taking sides: a tribe called quest vs. de la soul

Tribe all the way. I never liked the flower/hippy angle with De La; did they ever get rid of that? Hope so.

Now my buddy, don't you know that drive me nutty, Not too skinny and not too chubby, soft like silly putty...

De La is better to listen to during the day and Tribe is better to listen to at night.

An album-by-album stack-up puts all the muscle on the Tribe's side, but for me it comes down to one thing: De La are more interesting.

ian is dead right as usual, i can't remember how many saturday afternoons i woke up to de la is dead or buhloone and then spent that night bouncin to (insert any tribe record really). stakes is high is better at night though because it's de la's tribe album.

I love Buhloon Mind State so much. "i be.. four eleven." the cutting and mixing and looping is so seat-of-the-pants and inventive but so laid-back too.

Reading all these responses I'm kinda surprised at how there's barely anyone who professes more than a passing knowledge of either groups' output. Maybe it has something to do with my locale (west coast US), but both De La and Tribe were required listening for me and most of my friends from the ages of 16 to 25. I think Tribe has the single biggest achievement, the Low End Theory, that was daring and unique at the time and pointed the way forwards for a lot of hip hop in the 90s and is *still* an amazing record to listen to. It's fluid and natural and organic in a way that hip hop had not heard up to that point. And it was one of the first records where a very conscious effort was made to connect hip hop to jazz, to expand the breaks beyond 70s funk and 80s electro - and the rapping is top-notch, natch. But still, in terms of their overall careers, De La wins for me, hands down. They're weirder, more unpredictable, just sonically and lyrically wilder - and Prince Paul is the greatest hip hop producer ever. He has never produced a bad album and is responsible for so much, been ripped off, imitated so often, etc. There are still lines I'm picking out of De La's records 10 years later, stuff I hadn't noticed before that makes my headspin with the wordplay. All 3 Prince Paul-produced De La albums are fantastic, whereas Tribe really only has the one, maybe two if you glues the better parts of People's Instinctive Travels... to the better songs on Midnight Marauders.

That being said, I think the Jungle Brothers' wrongly ignored and vastly underrated "J Beez Wit the Remedy" singlehandedly puts them above De La and Tribe both. That record is AMAZING - dense, varied, alternately sobering and funny, thick, sonic headfuckery, nothin like it before, lots of things like it since (Anti-Pop Consortium, for example).

Blow Out Comb is also rightly praised in this thread. Fantastic, overlooked record. Just listened to it the other day - the logical extension of "Low End Theory", only yes more cinematic (maybe that's the "Shaft" orchestral breaks), broader in scope.

There's something about Tribe at their best, especially when Phife and Q-Tip are trading verses, that for me just about surpasses all other pop music, let alone De La or hip hop.