univers...

At their prime in the late '80s, the Jungle Brothers reflected all of hip-hop's potential – their second album, 1989's spiritual, street-wise Done by the Forces of Nature, was as conscious as it was funky and stands out as one of the most overlooked rap albums of that decade. On 1993's JBeez Wit the Remedy, the Brothers tried to reconcile their experimental impulses with the meaner-spirited...

The Jungle Brothers are part of the Native Tongues, a triumvirate of innovative rap groups (including De la Soul and A Tribe Called Quest) united in the belief that by adopting progressive attitudes the rap movement has nothing to lose but its gold chains. Like De la Soul, the Jungle Brothers are funky and cosmic, and they don't lose a shred of their defness by quoting the Bible, bad-mouthing...