Tucked into the middle of The Low End Theory is the second single, “Jazz (We’ve Got).” I remember the music video, seeping from the television late on a Saturday night during Yo! MTV Raps. Everyone talks about the end of the video, when the music video and song transition to “Buggin’ Out” and the enduring image of Phife Dawg and Q-Tip with miniature white cups over their eyes, giving off the odd impression of cartoonish and large bulging discs in the place of their normal-sized eyes. But the first part of the video, the bulk of it, is the most enduring. The group walks around New York City in a haze of black and white, rapping in simplistic fashion about the nuances of jazz music. It is an easy relic of a time past when watched now, and it was easy to dismiss in the moment. When discussing the single on the school bus, the older kids would dismissively wave their hands and say things like “I’m not listening to this shit! This the kinda shit old people like!”
And perhaps that is true. A Tribe Called Quest made rap music for our parents and theirs but left the door open wide enough for anyone to sneak through. Anyone with rhythm or anyone who knew how to find it before the bass high-stepped itself across a dance floor. Q-Tip, in the first verse of “Jazz,” sums it up evenly: “I don’t really mind if it’s over your head / ’Cause the job of resurrectors is to wake up the dead.”
So this is the story of A Tribe Called Quest, proficient in many arts but none greater than the art of resurrections—a group that faced the past until the present became too enticing for them to ignore. Of how I found myself beautiful enough for jazz music, but only in their image and nowhere else. Of how, in the Midwest, their songs first did not play out of passing cars but then played everywhere. Of how you can be both uncool and desirable all at once. Here, a story begins even before jazz. Like all black stories in America, it begins first with what a people did to amend their loss in light of what they no longer had at their disposal. With an open palm against a chest, or a closed fist against a washboard, or a voice, echoing into a vast and oppressive sky, or an album teeming with homages—here is the story of how, even without our drums, we still find a way to speak to each other across any distance placed between us.
CHAPTER TWO
Once Upon a Time in Queens
It is much easier to determine when rap music became political and significantly more difficult to pinpoint when it became dangerous. There is a belief, I’m sure, that it is impossible to imagine a world in which those two things were not always on a course toward each other, especially if you believe that everything is political. I don’t think the house party is always political, at least not as a universal element—though it might be political for someone who is finding their own small piece of freedom within a party’s walls. But the first bits of hip-hop were born out of DJs breaking apart funk and disco beats and relegating every other sound to a graveyard until all that was left was the percussion, cut up into small, danceable portions for the people in the audience to sweat to. And sweat is sometimes political. Say, if it comes off the back of someone who is working in a field that is not their own field in a country that wasn’t always their country. Sweat is sometimes political when it falls from the shoulders of an athlete who is playing for a college in a place where they might be one of few black people on campus. But sweat isn’t always political—not when it’s the small river being formed between two warm bodies in the midst of some block party or basement or anywhere music is coming from hands touched to records.
To DJ is hard work, and it can be argued that DJs were also composers—not in the sense of classical music composers, but a case can be made that early hip-hop DJs not only had to find the right groove in an old record but also had to know when to unleash that groove onto a room to get the bodies vibrating at the correct pitch. It’s easy to reduce touching fingers to vinyl to a simple act. But it is, in a way, commanding an orchestra, an orchestra of skin to skin and yes, sweat. But even with this in mind, the art of the turntable is not inherently political.
The lights went out in New York City in July 1977. Lightning struck an electricity transmission line in the heart of the city, causing the line’s automatic circuit breaker to kick in. The initial lightning strike wasn’t the problem—it was the second one, which struck about twenty minutes after the first, hitting an electrical substation in Yonkers, which took out two more transmission lines. At some point, if anything is pushed far enough, it is impossible to sustain.
