Another Great Rap Hope Falters : *** DE LA SOUL “De La Soul Is Dead” <i> Tommy Boy</i>

One of the great things about rap music is that a high-school kid can still come out of nowhere with a mature, self-produced, fully realized album that radically shifts the nature of the medium and sells a million copies--something that hasn’t been possible in rock ‘n’ roll since the ‘60s.

What’s important in hip-hop is to capture the pop moment, to cop the right attitudes from your peers and the right records from your dad’s collection, then put them together with the right beats. Nothing else really matters, not verbal virtuosity nor deftness on the turntables, neither studios nor high-tech production skills.

In late 1988, Long Island teen-agers De La Soul burst onto the scene with the two-sided single “Jenifa”/”Potholes on My Lawn,” which for the first time snapped rap around to the sort of introspective suburban vibe that had previously been the property of art-schoolish, white alternative-rock bands. De La Soul’s self-described Daisy Age philosophy seemed pretty refreshing amid a solid year of hard-core rap, exciting as it was.

And at the beginning of 1989, with the release of De La Soul’s astounding “3 Feet High and Rising,” rap branched off into two directions: De La’s gentle flower-power irony and N.W.A.’s hard-core rage--both, as it turns out, inspired by the Jungle Brothers’ seminal LP “Straight Out the Jungle.”

De La Soul’s rapping was playful, its content loopy, its samples taken from mellow-mood, instructional and children’s records where its peers relied rather heavily on James Brown: Not even the most casual listener could mistake a De La song for anything else.

“3 Feet High” was crammed full of ideas, anti-elitism and cartoon sexual politics and wisdom from Mr. Squirrel spilling over from cut to cut, all within the frame of a quiz show. It was the sort of channel-zapping pop masterpiece you’d expect from kids who grew up with a TV remote in their hands. In the 1990 Village Voice pop critics’ poll, “3 Feet High” was voted the best album of the year, soundly trouncing such critics’ faves as Lou Reed and Neil (Not So) Young.

But rap music mutates at the rate of an irradiated E. coli bacterium, and capturing the pop moment is something no rap group has ever managed to do two albums straight, not even Public Enemy.

“3 Feet High,” other rappers’ Afrocentric imitations of De La Soul, and the albums by members of the Native Tongues--a loose coalition of 20-ish De La camp followers that includes Tribe Called Quest, Queen Latifah, Monie Love and the Jungle Brothers--have never left the radio: Where three years ago De La Soul was a reaction to the status quo, now it is the status quo.

And De La Soul, on what is unquestionably the most anticipated hip-hop album of the year so far, sounds a little weary . . . starting with the album title. They’re tired of the hype.

The first single, “Hey Hey Hey,” is a bouncy little number about evading all the kids who try to press demo tapes on them; other songs discuss why they’re sick of being called hippies, how hard-core rappers are bogus, why Posdnous decided to step out for pizza when the girl behind the counter at Burger King asked for his autograph.

The framing devices involve snippets of conversation from a bunch of thugs listening to a copy of the tape that they wrested away from some kids--the thugs don’t like the album much--and a comically stereotypical black radio station.

Parts of the second album are extremely funny, most of the music slams, and its hermetically sealed rap universe is as ambitious as the first, but something about the record doesn’t quite click. Where “3 Feet High” is sweet, “Dead” is bitter; where “3 Feet High” is danceable, “Dead” stops and starts like an old Chevy; where “3 Feet High” is optimistic, “Dead” is riding a bummer.

In the end, “De La Soul Is Dead” leaves us a little sad. If De La Soul’s imagination is as played out as gangsta rap and new jack swing and hard-core rhyming, where does rap go from here?