Feelin' like the Beasties when 3 Feet High And Rising stole Paul's Boutique's thunder

It's all love, thug whiggas and all of the above to Thun and 'em for the 100 Greatest Native Tongues songs list they collated for Complex Magazine last year, especially since it came hot on the heels of Complex's godawful 50 Greatest Diplomats songs list which somehow arrived at the conclusion that Dipset's vast oeuvre centres around Juelz's 2 crappy albums, but I was slightly miffed that urtext at # 100 in their countdown was the How Ya Want It, We Got It Native Tongues remix when that very same week I had a post planned about it with the premise that it's a better song than anything on Stakes Is High and Beats, Rhymes And Life, the sort of dusty headnodding sound those 2 albums should've aspired to, totally refreshing after the po-facedness of De La in 1996 since they sound pleased to be rapping on a song alongside the Jungle Brothers again after settling their differences, and the last great Native Tongue posse cut which also should've featured Dres and the kid Jeff from De La's The Mack Daddy On The Left and Brainwashed Follower joints as the crew's ultimate truimphant final hurrah.

Jungle Brothers ft. Q. Tip & De La Soul - How Ya Want It, We Got It Native Tongues remix (1996)



Okay, so the post was little more than a thinly veiled attempt to troll Dilla stans by pointing out that his aseptic clippety-clappety production had managed to absorb all the character out of Tribe the same way it'd rendered The Pharcyde totally pedestrian a year earlier, while casually tossing out a few jokes about how the Jungle Brothers upping sticks to Europe to rake in that I'll House You festival appearance fetti and that Stereo MCs + Aphrodite & Micky Finn remix dough for the rest of the 90s after Raw Deluxe bricked in America was far more detrimental to their legacy than finding out that Afrika Baby Bam has been an undercover pagan drag-queen all these years, but it could've been a pretty good post of the week since it's always been a ridiculously underrated song given the rappers involved and it's always funny when Dilla buffs get their Jansports and chain-wallets in a twist.

Anyway, the element of surprise was lost after the Complex list so the post was discarded and consigned to the backwaters of my brain, but, fuck it, it's a thursday evening where I can't think of anything else to write about and I quite like the idea of baiting dudes from the SoulStrut forum by reiterating that Labcabincalifornia deserves to be mentioned alongside such sophomore stinkers as Non Fiction and Immobilarity, that Dilla's production was the main factor in the decline of Tribe, that the How Ya Want It, Ya Got It remix is still better than anything on the albums Tribe and De La released that year, that mid 90s Dilla was a moderately-talented producer who rappers should've hit up for the odd good jam (think : Stakes Is High and Busta's Still Shining) rather than a producer capable of anchoring albums, and that Slum Village were Arrested Development levels of coffee-table blandness but without that one sorta sublime corny pop moment like Everyday People.