To “shed a load”—in the electrical sense—means to do away with voltage. Electric companies lower their overall voltage use in order to spare some power for the entire grid. In other words, it’s a disposal of energy. It goes nowhere in particular. It just vanishes. Con Edison tried to shed the load to save the city from a massive blackout. And it worked at first, with engineers lowering voltage across the board in a series of events that allowed them to reduce the overall load. But a problem occurred in the chain reaction of substations tripping in Upstate New York and New Jersey, making it so that the load could not be dropped quickly enough. In a desperate attempt, Con Edison began dropping customers from the grid to manually shed the load. Spare a few, save the city. But the city’s major power lines were already overtaxed. It was too late. The Ravenswood 3 power generator was the largest generator in New York City. When it went out, it took the entire city with it. And then, blackness.
New York in the summer of 1977 was wildly hot, the city was already broke, and the Son of Sam had already attacked eleven people by the time the lights went out on July 13, and he was still out there. I’m not talking about the lights going out, or the birth of rap music, so much as I’m talking about the kind of landscape in which something frivolous might become political. Looting, rioting, and fires spread throughout the city that night, and there is something to be said about an urgency that arises in the struggling and afraid when what appears to be a basic right is taken away with the snap of a finger.
On the night the lights went out, DJ Grandmaster Caz and his partner Disco Wiz were spinning in a park, with their equipment plugged into a lamppost. They thought they had shorted out all of the city’s power themselves. When they realized that they hadn’t, Caz found himself among the looters, pulling a mixer out of the store where he had once purchased DJ equipment. A mixer does a lot of things, but a big thing that it does is allow a wider audience to hear what a DJ is spinning. Rap needed a megaphone, DJs couldn’t afford them, and then with darkness came a new kind of wealth.
It must also be mentioned that the birth of hip-hop is pretty much a mythology at this point. And so like all of the best stories told by anyone, anywhere, any part of it could be true or not true. But I like this idea: I like the idea that the lights went out, and on the other side, a genre found new life. I like to imagine that hip-hop became political when someone threw the first rock or brick into a glass door or window and walked inside a store to retrieve a mixer; that hip-hop became political when it took food out of one person’s mouth to put food into another’s.
By the 1990s, rap had become political to the world but not yet dangerous. Political tones were evident—as in Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message”—but these were more cautionary tales meet neighborhood reportage. Slick Rick’s “Children’s Story” falls in the same range. These songs and others were political but still felt as though they weren’t aiming at a specific target. A target can turn the political into something dangerous.
Who knows how long police have been beating on black folks, but I know some wise heads who will say that as long as there have been police and black skin to bruise, the two have been wed. What I’m saying is that some things just come to you as they have always been and you take them for what they are. Rap came to me as dangerous from the moment in the early 1990s when my parents banned listening to it in our household, and my eldest brother began to sneak tapes into the house.
N.W.A. members were detained by the LAPD for shooting at people with a paintball gun, which is perhaps when rap music became dangerous. W
hile detained, they were taunted and forced to lie facedown in the street, and they had guns pointed at their heads. Real guns, not the paintball gun that one of the group members had in his possession—something that might have gotten them executed on another day, as we have seen played out in my beloved Ohio with the murders of Tamir Rice and John Crawford. But N.W.A. lived, and they went into a studio to record “Fuck Tha Police,” their most infamous and notable song.
“Fuck Tha Police” is a song for those who many imagine to be powerless and angry. The thing with N.W.A. was that they knew they weren’t powerless. They actually had an acute awareness of their power, particularly in 1988, before the release of their debut album, Straight Outta Compton. The group was buzzing and poised to shift the direction of rap, which was then still East Coast dominated. There were rappers from regions other than the East Coast and Northeast, but because of rap’s humble beginnings in New York, most of the notable MCs of the era lived east of Ohio. The voice of the West had yet to be fully defined, and the sound certainly hadn’t been defined. N.W.A. knew they were setting themselves up to be catalysts, shifting the genre out of its regional clustering.
“Fuck Tha Police” suggests—in part—that people should rise up violently against this country’s police force, and it must be said that nonblack artists have used controversy to sell records for as long as there has been both controversy and a place to sell it. And so yes, underneath some of N.W.A.’s rage and contempt was a marketing plan—one that was partially manufactured by then assistant director of FBI public affairs Milt Ahlerich, who wrote a sprawling letter to their recording company, Priority Records, on the FBI’s letterhead addressing the song but never naming it.
