A few months after Digable Planets entered the ranks of popular music with their single “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)” in 1993, the trio (Ishmael “Butter Fly” Butler, Craig “Doodlebug” Irving, and Mariana “Ladybug Mecca” Vieira) released, their hit debut album, Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space). A year later they made a quantum leap with their second and final album, Blowout Comb. Now, a quantum leap is like quantum tunneling: very much like you running into a wall and inexplicably finding yourself not in pain but unscathed and on the other side of it. This does happen. And it all comes down to probability. Digable Planet’s Blowout Comb was, in hiphop terms, a kind of tunneling. Why?
The trio’s first album was, without a doubt, good. But one could not compare it to, say, A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory, a masterpiece of jazz-fused hiphop, or the early classics by De La Soul—which Planets clearly emulated (one was about the daisy age; the other, the insect age). Even the record’s best track, “It’s Good to Be Here,” was smooth but not remarkable. All one has to do is drop the needle on Freestyle Fellowship’s Innercity Boundaries, which was released in 1993, to hear the real stuff, rappers continuing the new school inaugurated by Rakim, rappers as instruments. Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space) also felt rushed. One had the impression that Digable Planets pumped it out because their hit single, “Rebirth of Slick,” caught them and record execs by surprise.
All of that changed, however, with Blowout Comb. This album can be compared—in terms of originality, execution, depth, complexity, political consciousness—with the best of the best of its time. From the first track, “The May 4th Movement Starring Doodlebug,” to the last richly, “For Corners,” the concept of the whole is maintained, or, put another way, cohering. And each track effortlessly weaves samples and live instruments. And the raps have a depth and an execution that turns to Miles Davis’ cool period for inspiration, rather than Coltrane intellectual acrobats on Giant Steps. And the Black Power movement of the 1960s is the ghost in this late-20th century machine. There is a specter that haunts the album and its society, and the specter is soul on ice.
Indeed, one can now speak of Blowout in the same way they might speak of Wu-Tang’s Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) or Nas’ Illmatic. But for many years you couldn’t. Why? Because it was a commercial flop when it dropped. The trio gave the public its creative all; and the public dumbly yawned.
We won’t get into the long and tired debates about why Butter Fly, Doodlebug, and Ladybug MeccaI were denied the glory they deserved in 1994. All that we need to say, and must be appreciated, is time was their side. (Lots of great artists and works were not so lucky.) As the years of the 21st century accumulated, the album grew in importance. And now, 20 years after its release, it’s considered a classic of 90s hiphop. Stream any playlist that begins with Gang Starr, De La Soul, Queen Latifah and, soon enough, you will hear a track from the numinously Afrocentric Blowout Comb.
