Q-Tip insists that he made the song “Bonita Applebum” first on pause tapes when he was fifteen, and if you listen to the song’s components, this would make sense, even when you hear the cleaned-up and sharper version that eventually made it onto People’s Instinctive Travels. The beat to “Bonita Applebum” consists of five samples.
Appearing first is a sitar riff from the Rotary Connection song “Memory Band” from their 1967 self-titled album. The riff appears in this song sparingly, but Q-Tip stretched it out in “Bonita,” peppering the song with it throughout the instrumental.
The next sample is the first part of the song’s backbone—the drum beat is built from the beat in Little Feat’s “Fool Yourself” from the 1973 album Dixie Chicken. In “Bonita,” the drums are looped in a sped-up fashion, played back at a pace a bit sharper than Little Feat drummer Richard Hayward played the original.
The second part of the song’s backbone comes in the third sample: the breezy, funky keys and guitar from RAMP’s “Daylight,” from their 1977 album Come into Knowledge. This sample is the most important one, because it is the glue that holds all of the others together. When layering sounds in this manner, there has to be a unifying one that each of them can fit into comfortably without throwing the groove off. RAMP’s song is both gentle and airy, leaving enough space to be filled by any other chosen noise.
The final two samples operate in the song’s ending moments: In Cannonball Adderley’s “Soul Virgo,” from his quintet’s 1970 album The Price You Got to Pay to Be Free album, there is a spoken interlude, a voice chanting words like “sex” and “peace.” At the end of “Bonita,” Q-Tip slows down that voice and uses it as a bridge, with the dying saxophone behind it. This gives way to the closing notes of the song, which bleed into the next song on the album, “Can I Kick It?” The light piano and drum groove was lifted from the Eugene McDaniels song “Jagger the Dagger,” which exists briefly before transitioning into the “Walk on the Wild Side” Lou Reed sample that is the major component of “Can I Kick It?”
When laid out this way, it would appear that the art of the sample, in the mind of Q-Tip, was science. He began by laying out pause tapes in his home until 1989, when he had the opportunity to be present for the recording of De La Soul’s iconic album Three Feet High and Rising. It was in those moments when he was shown around the studio by the in-house recording engineers and afterward was allowed to tinker with all the sampling devices. Seeing his potential and interest, the rapper and producer Large Professor taught him how to use other studio equipment to most effectively hone his sound. Not all young producers have a group of welcoming mentors like Q-Tip had, but not all young producers were as uniquely skilled from their teenage years as Q-Tip was, and not all were as willing as Q-Tip to “dig deep in the crates” to search for sounds. Q-Tip was, in many ways, an extension of rap’s early DJs, chipping away at a massive block of music and peeling off only what he needed.
People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm was a far-reaching album that was a new variation on black psychedelia. It wasn’t particularly hazy in the way that, say, Hendrix was hazy. But it does feel, instead, like Love’s album Forever Changes in the way it is utterly unconcerned with anything except for its own vibes and the celebration of them. The album is awash with samples, some of them unfocused and scattered, coming together when least expected. Now, with knowledge of its origins and the mind behind it, people can look back and hear the unpolished excitement in Q-Tip’s flights of fancy as a producer. “Public Enemy” is jam-packed with lifted sounds from Luther Ingram and Rufus Thomas and Billy the Baron and his Smokin’ Challengers and Malcolm McLaren. “Go Ahead in the Rain” mashes up Jimi Hendrix and “Brother” Jack McDuff while also managing to sneak in a Slave sample. “Push It Along” pairs Grover Washington Jr.’s “Loran’s Dance” with “All You Need Is Love” by the Beatles.
It is an album stuffed with a cast of characters, all orchestrated by Q-Tip’s vision. Yet he still finds a way to carve himself out as the central force, his somewhat nasally and melodic flow slicing through the tracks with ease. Of all the album’s characters, there is one that doesn’t find a home as easily.