“Advocating violence and assault is wrong, and we in the law enforcement community take exception to such action,” the letter reads. “Law enforcement officers dedicate their lives to the protection of our citizens, and recordings such as the one from N.W.A. are both discouraging and degrading to these brave, dedicated officers.”
When the letter was made public, people set N.W.A. records on fire. Politicians denounced the group and urged parents to keep their children away from the music they made. And not just the music they made but also the musical genre they trafficked in. It was the springboard N.W.A. needed to brand themselves as the World’s Most Dangerous Group—something that was boosted dramatically when already-hysterical Christians and cops realized that their name stood for “Niggaz Wit Attitudes” the whole time.
And so it can be said that rap became political when the people making it needed it to be fed, and it became dangerous when those people being fed realized they had the power to feed themselves forever off the power they had.
A Tribe Called Quest arrived on the scene at the turn of the decade, in the spring of 1990. The individual members had arrived years earlier. Kamaal Ibn John Fareed and Malik Izaak Taylor grew up together in Queens, New York—childhood friends who used music as a bridge to each other. Before Fareed was Q-Tip, he was MC Love Child, performing occasionally with another pal from Queens Ali Shaheed Muhammad, who acted as his DJ. Before Taylor was Phife Dawg, he was Crush Connection, collaborating with MC Love and Muhammad regularly, before eventually joining their group.
Q-Tip and Ali Shaheed Muhammad went to high school with the group that would become the Jungle Brothers, and on a demo track, Q-Tip opened with a line about being Q-Tip from “a group called quest.” Jungle Brothers’ member Afrika Baby Bam told him to change it to “A Tribe Called Quest,” and so, like all good names, it came from someone else.
While N.W.A. found themselves stirring up hysteria on the West Coast in 1988, in Queens, Q-Tip was being featured for the first time on record, on the Jungle Brothers’ song “The Promo”—the final track on their classic 1988 debut album, Straight Out the Jungle, which was released exactly three months to the day after N.W.A. released their classic 1988 debut album, Straight Outta Compton. These two groups point out the ways that rap artists had begun to craft their own mythologies, like wrestlers in the ring: N.W.A. with their fearless, hyperviolent personas, rooted in some truth but absolutely rooted in some idea of what would make young white people most excited and old white people most afraid; and the Jungle Brothers, with their heavily Afrocentric imagery, tone, and aesthetic, rooted in some truth but absolutely rooted in some idea of what would make young black people most curious and old black people most welcoming. The turn of the decade is when rap’s identity took new and more interesting turns, but it can be argued that the most fascinating spark of it began here: with two albums on two coasts, and two groups laying claim to what they were coming out of.
And within that, there is Q-Tip, on the song “The Promo.” He opens with, “My name is Q-Tip from A Tribe Called Quest.”
The first single by A Tribe Called Quest was actually “Description of a Fool,” though no one ever really heard it until their first album was released, where it was the final song. The first commercial single that A Tribe Called Quest released was a song about losing your wallet. “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo” is an interesting choice for a debut single on its own, made even more interesting by the fact that songs like “Bonita Applebum” and “Can I Kick It?” were also on the album, released as later singles.
El Segundo is a real place—it is a suburban city in Los Angeles County, named El Segundo, Spanish for “The Second” because it was the site of the second Standard Oil refinery in California. El Segundo is also a part of a running gag on the show Sanford and Son. The Sanfords lived in Watts, close to El Segundo, and Fred Sanford would often talk his way out of messes by telling wide-ranging stories about something happening in the world around him, with the punch line resting on something absurd happening in El Segundo.
“On the news, there was a Cyclops!” he’d say. “And the Cyclops, he was crying, and he cried into the ocean, and he cried so much that it started a tidal wave in El Segundo!”
And with that, the laugh track would roll.
Q-Tip wrote the title for the song because of Fred Sanford, not because of any affinity to the geography itself. The title came before the song, and therefore, the song had to be built from what the title was asking us to believe.
