3 Feet High and Rising
De La Soul · 1989
An explosion of day-glo color — peace signs, daisies, Pop Art graphics — was a visual manifesto for the D.A.I.S.Y. Age, declaring that hip-hop could be playful, conscious, and joyful in an era dominated by images of urban toughness.
The cover is an explosion of bright, day-glo color — yellows, pinks, oranges, and greens dominate. Peace signs, daisies, Pop Art graphics, and playful typographic elements fill the frame. The overall effect is of a psychedelic garden party, a visual manifesto for joy, playfulness, and creative freedom. The title appears in bold, colorful lettering, and the whole package radiates warmth and positivity.
The design was created by Toby Mott, a British artist and designer associated with the punk and post-punk art scenes. The visual language drew from 1960s hippie culture, Pop Art, and psychedelic poster art — all filtered through a hip-hop sensibility. This was a deliberate and radical choice: in 1989, hip-hop album covers were typically dominated by images of urban toughness, street credibility, and b-boy posturing. De La Soul's cover was a declaration that hip-hop could be something else entirely.
The cover was a visual embodiment of the "D.A.I.S.Y. Age" — an acronym for "Da Inner Sound, Y'all" — that De La Soul and their Native Tongues collective (which included A Tribe Called Quest and the Jungle Brothers) were promoting. The D.A.I.S.Y. Age represented a conscious, playful, intellectually curious alternative to the harder-edged, more materialistic hip-hop that was gaining dominance in the late 1980s.
The album was groundbreaking musically as well as visually. Produced by Prince Paul, it used sampling techniques that were revolutionary for the time, drawing from sources as diverse as French language instruction records, Steely Dan, Johnny Cash, and children's educational programs. The playful, collage-like approach to sound was perfectly reflected in the playful, collage-like visual design.
Ironically, De La Soul later struggled against the hippie image that the cover established. By their second album, De La Soul Is Dead (1991), the group was actively trying to distance themselves from the flower-power stereotype, featuring a broken flowerpot of daisies on the cover as a visual rejection of the image that had defined them.
The cover remains one of the most joyful and visually distinctive in hip-hop history. It helped establish the visual language of the alternative hip-hop movement and demonstrated that hip-hop imagery could be as diverse as hip-hop music itself. The influence can be traced through the colorful, playful aesthetics of artists like Tyler, the Creator, and the continued presence of Afrocentric, positive imagery in hip-hop art.