A Tribe Called Quest outgrew the Native Tongues quicker than anyone else. Arguably, Q-Tip’s vision outpaced any reasonable future the collective could have had together. Beyond that, it was a question of ambition. Not everyone wanted to act, or DJ. A Tribe Called Quest wanted to make as many classic records as they could. Sound and style are fleeting in hip-hop—more so now than they were then—but there was an urgency to Q-Tip and Tribe’s approach. They wanted to run fully into the moment while they still had one to run into. The joy of collectivism aside, there was a process that had to be catered to.
I miss loosely defined collectives in rap music, and I think the genre misses them, too. They aren’t entirely obsolete, though. The Los Angeles collective Odd Future, formed by Tyler, the Creator in 2007, is unlike Native Tongues in sound but similar in spirit: a bunch of young, talented artists, tethering themselves together for the sake of community or collaboration, or just from the desire to be weird together. So many crews now are tied together by the same record label, which makes things difficult when the business end of things begins to fall apart. Cash Money Records has gone through so many iterations, with only Lil Wayne remaining as a core functioning member, it’s hard to consider them a crew. When hard business is involved—I mean when one member’s business directly affects whether or not you will be consistently paid—it’s difficult to put that into the context of a crew, who are just looking to one another for creative lighthouses or for some emotional respite from a grueling industry. The songs begin to sound like they have checks being chased at the end of every hook.
In the mid to late 1990s, a new era of rappers and producers took up the Native Tongues mantle, like a group of superheroes, subbing into the old, dormant costumes of their departed elders: Common, J Dilla, Mos Def, The Pharcyde. It was cool in name only. The new class didn’t collaborate nearly as much, beyond J Dilla providing soundtracks for several of them. This group didn’t have the same free-flowing spirit of the first collective. Rather, it was a band of artists trying to lift a flag but being worn down by its weight before the wind could catch it.
Still, I understood it and valued it from my small corner of the world. I know what it is to have heroes and want to slide a foot into their shoes, whether or not the fit is perfect. I know what it is to walk into a world that seems wild and eager to swallow you whole and want someone at your side, even if they are at your side in name only and nothing else. There is plenty out there worth doing alone, but for everything else, there is a need for your people. It would behoove you to have a crew.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Low End
DEAR TIP,
I, too, have in interest in that which can be felt more than heard. You know this from jazz, as I do, but also from the way the body reacts with a low, joyful moan after placing the first bite of a good meal on your tongue. I’m talking about vibrations. In music, it works best if one imagines hearing as a straight line, with the larger number of hertz on the high end and the smaller number of hertz on the low end. Any music you hear falls along that spectrum. Higher noises—like cymbals crashing together or a car stereo with the treble turned all the way up—fall on the high end. Sounds that demand the ear’s most eager attention. Sounds that are jarring enough to get a room to snap to focus. On the extreme end of this spectrum would be some guitar feedback, wrung through a speaker.
The low end is where the bass and the kick drums exist. You found a home here, as I did listening to the bass licks of Ron Carter and Stanley Clarke on good speakers and feeling my chest rattle a little bit with each slow walk of the fingers along a string. Tip, what I most love about “Jazz” is the way the Low End is not only desired but prayed to. I am wondering what space you went to when you let your chest direct your musical curiosities and allowed your ears to rest. Some might say it is too wild to strip away all those sounds and just leave a song’s backbone, but you knew what you were trying to spell out: an homage to the horns and strings—bowing to Ron Carter himself and promising not to curse too much on the record if he came in and played some bass for you.
Jive Records never knew what they had, and I know you understood this always, but it’s a good time to say it again now. They didn’t deserve the album, but you gave it to them anyway. When asked about the sophomore slump, you said, “What the fuck is that? I’m going to make The Low End Theory.” And I must say that I am impressed by how you never imagined a failure at your doorstep. Maybe the idea was that if you never left the studio after making the first album, there was no true sophomore album—just a continuation, another arm attached to the body you were building.
It is really something to make the music talk so that the rapper doesn’t have to speak until they are ready. I love the sample as you love the sample, Tip—for how it can be extracted from the past and stretched over a sound reaching for the future. On “Check the Rhime,” there was Grover Washington Jr. again, as he was in 1975, when he put out back-to-back albums that were both critical and commercial darlings, one in the winter and one in the summer. I loved the way you stripped his tune “Hydra” down to its base elements and let it rattle around a bit along the spine of “Check the Rhime,” but not so much that it drowns out the Minnie Riperton sample. I love the deep and chunky guitar plucks from “Baby, This Love I Have.” I, too, have dug in the crates and found that record: Adventures in Paradise, the record that came after the album that made Minnie a household name. This is also a type of sophomore record, isn’t it? “Baby, This Love I Have” is a perfect album opener—a reintroduction, if you will. Maybe all the samples you chose were chosen by way of reintroduction, as you imagined your own sound being reintroduced.
