Yesterday on a long training run, I did a double listen through Digable Planets debut record, Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space). That was a great decision. A landmark alternative hip hop record (to me) when it arrived, Reachin’ is as fresh and engaging today as it was when it was released.

As it happens, that release was Sept 27, 1993. We are sitting right on the 20th anniversary of an album that had a major impact on my suburban Minnesota youth. I thought I’d share a little reflection.

I was only 12 years-old when Reachin’ was released. The album ended up in our house one way or another, and though I’m not sure where it came from-the older brother is a good guess- I absorbed it thoroughly.

Digable Planets, I would later learn, weren’t the originators of what they showed me. But I hadn’t encountered De La Soul or Tribe Called Quest or Pharcyde yet. Digable Planets was my introduction into an alternative jazz infused hip hop scene that I still love. One of my earliest memories of actually thinking about language resulted from the lyrical playfulness of this record-even if I didn’t put it that way at the time. I even wrote a little junior-high writing assignment on the album.

Somehow, about 1993/4, I found my way to a hip hop world I felt like I had no real business inhabiting. It was a bit like being a peeping tom. I loved gangster rap in those days (again, brother). Rough and tumble rap, filled with racial tension and bristling with aggression that made no sense to me but gripped me tight. Once you looked you couldn’t really look away. So when Digable Planets came around, I was confused. I had never heard anything like Digable Planets.The poetic musicality of the rap, the variety and multiplicity of sounds on the record, combined with a smooth and relaxed flow, it was wholly new to me.

I imagine I’m not the only white suburban Midwest kid who delighted in the smoothness of Digable Planets, and the funk and jazz legends they rest so comfortably atop. The liner notes revealed a musical world as yet undiscovered (Curtis Mayfield? Sonny Rollins? Herbie Hancock? Who were these guys? I’d eventually look them up in college).

By the time I reached high-school I was listening to very little rap and hip hop, turning instead to the inescapable grunge movement that settled over adolescents everywhere. But it was only a matter of a few years before I resettled in to the hip hop tradition Digable Planets introduced. And for this introduction and the expanding of a young kids musical horizon, I will ever be grateful.

So, 20 years after it’s release, I can’t recommend enough a return to Reachin’.

Return and remember the bass and drums leading to the simple repeating horn refrain of Rebirth of Slick. So set are those horns in my brain they’ll be forever linked to the same unavoidable shoulder-and-head roll that accompanied my Walkman headphones on the bus.

Or the apolitical story turned political outcry that is La Femme Fetal, which introduced me for the first time to that murky water that is abortion politics. The subject didn’t seem that complicated when Butterfly told us about the story of two young lovers whose “love was often a verb, and spontaneity has brought a third, and due to our youth and economic state, we wish to terminate. About this we don’t feel great, but baby, that’s how it is.”

I recognize now La Femme Fetal is about about the strongest pro-choice message I’ve ever found.

Or just relax into the fluid pop engagement that is Where I’m From. Oh so endlessly cool. The kind of coolness one expects from KC and the Sunshine Band (I would learn later). Where I’m From, like so many other tracks on the record, lingers along a cozy flowing river just long enough for Butterfly, Doodlebug and Ladybug to reminisce on a time when hip is just the norm.