3 Feet High and Rising

Made at Calliope Studios and mixed at Island Media Studios, with Prince Paul producing and De La Soul credited as co-producers. The group learned the studio equipment as they went. Posdnuos recalls working with a Casio RZ-1 drum machine and an Eventide Harmonizer to record and bend the samples. Al Watts, who engineered the mix, also voices the game-show host, and Don Newkirk is the prize announcer. The title comes from Johnny Cash's Five Feet High and Rising. The cover, by Toby Mott of the Grey Organisation, shows the three photographed from a stepladder with flowers drawn over the print, and Trugoy said the group had wanted a picture of an elevator stopped halfway up with just their faces. Four months after release, lawyers for the Turtles filed a lawsuit over a sample on Transmitting Live From Mars, and the group and label eventually settled.

Robert Christgau called it "radically unlike any rap you or anybody else has ever heard" in the Village Voice in 1989. The Village Voice's critics' poll then ranked it first for the year, ahead of Neil Young's Freedom. It reached number one on the Billboard R&B/hip-hop chart and 24 on the Top 200, and it is the only De La Soul album to be certified platinum by the RIAA. Rolling Stone placed it at 346 on its 2003 list of the 500 greatest albums and at 103 in 2020. The Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry, and it appears in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. When the album reached streaming in March 2023, the sample collage Cool Breeze on the Rocks was replaced by a short version called The Melted Version.