Don’t you love the cover of Adventures in Paradise? Minnie, propped up on a chair with a real lion at rest beside her. The story I’ve heard goes that there were two lions at first, but the initial lion snapped at Riperton and attacked her without warning. The lion’s handler removed the first lion and brought in the second. The second, upon seeing Riperton, laid right down next to her and didn’t move. Shortly after the album cover was shot, she found out she had cancer and was given six months to live. She made it longer than that, but I’ve been thinking about how the art of the sample is also the art of breathing life into someone who doesn’t have a life anymore. And I say this and know that you are not in the business of resurrection as much as you are in the business of feeling, but I hate that Minnie Riperton was lost before I could live at the same time as she lived, and I hate that she is only known for the one song and nothing more, and I hate that I cannot hear that song and think that she sang it without knowing how much longer she was going to live.
But I suppose none of us truly know, Tip. Which is why the sample is a joy, isn’t it? The wind blows a memory of someone into a room through sound, and the architect captures that memory with their bare hands and puts it on wax. Is this, too, the low end? The feeling of something familiar that sits so deep in your chest that you have to hum it out? The James Brown on “Show Business” or the Sly Stone sample on “Jazz.” There are cookouts and Soul Train lines on this album. There are hot rooms and hot card games. I imagine the low end to be anything you could touch once but is now just a fading dream. I imagine the low end to be a bassline that rattles your teeth, too. But I also consider the low end to be the smell of someone you once loved coming back to you. Someone who sang along to Aretha, or Minnie, or Otis. Someone who loved you once and then loved nothing.
PHIFE DAWG,
It was a bad one for the Knicks last season, I know. The problem with a team like that is that they’re just good enough to give you hope, but not good enough to fulfill that hope. I like John Starks, even when he shoots too much, or even when he’s a bit of a menace on the court. He’s tough to handle and tough to deal with. But the payoff happens, eventually. It comes in bursts, sure. But it happens. You can tell he annoys Patrick Ewing. Everyone knows Starks is going to be big eventually. His 7.6 points per game don’t feel like much, especially when he is
shooting 29 percent of his three-pointers. But I like a guy who isn’t afraid to shoot a team out of a game, because it means he’ll eventually shoot them into some games, you know? Someone who isn’t afraid to miss is surely also not afraid to get hot and stay hot. Sure, if you’re the Knicks, you hitch your star on Patrick Ewing and let him carry you as far as he can. You bank on Charles Oakley’s defense and reliable rebounding. But you need a player like John Starks. Every team needs an enigma, or a player that makes someone throw something across a room one minute and cheer their name the next.
What I like about Starks is that he’s willing to fight. He got kicked outta college for stealing some kid’s stereo equipment. Then he went to another college and got kicked out for smoking weed in his dorm room and listening to rap. He worked at a grocery store while averaging eleven points per game at one college, and then went to another. He didn’t even get drafted. Had to work his way up to the NBA through the minor leagues, where they pay you next to nothing. And now, here he is. He’s the quintessential New York player. He has the city’s architecture built directly into his style of play. He endures, and it isn’t romantic. It’s peppered with drugs and theft and jail time. But if there’s a fight to be had, you want him next to you.
Phife, I love Starks as I love you, perhaps because both of you strike me as people I would want by my side if something were to go down that I didn’t know if I could find my way out of. Some might think that the message underneath all of this is that Q-Tip is Ewing, the fearless and stable leader, and you are Starks, the unpredictable but brilliant sidekick. But I think what makes the most sense to me is that you are both equals, fighting for your own space in relation to each other. Perhaps Tip is Ewing, but Ewing found himself needing Starks to thrive and survive more than he could on his own. This is what made your dynamic worth celebrating.
I am glad for the story I read. The one where, when exiting a train, you ran into Q-Tip by chance, after having not spoken to him for some months after finishing work and touring on People’s Instinctive Travels. It’s funny how chance encounters work, I suppose. When you were both ready to find the way to each other again, the journey began.
Let me first say that I know you were but a whisper on the first album, but also, where would it be without your energy? Where would it be without your introduction to rap, the idea that you had arrived and were unlike anything before you? I appreciate stability so that I might appreciate that which shakes up stability, and I felt this on “Push It Along” in just a few bars. It’s what you feel when John Starks checks into a game: the idea that everything that happened before is about to be altered.
Tip is the conservative but skilled MC, in the way that Ewing was the reliable, back-to-the-basket center who would bully down low with technical grace to get his buckets. You, though. What you did was an act of brilliance, flying in from nowhere, a rush of colors behind you, throwing up everything like you’ve never missed before. This is how you came alive on The Low End Theory, a whole album about love and loss and fear and rage. I get it. Maybe People’s Instinctive Travels wasn’t the thing you had a taste for. It all seemed like some trick that would never pan out. But on The Low End Theory, you decided to get serious. You started writing more, like a writer’s writer. I heard it in the way your punch lines began to leap off the page, or in the unexpected angles they began to take. I laughed with you in awe. It is great to have a group with one feared MC, and you made it so Tribe had two.
The Knicks will maybe never get past the Bulls, Phife, and I’m sure you know this. I’m hoping that you’ll make some peace with this. It’s a question of era, really. There is nothing like playing a game as well as you can and having it still not be good enough because there are titans roaming your land.
