★★★★★
There's never been a hip-hop LP quite like The Pharcyde's 1992 debut. Twenty years on, its quirky good humour, self-deprecation and searingly honest tales of everyday life remain an anomaly: a rare but joyous example of rap without ego. This celebratory box set boasts a wealth of remixes and instrumentals to complement the remastered original...
- recordcollectormag.com
2013-04-02
★★★★★
In the early 1990s, west coast hip hop was, from the outside looking in, dominated by gangsta rap. The vibrations from N.W.A.'s Straight Outta Compton were still being felt; Ice-T's O.G. Original Gangster album was huge; and 2Pac began his commercial ascent. But Los Angeles-based foursome The Pharcyde presented a different sound, as inspired by jazz as it was characterised by crude but colourful humour...
- www.bbc.co.uk
2012-07-23
★★★★★
The Pharcyde burst on the scene in 1992 with their debut "Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde," an album that remains one of hip hop's most purely entertaining records to date...
- rapreviews.com
2010-12-06
★★★★★
There is surely a Gender Studies dissertation in "Phobia Of Inadvertent Homosexual or Transsexual Encounters In 'Golden Age' Hip-Hop". Try that one on your prof next term. The paradigm, natch, is Tone Loc's 1989 pop-rap classic Funky Cold Medina ("I don't fool around with no Oscar Meyer wiener," Tone assured us, perhaps protesting too much)...
- www.mojo4music.com
2010-07-16
★★★★★
After a pleasant trip down memory lane thanks to Jordan Selbo's Back to the Labreview of "Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde," I stumbled across this curiously concocted compilation at my local mom & pop record store. Why curious? Because if you were to judge by the Delicious Vinyl website, you wouldn't even know this album exists. The only person even associated with Pharcyde to be featured there or sold through their online store is Fat Lip, and he left the group over a decade ago...
- rapreviews.com
2010-02-13
★★★★★
First, there was four. The four were good. The four were The Pharcyde. Slim Kid Tre, Fat Lip, Imani and Romye a.k.a. Booty Brown made one hell of a hip-hop barbershop quarter. Their "Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde" debut in 1992 would be an unheralded hip-hop classic, were it not for the fact that it IS heralded. Their use of fat and jazzy beats paired with hilarious rhymes and skits made them a refreshing change of pace from the often much too serious West coast gangster rap scene...
- rapreviews.com
2009-07-21
★★★★★
Much like the Wu a short while later, in 1992 The Pharcyde entered the hip hop landscape as a fully-formed entity, not only a dope-ass group but damn near a valuable and refreshing philosophic, musical and aesthetic movement...
- rapreviews.com
2009-07-21
★★★★★
surrealism in African American life, middle-class cutup division ("Ya Mama," "If I Were President," "It's Jiggaboo Time")
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-10
★★★★★
No text for this review; see http://robertchristgau.com/xg/bk-cg90/grades-90s.php.
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-10