Phife Dawg is almost an afterthought on People’s Instinctive Travels. It may not seem like this, because he appears in all of the visuals, and he’s present on the album’s most popular track, the aforementioned “Can I Kick It?,” but beyond that, Phife is only present on three other tracks, or four out of the album’s fifteen. The entire group was young—teenagers preparing to enter their twenties—but Phife was the least mature of the bunch, by his own account. He was living at his grandmother’s place, running the streets all day and night. Q-Tip wrote all of the lyrics for the album, even the lyrics Phife rapped. Phife stole the show on “Can I Kick It?,” but his other verses were largely muted, acting as small bridges to Q-Tip’s vocal and instrumental ambition. Phife often had to be dragged to the studio, his stubbornness clashing with Q-Tip’s drive and vision. The album was recorded a couple of blocks from Madison Square Garden, at Calliope Studios. Phife would make a brief stop in the studio and then sneak off to Knicks games, leaving Q-Tip and Ali Shaheed Muhammad frustrated but committed to the album’s completion, with or without him.
Another part of the story, which speaks to Phife’s ambivalence about the project, is the fact that he wasn’t signed as an official group member at that point. A Tribe Called Quest was officially only Q-Tip and Ali. Phife and Jarobi were going to start their own group, independent of Tribe, but Jarobi decided to go to culinary school in the middle of this planning, leaving Phife somewhat out in the cold. Tribe welcomed him into the recording sessions and for his contributions to the album, but he wasn’t signed to a contract as an official member. It makes sense, then, that he might not be as open to being pushed in the studio in the very particular way that Q-Tip could push people. Because Q-Tip’s mind operated at almost unimaginable speeds, his major function was to carry everyone else to his level. The stakes were higher for Q-Tip on this album than they were for Phife, who had no real promise of being signed to the group when the album was complete. Phife was still simply making music with his friends in his spare time, but Q-Tip was trying to build a sound that would carry him for an entire career.
People’s Instinctive Travels was critically acclaimed upon its release, though it struggled commercially, taking nearly seven years to achieve gold status. Some of the commercial failing was simply an inability on the part of listeners to understand Q-Tip’s sonic vision. When we talk about artists being “ahead of their time,” the remarks are often peppered with vague complimentary aspects about some futuristic soundscape sold to an audience that would later come to appreciate it as sounds around them evolved. An example would be something like the frantic and hectic album Tusk by Fleetwood Mac, which was a stark departure from the pop-drenched sounds of their previous album, Rumours. The album helped signal the New Wave sound, but at the time, it was a confusing release, loved by a few critics but only a fraction as commercially successful as their previous two albums, until the middle of the 1980s, when the sound they were reaching for began to make more and more sense to people.
Q-Tip and A Tribe Called Quest weren’t selling futuristic grooves as much as they were selling new interpretations of past grooves, layering samples from every corner of the crates and pulling out only the useful parts of the music. People’s Instinctive Travels was, indeed, a blueprint for what was to come. Tribe’s sound didn’t just shift the direction of hip-hop; it offered alternative windows into the world of sampling, cadence, and language. That the album sold better as it aged was simply a reflection of people catching up to it. The mastery in the album was the fact that these were all relatively young artists. Q-Tip was still figuring out how to make the music sound the way he wanted it to sound. And yet, out of all that, he created a stunning, singular debut.
