Search - Pharcyde :: Bizarre Ride 2: The Pharcyde

Like De La Soul's Three Feet High & Rising, the Pharcyde's 1992 debut came at a time when hip-hop was headed in one direction, but the group was going somewhere else entirely. A crew of spunky b-boys armed with a self-deprecating sense of humor, the Pharcyde made an album that was fresh and profoundly honest. "Ya Mama" is a clever array of mother jokes set to cartoonish beats; "On the DL" has each MC unguardedly making self-denigrating confessions (like Fat Lip admitting to masturbating--previously a hip-hop no-no); and "Passin' Me By" is an ode to hopeless crushes on unattainable women. The group's playfulness was also infused with smarts, too, most visibly on "Officer." Recorded around the time of the Rodney King verdict, the song was an indictment of racial profiling--shrouded, of course, in a comic tale that parodied Public Enemy's "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos." With animated beats from J-Swift (the West Coast version of Prince Paul) and four distinct rhyming styles, particularly Slim Kid Tre's melodiousness and Fat Lip's nerdiness, this album captures an innocence rarely seen in the music's posturing ways. It's something that this album captures forever. --Joseph Patel