Stakes Is High

Product Information

The streaming version of the album divides "The Bizness" into two tracks, "The Bizness" and "Yunonstop".

Great to see so many other reviewers echoing what I'm feeling about this record - its absolute quality!Here, they're no longer so self-conscious and it's easy to remember why you liked them enough in the first place to stick with them through the hard times. Then they tried to kill the Daisy with their follow-up, De La Soul Is Dead and then tried to find their way through the aftermath of that unnecessary act on Buh-Loone Mind State. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. I look back on people like that and think about how they had that moment of clarity, where they looked around them and at things decaying in their society–whether it’s music or life, that’s where “Stakes is High” was at.

The album marked a change in the group's sound and direction, as it was their first release not produced in collaboration with Prince Paul.Dilla was excited because here we are at this point in time where Dilla had already been seasoned in the game doing different things in the name of The Ummah, working with different artists but hadn’t did a De La Soul record.

The music video for "Stakes Is High" has all three members of De La Soul on an episode of The Maury Povich Show (with Povich appearing as himself) about hip-hop culture in the 1990s and how much of an influence it is on the world, along with clips of each De La Soul member doing typical household chores (raking leaves, doing laundry, etc.Dave's input was no less outspoken: "I'm sick of bitches shakin' asses / I'm sick of talkin' about blunts / Sick of Versace glasses / Sick of slang / Sick of half-ass awards shows / Sick of name brand clothes. Stakes Is High deals with many topics, including the state of hip-hop, the commercialization of hip-hop culture, and criticism of gangsta rap.