★★★★★
Around the turn of the 1990s, hip-hop had a brief and fruitful collision with jazz. "You could find the Abstract listening to hip-hop/ My pops used to say, it reminded him of bebop," said Q-Tip on 1991's The Low End Theory, an album that included contributions from legendary second-Miles Quintet bassist Ron Carter and featured a song called "Jazz (We've Got)"...
- pitchfork.com
2013-06-25
★★★★★
We are finally set to reissue Blowout Comb, the 1994 second album by cult, Brooklyn-based hip hop trio Digable Planets. The album is named for the combs used to maintain an Afro hairstyle, and that's significant. The group's Ishmael 'Butterfly' Butler said it summed up what they wanted to do with it: 'It means the utilization of the natural, a natural style,' he has said...
- www.forcedexposure.com
2013-05-29
★★★★★
Unlike a lot of the bands I conceived One Hit Wonder Week as a chance to grant exposure to, I know exactly why the Digable Planets got stuck with their one-hit status. It's pretty simple, really -- sophomore jinx. Although it's not a bad record per se, the 1994 epic Blowout Comb is so wildly overambitious, so seeped in in-jokes and references and dense with local knowledge that the band must have known in advance that there was no way it was going to match Reachin''s crossover cool...
- www.nudeasthenews.com
2009-07-28
★★★★★
As much as I enjoy Ego Trip's "Book of Rap Lists," I've always taken great exception to the fact that on pages 334-335 they list the self-proclaimed "Greatest Albums of 1993" and that Digable Planets is nowhere on the list. It gets worse - on pages 325-326 they profess the "Greatest Singles" of 1992 and '93 and "Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)" isn't mentioned for either year.What's wrong with this picture...
- rapreviews.com
2009-07-21
★★★★★
Did you know the commies made a short comeback in '94? Not the ones you're thinking about. The Berlin wall fell in '89, after all. These commies wantedblack folks to unite and stand up against fascist suit scumbags on their side of the ocean. But New York summers are way too hot for fur coats,military boots and march songs. So what do you do? Stay smooth. Not all revolutions have to be the violent kind...
- rapreviews.com
2009-07-21
★★★★★
The title's about escaping oppression and mortality, fleeing social madness and physical contingency into a spiritual realm of your own, and I say they get away clean. As the Godfather taught and the Planets agree--on "Escape-Ism" and "Escapism (Gettin' Free)," respectively--all music is escapist one way or another, a symbolic/sensual refuge no matter how cerebral, demanding, or hard to take...
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-10
★★★★★
Their edge was music not attitude, vocals not words--they had 'em both, their fellow middle-class revolutionaries in Arrested Development didn't. So while the follow-up rhymes could be more down-to-earth, it's amazing how good they sound with a live band and limited samples--less jazzy, a loss, but still thick, warm, and smoove...
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-10
★★★★★
With bebop samples, boho attitudes, and oftenpainfully cute lingo, this sexually mixed trio creates an ultrahip,deliberately fuzzy, retro universe on Reachin' (A New Refutation of Time and Space). Gimmicks aside, Digable Planet's brand offunk floats along on air-spun smoothness, with special praises due to"La Femme Fetal," possibly hip-hop's first pro-choice rhyme. B+
- ew.com
2009-06-12
★★★★★
Remember those beat-poet puppets on Pee-wee's Playhouse? Imagine a hip-hop version of that trio trapped in the Gap ad where the turtlenecked poet recites verse to an anonymous crowd of cool people. The setting is cribbed, but the combination of dreadlocked Digable Planets and slicked-back
Asian jazz musicians in the video for Rebirth of Slick is so hot it may set off your smoke alarm. B+
- ew.com
2009-06-12