Its funny, Pharcyde is literally a commodified version of a lot of things that were outliers in LA Rap as antithesis to "Gangsta Rap" such as Freestyle Fellowship or Ahmad/Skee-Lo, but then again there were a lot of people who skated the line a little more... Either Hi-C or AMG, Quik affiliates, doing "Sittin In The Park" is kind of a grounding to the idea. Eazy-E being the financial backer for stuff like Blood of Abraham or Black Eyed Peas in their early form. The lines were a lot blurrier there the same way Gang Starr were such good friends with Freddie Foxx who is basically a goofy rap guy but a arch goon IRL. And that isn't to say I don't love Pharcyde's first album.
But that's the point, at the dawn of the 90s it wasn't thaaaaat unusual for a larger network of people to come from differing walks of life in hip-hop. Even in Native Tongues, the Violators (including the late Chris Lighty) were the strong-arm section who were known for starting fights if you tried to disrespect who they were protecting because they were soft. When Tupac kept doing his tantrums and spats against Tribe and De La, it would be people like the Zulus and the Violators who'd give him the ol' "Say Sorry" treatment.
Its one of the strange sagas of the Native Tongues movement I described in that "Rap's Altamont" tangent we had a while back, but its an evolved timeline...
You have basically "PSK" as the first gangster rap record, and then Ice-T and KRS-One rip that off and turn it into album length personas (prior to that, Ice-T is another Shan/LL clone, and KRS is basically never gotten much further than early Philly rappers like Schoolly and Steady B combined with Just-Ice). Now Bambaataa watches KRS get rejected by the drug money funneling Juice Crew dominating commercial rap center, and then determines to 'save' KRS. KRS is only a step or two removed from Bam because DJ Red Alert is Zulu backed and that's who supported KRS when Marley Marl / Mr. Magic rejected him, and Ced Gee from Ultramagnetic who features ex-Zulu dancer Kool Keith does a ton of the beats for Criminal Minded. So at the same time that Keith and The JBs are pushing a moralistic yet 'playa-type' aesthetic, with humor and self-awareness backed with self-conciousness, they work on Kris and polish him a bit into the Teacher persona. It helps that you have a respected dude who used to crush other human beings skulls and is now a very benign peaceful DJ/Gang Leader turned Cult Leader.
So eventually what happens is certain kids, namely De La and Tribe go to the Zulu/Native Tongues transition, as does Latifah. Latifah, as well! Her family background is full of a lot of goons, but she doesn't carry herself that way. Whereas Tribe and De La are basically... they were the weed carriers at first. They were joyful and playful and that fit the Zulu aesthetic because obviously they were influenced by those groups. Public Enemy was a separate entity, but also fit very well within the aesthetic group.
So, what happens is this movement gels and centers around... 1989-1990. And what happens is JBz and Ultra and PE make their booms. Now since PE is marketed as a 'black punk rock' group by Island, its ridiculously easy to blow them up beyond the rap market. Ultramagnetic, their 2nd album is so obviously attempts at making a 'commercial party' rap album, and that implodes. JBz always liked but perpetually on labels without Island's PR connections. "Crews" are abstract concepts to this day unless they're bunched on a label such as a Death Row, so you can't market a loose collective as well as you can DEF JAM THE LABEL OF RAP. But by the time there was an audience that you could do that to, the paradigm had shifted. Because now Rap's commercial audience had expanded and Tribe and De La had obvious hits, and pop writers obsessing over them, and were just arguably a lot more accessible because they didn't say shit about shit. "The Abstract" nothing, they were just a bunch of dorks conceptualizing the fact that they just freestyled about nothing. And made good music out of it.
But then of course, that whole movement got bloated and there were the Johnny Come Latelies and the terrible KRS-One follow up albums, the boom of happy pop rap... Its very hard for Tribe to seem all that impressive in those old Video Music Box blocks (which my dad had on VHS) where it'd be Tribe, Fushnickens, Kwame, YZ, and its just a melange of the same record over and over. Never mind the US over, even in NYC.