I admit I lost my wallet in another city one time and I did turn back to get it in West Texas, leaving O
dessa after reading the book Friday Night Lights in some late-teen haze and insisting that I must see the town. The thing about Odessa, Texas, is that it really is a desert. I mean, I’m not saying that there’s nothing else there, but I am saying that at one time the town became rich from oil and then the oil left. So you maybe can imagine what I mean when I say that there is a big sky and a lot of land with nothing on it below. That’s beauty, though—a kind of America that can make someone feel like the wide-open spaces are calling them and all of that, that is, when not factoring in the people, some of whom wave Confederate flags on their front porches or glare ominously at an unfamiliar black face in a gas station when the person who owns the face puts their wallet on the counter with a bottle of sweet tea and a pack of peanut M&Ms and then gets the hell out of town before anyone else gets too suspicious. And who is to say really why I drove to Odessa, except for the fact that it was summer and I had nothing better to do and I sure didn’t have a job or much money except for gas and the occasional road snacks and I wanted to get the hell out of town, and anywhere would have done. Like Q-Tip in his own story, I had the space and freedom and four wheels and a map that pointed me to a place I’d heard of and only imagined. And the thing about road trips is that nothing at the end of the journey can live up to the anticipation of the unseen destination once we arrive there, and so, in my haste to get out of Odessa, I drove an hour or two and reached into my pocket when passing the first fast-food sign I’d seen in miles. And I wish Q-Tip would have gone on to describe the feeling that hits you when you realize you have lost your wallet, or some other precious thing—the way shock begins in your legs and carves a home in your stomach for a while, before even getting to the part of your brain that asks the “What do I do?” question. And I knew I’d left it in the gas station, and I knew I left the gas station in too much of a hurry because once you’ve seen a harsh look in one too many small towns, you start to get a feeling for what might be on the other end of that look if you stick around too long. And yet, I did a complete U-turn, kicking up sand and dust as I sped back to the gas station, where my wallet was most certainly waiting for me, and the person behind the counter handed it to me without a word, and I got in my old car and headed back east, and the muffler on that car was so loud, but instead of getting it fixed, I just got a louder stereo and I fingered the leather seams of my newly retrieved wallet and I laughed at the absurdity of it all and then I remembered: there’s a song for this.
CHAPTER THREE
Push It Along
Let it first be said that it would behoove you to have a crew of some kind if you are of the wandering sort, or the dancing sort, or the scrapping sort, or the hustling sort. It would maybe behoove you to have a crew if you are the rapping sort, but it is certainly not required. I had a crew first in middle school, and let it second be said that it is not easy to form a crew. But, again, it would behoove you to do so, and so you find a crew out of whatever ashes of coolness you have left after your confidence has been burned to the ground by the rigors of early teenage life.
My crew was easy to drag out for me. I hung with the kids who were not entirely uncool but who were also decidedly not the cool kids. There’s a lot of currency in the space between immensely cool and not at all cool. If they’re lucky, a crew can define coolness on their own terms, because in the larger ecosystem of popularity, they are often forgettable. My crew sometimes wore our clothes backward in the era of Kris Kross, and my crew sometimes pretended not to like sports even though we kind of liked sports. My crew couldn’t afford the coolest sneakers on the market, but we could afford ones just cool enough to get by—black ones that could go with any and all of our clothing, some of mine hand-me-down or sewn at home by the hands of my mother or passed down from my older brother, who had them passed down from my oldest brother.
My crew stayed under the radar mostly because we couldn’t fight like some of the other crews filling the halls of our school. My brother—a year older—was in a significantly cooler crew, because he could hoop well enough to be respected by the basketball players and he was attractive enough to be desired by the girls. And even though we were from the same home, with similar circumstances and similar genes, he had the confidence to be cool in a way that I didn’t. He wore his clothes better, smiled easier, and was generally more appealing to a wider audience of people in our age group. I envied this, of course, even though I found comfort in my crew’s relative anonymity. My brother was an actively good person who was also good to be around and good at the things he undertook. I was a significantly less good person who was sometimes fine to be around and marginally good at some of the things I undertook. I say this to say that having my brother be who he was at our school and having me be who I was at our school seems like it would be awful on its face, but it added to the general idea of anonymity as a function of my ability to thrive. It’s not as if my brother didn’t claim me or acted ashamed of my presence in school. It’s just that when he was around, his presence rendered me somewhat invisible. I realized this early on, and instead of fighting against it, I found some comfort in it. I didn’t have to live up to the expectations of anything except for silence.