But this makes me wonder, what did it feel like not to know what that was? To be the titans roaming the landscape, if for just a short while. Maybe you don’t give a shit about basslines or sound frequencies or how low the human ear can hear. Maybe you don’t care about the way a good bass kick can briefly stop the heart before it starts again, refreshed. The right speaker makes the body a quick ghost before kicking it back to life, and I find that fascinating, and if you don’t, that’s fine. I guess I can’t expect you to do much but show up and do what you imagine your job is. Shaking the table. Rapping better than anyone else in the room.
TIP,
The police showed us what the body of Rodney King could take, didn’t they? On the concrete of Los Angeles, the batons cut through the air and then fell again on King’s writhing body. It is hard to tell what could bring this specific type of ferocity out of anyone—particularly those who insist on serving and protecting. Yes, Rodney King was drunk, and had led police on a high-speed chase through the L.A. streets while behind the wheel of a Hyundai. I don’t know what measure of recklessness warrants a type of anger that results in what Rodney King got, but the American public got Rodney King.
It must be an odd life, to be introduced to the world first through your flaws and then through your blood on the ground, or your swollen face in a mug shot, or your bent body in a wheelchair. It is said that King patted the back of his pants when exiting the vehicle, which made police believe he had a weapon. I’ve been thinking a lot about invisible weapons and how they relate to the body itself. I have nothing on me, but in the wrong neighborhood, I have everything on me. And it’s as simple as a move for a pocket, or a low whistle in the wrong direction, or the song spilling out of my rolled-down car windows.
Los Angeles wasn’t on fire yet when The Low End Theory was being made or when it was released. But it would be on fire by the time the songs were playing in heavy rotation all across America. What had already begun, though, were all of the replays of Rodney King’s beating, his legs twitching on the ground with each strike of the baton. The constant replaying of the footage was laying a new groundwork for rage in communities miles away.
I first watched it in the dark of a living room with my parents, who often had the news on. I remember my father’s silence and that is about it. I was too young to know how to feel. But I do wonder where the visuals arrived first for you, Tip. If you sat, with your hands shaking, or if you covered your eyes with each blow. You knew already. The police in Queens would hassle you enough for you to understand that they could, if they wanted to, do harm and get away with it.
I understand more clearly now what I didn’t understand then: how The Low End Theory isn’t only about that which cannot be heard, but it is also about society’s unseen, the people who exist but may be able to navigate an entire landscape as invisible, until some violence or some tragedy deems them less so. The downtrodden, yes. But also those who are getting by, just trying to make a chain of solid days out of a mess of a year or a wreck of a lifetime, who need a way out but don’t know where the windows are—the people living very normal lives until they are the target of something greater than themselves.
Maybe it was always time to make a political album anyway, wasn’t it? Maybe what N.W.A. was trying to chip away at was right there all along, but you guys were never ones to point two middle fingers in the direction of your foes. You were never the sonic force that Public Enemy was, with a big-voiced siren shouting down the kingdom of your oppressors until their empire trembled to dust.
What is political in a country that would leave you bleeding on the concrete? What is political when those who did the beating walk free of all charges, despite the footage of their crime? I don’t know if you have to answer that, Tip. But The Low End Theory at least has characters at the heart of these questions. I most love Miss Elaine from “Everything Is Fair.” Do you love Van Morrison as I do, Tip? On a night of your choosing, I could play the song “Madame George” for you, and we might sit together and talk about all of the ways you bring to life a character in the same manner that Van Morrison brought to life a character: Madame George down on Cyprus Avenue, whom Morrison looks upon with curiosity and compassion in equal measure. I like to close my eyes wh
ile listening to “Everything Is Fair” and imagine that you perhaps stumbled upon Astral Weeks in one of your many record store excursions and skipped straight to “Madame George,” listening to the way Van Morrison wrote a listener into some small dose of empathy.
Miss Elaine hustles weed and manages to get by without the cops hassling her. You wrote of longing for her, maybe not even entirely out of romance, but out of a love for power. You write of getting close to her and then her turning around and trusting you to sell her drug. She gave into your advances but then pulled away. And you write of how she kept the gun closer than any person and became consumed by dealing. It’s a love story, maybe. But it’s mostly a narrative on what one must do to survive in a city. What it is to be loved by the streets more than you can ever imagine being loved by a person. I want to imagine this as political because it is a song about the varied ways we all survive. In the song, you sold drugs because you desired closeness, and I imagine that, too, is a type of hustle. We do whatever we must to get closer to the people we desire. This is also the low end, the dark and endless humming of want, which opens the door and beckons us to all manner of ills.
I thank you for knowing the type of political album that the world needed at the time: one that wrapped its politics in ideas of a type of freedom. “Do your ill dance, don’t think about the next man.” Thank you for showing us how we might, if we are lucky, be able to dance our way into a type of brief forgetting. Let the other groups have the anger. They knew how to navigate it better than you all ever did. I know what it is to watch a man beaten on the ground and shout with rage. I know you know that as well as I do. But I also know what it is to fashion that rage into a hunt for empathy, even among people who likely have none. And if all else fails, at least there will be something left for our people to move their hips to.
Go Ahead in the Rain Page 5