from the LP Midnight Marauders, Jive Records, 1993Normally when I’m requested to choose a single solitary “favorite” of anything, be it music, food or a color, I proceed to make excuses for why choosing just one is typically an impossible thing for me to do, which is usually then followed by my giving a small collection of loved options. The reason I mention this is because, in the case of rap music, there is a gleaming exception to my rule: I can say without any hesitation that A Tribe Called Quest is my all-time favorite troupe of hip-hoppers, period. They grew out of a time that myself and many other music aficionados refer to as the “golden age of hip-hop”, from about 1987 – 1994, an era when samples-laced beats with real drum breaks were the way of the walk; please forgive my pining away here for a second, but the vast majority of shit they call “hip-hop” these days is about as interesting as the phlegm I hack up in the mornings. What’s crazy to me is that, if Tribe came along with a demo right now, not a single big hip-hop label would sign them, as this type of vibe has been relegated to the underground or “backpackers” circuit. Tribe’s two main MCs both kick serious ass & they manage to represent two rather dissimilar styles of flow: Q-Tip rocks things more mellow (though no less boastful) with his nasal monotone and garrulous spoken-rhymes, “…honey, check it out, you got me mesmerized, with your black hair and fat-ass thighs; street poetry is my everyday, but yo, I gotta stop when you trot my way… keep it on the down, yo, we keep it discrete, see, I'm not the type to kid to have my biz in the streets…” while Phife Dawg comes at you with a more traditional sounding, in-your-face approach, “…I like em brown, yellow, Puerto Rican or Haitian, name is Phife Dawg from the Zulu Nation; told you in the jam that ‘We Can Get Down’, now let's knock the boots like the group H-Town…original rude boy, never am I coy, you can be a shorty in my ill convoy; not to come across as a thug or a hood, but hon, you got the goods, like Madeline Wood…” Completing the package, and for me the most important and synergistic element of the crew, is their DJ and beatmaker Ali Shaheed Muhammad; remember, this is long before the user-friendly software we have today which makes looping and sampling so easy. Shaheed’s stacks was DEEP yo, fearless in his cutting and pasting from a plethora of genres: soul, funk, psych rock, jazz, etc… On this masterful track he laces a complex patchwork of three or four separate samples, including the 3-bar loop that dominates the track, which he nabbed from Ronnie Foster’s stellar “Mystic Brew”, and the drum break from the Brethren’s funky “Outside Love”. It all melds together into this soupy, acid-jazz-funk haze which would be difficult for anyone to assemble, even with today’s technology. From the beats to the rhymes, Tribe’s funky and spicy concoctions never fail to put a smile on my face, a nod to my head & a bounce in my step, simple pleasures in this increasingly complicated world.