So like I said, west coast did similar things because remember, Bam had sent Afrika Islam to LA to help make "The Rhyme Syndicate", with Divine Styler and Everlast, and keeping people who were more moderate like King Tee and Toddy T around Ice but then by then... NWA, which is full-fledged misogynoir piloted by Public Enemy / Ultramagnetic fans Ice Cube and Dre respectively. Lost cause. So you have a sort of more diverse approach to full-fledged gangster rap or whatever. (Most 'Gangster Rap' in NYC never made it... Kool G Rap was always 'marketed' as the gangster, but he didn't have a big street rep. Actual criminals like the ones who made up Mobstyle like Azie of the Paid In Full crew generally got kept to the wayside).
So boom, Tribe and De La are over in the public consciousness after Wu-Tang and Nas and Biggie and Tupac and all these types blow up. What do they do? They get mad and blame the labels, blame the fans for being ignorant, blame the new artists themselves... Meanwhile they were just fucking passe. Sorry, but Midnight Marauders is already so fucking old hat by the time it comes out from the perspective of the records the gen pop of NYC was starting to gravitate to. 'hardcore' was in, and dancing in overalls was out, can ya blame 'em? But that's what the second wave did, because they had gotten a taste of mainstream money because the industry knew how to handle them better than they did the Def Jam era, the same way the ones who came after them benefited further from the industry being more creative in marketing rap, and so on. There's a great bad capitalist metaphor in their behavior somewhere, but I don't have the language or the desire to point it out.
So then what happens next is that as the fanbase kind of solidifies and codifies to a certain core audience for these guys, De La and Tribe react both with a greater desire to sell out and a more cynical attitude in general. YOU NEVER SEE THAT in the Jungle Brothers, they simply just keep it moving, they try doing jungle, doing an album backed by the Roots, do a dance-y themed album with Black Eyed Peas very early, whatever. De La fall further and further into orthodoxy, getting rid of Prince Paul who was arguably their greatest attribute while Tribe continuously sell out harder and more desperately to making lighter and poppier music while the album material is actually super fucking depressive.
So as I'm saying, a lot of these guys are discovering the Slum Villages, the Rootses, the Blackstars, guys who were the wannabes, who didn't fit in with the new rap environment. They came in with their own additional hangups because they were often pointed out as being conservative and retroactive compared to the climates they were in, and often responded with childish disdain for the others (The Roots specifically so; ?uestlove still loves to run his fucking mouth. I can't explain how disgusted I was when he publicly took to youtube to chide Method Man & Redman for wanting to play their single on Jimmy Fallon with just a DJ. Like jeez, how dare rappers use a fucking DJ and not your inept backing rhythms). And as I discussed earlier, a bunch of these acts didn't cut their teeth alongside the people who got deals and had notoriety in the underground of the 90s. The Roots never politicked in NYC, they just went straight to a deal based off their renown in Philly. SV, big in the Midewst, very few people actually knew about them in NY at first. And as NYC centric as my argument is, the industry was to certain aspects built around one highly competitive market/field in that era and only juuuuuust starting to really consider the various urban communities of different metropolises for national artists. It was still very fracticious with NWA being booed offstage in NYC, NY groups getting booed down south, etc. etc. Artists profiles, commercial value, and audience prominence never actually matched perfectly even then.
And what tends to be the issue is that a lot of these guys who were 2nd or 3rd generation N.T. guys, or had the aesthetic around that... They weren't approaching it from the same perspective or goals. It wasn't about "we have to make music that tells kids to love themselves more than Big Daddy Kane loves his gold rope chain bought by him for guys who hire people to shoot AKs into crowded barber shops", it was "We are better than THAT." It all got made into crude finger pointing and then the divisions became a lot more fixed that underground rappers acted like this and commercial rappers acted like that. And since popularity and sales make someone seem bigger, commercial rappers were the 'real' ones. Classism totally plays into that because lower class success stories are obviously more authentic, so discoveries of things like "Ja Rule went to private school and is from a middle class part of Queens" is damnation when he wants to be a star and is posing around like a fake Tupac guy. Albeit one with no real content and who makes R&B songs.
That honestly isn't so big an issue until the N.T. side starts making it an issue. Shit, Wu-Tang was as a collective somehow completely at ease with having Raekwon and Gza and Method Man and ODB at the same time.