A Tribe Called Quest: Beats, Rhymes and Life
by Lou Papineau
February 19, 2018
A Tribe Called Quest were selected by the Current's listeners as one of the honorees in our celebration of Black History Month. Here's the tale of their beats, rhymes, and life.
A Tribe Called Quest were hip-hop innovators. MCs Q-Tip and Phife Dawg crafted a heady blend of comic travelogues and social commentaries, with Q's abstract observations and elegant delivery complemented by Phife's fierce and engaging flow. Q-Tip called Tribe's style a "left-of-center thing" — and that unique detour from rap conventions earned them a huge following and a lasting impact.
Q-Tip (née Jonathan Davis, who changed his name to Kamaal Fareed) and Phife Dawg (Malik Taylor) bonded over a love of music. "I've known Phife since I was like three years old," Q-Tip recalled in Brian Coleman's essential book, Check the Technique: Liner Notes For Hip-Hop Junkies. "Phife is the one who got me into rhymin' in the first place. He was the one who pushed me into MCing. I was always into books, so I guess that's why I fell into rhyming so easily.
"I just remember hearing music constantly. It was all around us," Q-Tip said about his formative years on Linden Boulevard in Jamaica, Queens. "There was a lot of blues and gospel in my house when I was young, and my dad was a big jazzhead . . . I was drawn to all kinds of music as a kid. Al Green, Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell. I listened to rock radio stations too, so I heard lots of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd." But the friends' heads got turned when rap hit 'em up: "Me and Phife heard [the Sugar Hill Gang's] 'Rapper's Delight' when it came out, but once Run-DMC started doing it, we knew we wanted to do that." (They immortalized those early days in "Check the Rhime," from Low End Theory: "[Q-Tip] Back in the days on the boulevard of Linden / We used to kick routines and the presence was fittin' / It was I, the Abstract / [Phife Dawg] And me the Five Footer / I kicks the mad style to step off the frankfurter.")
In 2016, Q-Tip told CBS This Morning what hip-hop meant to him when he was growing up: "It was exciting. It was new. It was a place where I saw young people that looked like me, that talked like me, that, you know, dressed like me to be expressive. Be, like, kings and queens. And be these superheroes." In the 2011 documentary, Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest, White said, "We were just trying to be fly. And make music. And be musicians. Be like Stevie and Marvin and Prince. Thelonious Monk and Mingus and Charlie Parker. We were trying to be those people."
Q-Tip got serious while attending the Murry Bergtraum High School for Business Careers, where he met Mike G and Afrika Baby Bam of the Jungle Brothers and DJ Ali Shaheed Muhammad. Q, Phife, Ali and MC Jarobi White joined forces in 1985 as Tribe; Baby Bam came up with their full name. The Jungle and Tribe crews soon found kindred spirits in the Long Island-based De La Soul. They became known as the Native Tongues collective, noted for lyrics boasting infused with positivity and Afrocentric pride, supported by tracks bursting with inventive samples and jazz elements,. The sonic innovations were exemplified by the Jungle Brothers on their 1988 debut, Straight Out the Jungle, and De La's 1989 landmark, 3 Feet High and Rising.
"When Tip and the Jungle Brothers met up with De La it just seemed like they had known each other for years," Phife said in Check the Technique. "We were just kids back then, and it was just a family affair, not like a marketing thing. It's like in elementary school, on the weekends you have a sleepover. But the sleepover with Native Tongues was in a recording studio instead. People would just roll by other people's sessions and we'd be in there all night, eating Chinese food and working. We had fun being around each other, and that was really the main thing."
ATCQ's debut album, People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, was released in 1989, including the attention-grabbing single "I Left My Wallet In El Segundo". Q-Tip told Coleman, "It was just a lot of fun. I had all these ideas in my head and I was just letting them out. It wasn't too cerebral — it was about emotions and colors. The label was happy, it sold well, and we had a buzz out there."
The first album was a blueprint for Tribe's methods, but they reached full force on their next effort. In Check the Technique, Q-Tip said, "I felt like there were even more possibilities with the second album, with all that I had learned and how I wanted things to be, sonically. I just went to another level when I was getting ready to do Low End Theory . . . I was chopping beats differently than other people were back then. The [second] album was like a project. A show. And everybody was invited to watch. The first album was about color, and Low End Theory was more about technique . . . Phife was so amazing, so crazy on [Low End Theory]. He was the fire starter and he always brought that edge. His tone over my beats is such a great contrast. Phife was always the battle rapper — he would take what was happenin' on the street and rhyme about it. And he was a great freestyler as well. My sh*t was always more cerebral, and the combo always worked really well."
Low End Theory — highlighted by "Check the Rhime," "Jazz (We've Got)" and "Scenario," with a scorching breakout verse by Busta Rhymes — was a genuine game-changer. "A Tribe Called Quest . . . [kicked] hip-hop firmly in the seat of its baggy jeans," author Colson Whitehead wrote in The Spin Alternative Record Guide in 1995. "[They] broaden the music's emotional and stylistic palette to fashion complicated aural paintings. Stand far away and their crazy-quilt grooves exhort the feet; stand up close and the lyrics' textures contain whole, weird universes." Q-Tip told Coleman, "After the responses came back and they were all very positive, it really did feel like we had arrived as a group. A lot of our albums have been ahead of their time, including our first and third records. But I think that Low End Theory was one of the most on-time records we ever did. It really broke us out of the Native Tongues stereotype, and it made people take us very, very seriously, especially after they had heard a song like 'I Left My Wallet In El Segundo.' Most of all I'm just glad that people consider it a classic musical album." Phife Dawg concurred: "Low End kicked the door down and knocked it off its hinges. In this game, timing is everything, and the timing of Low End Theory was perfect."
Tribe dropped another classic, Midnight Marauders (its best-selling disc), in 1993, featuring "Award Tour" and "Electric Relaxation," plus Beats, Rhymes and Life (1996), and announced their breakup, which was attributed to personal and professional tensions, before the release of The Love Movement in 1998. Q-Tip's solo debut, Amplified, came out in 1999; its follow-up, Kamaal/The Abstract, was recorded in 2002 but didn't get released until 2009. He was active as a producer, including tracks with Whitney Houston, Kanye West, Santigold, and Solange, while Phife guested with the likes of will.i.am and Al Jarreau. Tribe did a reunion tour in 2006 and an appearance on The Tonight Show in November 2015 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their debut album, which led to work on their final album.
"When we did that performance, the synergy between the four of us was crazy," Jarobi White told Billboard. "It was such an ill moment, and [Q-Tip and Dawg] both had a feeling they needed to reconcile." But Phife died on March 22, 2016, at the age of 45 due to complications from diabetes; We Got It From Here . . . Thanks You 4 Your Service was completed after his death. "We just hope that people enjoy it," Q-Tip told CBS. "And it makes people feel good — that's what we always wanted. And I just want to hold my brother up and celebrate him. He wanted us to do an album, more than anything. So in many ways it's a legacy album, too." A Tribe Called Quest's legacy, and enduring influence, is assured.