Once, when he was in the eighth grade, my brother’s crew got into a fight with some other crew. By this I mean nothing in the realm of gang violence. I do mean that one group of friends rubbed another group of friends the wrong way, and before you knew it, fists were being thrown in a field, and my brother charged into the fray. The fight was the scandal of that particular middle school year. The boy who was beaten up the most was white, and most of his assailants were black. The optics of the fight were difficult for parents to handle, and the violence seemed to be a stark uptick from the occasional scuffle that was often quickly broken up in the school hallway after some circling and yelling in faces.
My parents didn’t understand my brother’s involvement in the fight, or maybe they did but they had to be parents—showing remorse for the hurt boy and contempt for those who hurt him, even (or perhaps especially) if they were raising one of the perpetrators. Though I do expect and believe that my parents once also had a crew and they knew the inner workings of what it was to have a crew, there is still a line that gets crossed when blood ends up on someone’s asphalt. I have no hard evidence on the distance between a crew and a gang, or what makes someone designate one group a crew and another a gang. I imagine it might depend on who owns the eyes looking upon the cluster of people considering themselves a crew, and what skin is most prominent on that cluster of people, and perhaps the clothing they have on—how it hangs or doesn’t hang from their bodies.
I also imagine that there is something to be said about violence, and how it manifests itself in crews or doesn’t. I can’t speak for the concern of my parents, but I imagine that a small part of it had to do with the fact that a group of boys had inflicted violence on another group of boys, and this was in the 1990s, when gang hysteria was at its peak in our neighborhood and in our school. Some of the hysteria can be attributed to that, but some of it was firmly rooted in what was playing out in the neighborhood: boys who were young and impressionable were being pulled into gangs as a way of forming their own communities.
The difference between a gang and a crew sometimes boils down to reputation or intention. My crew was not preoccupied with appearances, and neither was my brother’s, but the point I’m making is that sometimes you run into the fray in the name of people you love, even if you don’t share blood with them. And that might make you a gang or a crew, depending on who is assessing the fray, or who is defining the kind of love that might make one throw a fist on behalf of another.
My crew didn’t throw fists, though I’d like to think we would have scrapped for each other if need be. We cracked jokes at a high rate, and that’s what kept us sharp. Like Phife Dawg, we were small and of dark skin, and we knew that our wit could be weaponized in tense moments. If cornered in a hallway, for example, we might be clever enough to briefly win over the hea
rt of a bully by cracking jokes at the expense of someone lower on the spectrum of popularity than we were. This, again, is why we existed at what appeared to be the best intersection: the place where there is someone below you that you could turn to and lay a joke on in order to escape what might be a more physically painful fate for yourself. I am, of course, not advocating for this chain of command now, as an adult. But the primary language around having a crew or being a crew also had to do with survival.
By all accounts, me and my boys were nerds, but we were acceptable nerds. We were kind of ahead of our time in this way, though it is laughable to try and sell that now, as I’m sure you know. But there is an age where that became cool, and an age where it still appears to be cool now—one where black people age into some kind of alternativeness that allows for a celebration of simply doing nothing but appearing smart or interesting or witty. If nothing else, my boys and I were tuned in to popular culture in a way that many of our more popular peers simply weren’t at the time. Some of them were going out at night with other cool kids from other schools, and some of them were on sports teams, or some were simply reveling in the type of teenage debauchery that makes memories for adulthood. My crew and crews like mine were at home, watching sitcoms and cartoons, or dubbing tapes from the radio. This, too, was a feature of survival. We weren’t cool, but people would come to us to find out what was cool. To that end, we had a purpose. To have a purpose was to be needed, and to be needed was to be slightly protected. I would ride the back of the school bus with headphones on, attached to my Walkman, and people would talk to me because they knew I was listening to good music, and they’d want to know what music was good so that they could talk about it in their far cooler circles.
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