There are many ways to approach a lead single for a group entering the arena for the first time: you can give the people something that will make you a star, or you can give the people something that best defines who you’ll aim to be going forward. If you’re lucky, you hit some combination of both. “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo” is definitely the latter of the two options, though it can be said that the single acts as a showcase for the idea that A Tribe Called Quest was going to be driven, largely, by Q-Tip’s ambition. He birthed the name, he birthed the title for the first single, and he’s the only person performing on the song.
Q-Tip was never interested in a Point-A-to-Point-B perspective as an MC or as a storyteller, so it makes sense that A Tribe Called Quest’s first single is a sprawling narrative with an inconsistent narrator telling a story about going on a road trip after his mother left him home alone, and ending up in California after driving from New York for two days. The song’s story and lyrics would have one imagine that Q-Tip had perhaps never been to California before, with his branding of it as an entirely desolate wasteland in the middle of nowhere. In the song, Tribe drives through miles of desert before finding a single gas station and a bite to eat. They lament the middle-of-nowhereness of their surroundings, and yet, at the hole-in-the-wall diner they end up in, Q-Tip sees one of the most beautiful women he’s ever seen, prompting him to lose his wallet. This is more comically played out in the music video, where all members of Tribe are crammed into a rusted blue Cadillac, looking like a bunch of kids who never expected to be on camera in the first place.
This song shows something about rap and the way rappers on each coast imagined one another and their landscapes at the early turn of the century, before the East Coast–West Coast rap war exploded and so many rappers were confined to their
singular bubbles. I don’t know for a fact whether or not Q-Tip had ever been to California, but he wrote about it as I imagined it when I was young and living in the landlocked Midwest. Heat and sand, a large and endless sky, a place to get lost, a place to lose things.
The song was quirky and delightful enough for a listener to ignore any glaring plot holes, like the fact that in the story, it takes Q-Tip three days on the road before he realizes that he lost his wallet. By the time of the song’s release, rap had already seen its fair share of narrators, chief among them the aforementioned Slick Rick, who wove tales of caution with tales of his own sexual mischief and whimsical, fairy tale–based stories of the world in his head. Hip-hop artists had already cemented themselves as griots, telling stories from their own corner of whatever land they claimed and broadcasting them to a world that might not have access to the interior of that land. If you’re N.W.A. or Public Enemy, you want to rattle the cage of public consciousness and push for some uprising among the people to take back what is theirs, or to incite some violence against an oppressor. If you’re Too Short, you want to captivate a listening audience of young men who imagined sex but hadn’t experienced it beyond their imaginings or the pages of some illicit magazine swiped from the room of a parent or an older sibling.
If you’re A Tribe Called Quest, or at least if you’re Q-Tip, the story you tell is one that is mundane on the surface, built around something meaningful only to you and a handful of your pals, piled in a car, driving on a stretch of road that seems endless.
People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm is certainly A Tribe Called Quest’s debut album, but it could be read entirely as Q-Tip’s introduction to the world at large. Q-Tip made the bones of most of the album’s production on pause tapes when he was still in high school. The pause tape was something that aspiring producers would dabble in before they had access to proper studio equipment. Back when record stores sold tapes, and dual cassette decks were the norm in most homes, the hopeful producer would play an album and sample from another tape or a record, stopping the tape when the sample finished its rotation. The trick was in the second part, where they would rewind to the beginning of the sample and unpause the tape, which would extend the sample for longer. It was an amateur trick, but it played a huge role in the evolution of rap’s sound and the sampling that hip-hop was rooted in. It was akin to the DJ finding the proper groove in a record and flooding a room with drums. Hip-hop’s architecture was based on extending the sounds laid by other hands, and the pause tape was an expansion of that. The products of these tapes were often imperfect but good enough to record some vocals over and get a demo tape done. The process was tedious, taking hours of work to perfect and draw several sounds out in sections. It was hip-hop’s version of the Wall of Sound, Phil Spector’s production technique that involved layering sound over sound to create one cohesive wave of music.
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