No, this was not an unabashed hip-hop classic like 3 Feet High and Rising and De La Soul Is Dead, or as provocative and fresh as some of its 1996 peers. "Baby Baby Baby Baby Ooh Baby" is a sharp satire of the Bad Boy-style hip-hop that was beginning its reign, fit with a beat as Hitmen-esque as an '80s R&B revision with Posdnuos rhyming in a conspicuously Biggie-like cadence. "Supa Emcees" asked "Whatever happened to the MC?" and cautioned "MCing ain't for you!" "Dog Eat Dog" asserted that folks were "fucking my love in all the wrong places" - an obvious metaphor. On "The Bizness" - a song featuring the quickly maturing Common before his lyrical touchstone One Day It'll All Makes Sense - Dave spits "Do not connect us with those champagne-sippin' money-fakers." Hip-hop was at a crossroads, a precipice - whatever you'd like to call it - and De La were concerned. Inter-genre violence was bubbling beneath the surface, overshadowing the turn hip-hop was taking - a turn away from what was a mid-'90s renaissance of the late-'80s golden age excellence, quickly evolving into what is now known as the jiggy era.
But it's under these conditions that De La offered an album that was not only sonically excellent and creative and pure, but an album with the year's most relevant and prescient message. West Coast beef, something in which the Native Tongues vanguards were seeming nonplayers. Aside from that, hip-hop was fully embroiled in the East Coast vs. Released on the same day as Nas' alter-ego epic It Was Written and sandwiched between albums like Jay-Z's Reasonable Doubt and OutKast's ATLiens, it's very possible that Stakes Is High didn't get its rightful burn in respective tape decks and CD players. Stakes Is High is often overshadowed by its predecessors in the De La Soul discography and, upon its release, it was lost in a summer of great import and consequence.
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