Just like an Incense That Burns Slowly: Oliver Wang on Buhloone Mindstate
For reasons I might detail in a future post, I’ve been souring on the notion of anniversary-style commentary on albums. Misgivings aside, though, there was a thoughtful piece on NPR’s Morning Edition today about Buhloone Mindstate, the third album from De la Soul released in 1993. 
The feature is a cap, perhaps, to a year’s worth of pieces devoted to the year 1993 in hip-hop history. Whether or not you agree with the conceit that a cultural product can be “ahead of its time” (a conceit that is one point of departure for an upcoming post), there’s something to be said for rehearing and reassessing a release that apparently took time to register beyond the world of music critics, especially those perpetually seeking the novel or the challenging. Click through, as always, for more…