“Stakes Is High” by De La Soul

De La Soul made "Stakes Is High" the title track of their 1996 album, and they came out swinging: released as a single at the height of the East Coast-West Coast rap feud, it's a flat-out assault on what they saw as hip hop's slide, in the music and in the culture around it. Posdnous and Dave take turns on the attack, Dave reeling off a long list of everything he's sick of, while Posdnous announces that the Native Tongues are back together, a point driven home when A Tribe Called Quest showed up in the video.

The beat came from J Dilla, then going by Jay Dee, in one of his earliest mainstream productions, and he shares the production credit with the group on this Tommy Boy release. Common turns up on the B-side, "The Bizness".

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.