The Chronic, at its best, is both album and picture book. I knew very little of 1960s Impalas or Dayton Rims. In the Midwest, people didn’t equip their cars the way cars were equipped on the West Coast, largely because of the instability of the weather. But, even before setting eyes on the music videos associated with the album, I could listen to the music, close my eyes, and visualize the cars rolling in straight lines down sun-soaked roads with palm trees hanging over them lazily, letting their wide leaves cast shadows. I loved The Chronic for the windows into the world it opened for me, but it served a greater purpose. If Ice Cube gave the West Coast a viable solo MC, The Chronic gave the West Coast a viable sound and a label to house that sound. Death Row Records had their first major success with The Chronic’s release. The album spent eight months on the Billboard 200 chart, with its three singles becoming Top 10 hits as well. It eventually went triple platinum. But beyond its sales, The Chronic introduced a new stable of West Coast artists, steeped in versatility, that shifted hip-hop’s focus away from its birthplace.
By 1993, A Tribe Called Quest had largely avoided any significant drama, outside of Q-Tip’s minor scuffle with Wreckx-N-Effect. True to their previous practice, they began the year working on what was next. Having not only survived the test of the sophomore album but passed it with flying colors, A Tribe Called Quest was now a known commodity, with a sound being hailed as the future of the genre. Where the work of Q-Tip on the first two albums was to build a sound and then turn it on its ear, the work of this next album was to bridge the gaps between those two elements—to settle on a sound that would carry the group through what seemed as if it would be a long and deep career.
What wasn’t going to be sacrificed was the bass-heavy sound that flooded The Low End Theory. That concept remained, along with the renewed idea that Tribe was now a group with two distinctly different MCs who complemented each other well enough for the group to have a discussion about making music with the voice as an instrument—reflecting how Q-Tip and Phife could each bend similar sounds to their liking. To get to work on the album, Q-Tip eschewed the traditional studio approach and set up his production equipment in the basement of Phife’s grandmother’s house. She gave him a key so he could come and go as he pleased, leading Q-Tip to map out late-night planning sessions for the album. It created a more casual atmosphere, one that better suited Phife’s creative process, as he could sit and watch basketball or play video games while listening to the beats Q-Tip was cooking up, lazily flowing over them when things organically came to him. The rigor of their first two projects bore significant fruit, but they were hard on Phife, who was consistently exhausted due to his diabetes and the energy it required of him to tour and write and perform interviews. His exhaustion led naturally to Q-Tip shouldering most of the group’s publicity appearances. But behind the scenes, Q-Tip was also working to make the production and recording space more comfortable. Though the motive was not explicit, there was a perceived generosity in the shift of recording style and session from the past two albums to the album that would become Midnight Marauders. Phife could be in a safe and comfortable place, where he would be at his sharpest. This served the group, as well—Phife was at his best when he was relaxed and playful, when the pressure to rise to Q-Tip’s level wasn’t explicit and present.
By the time these recording sessions were going on, Q-Tip was also sought after as an in-demand producer independent of the group. Nas, then an up-and-coming solo MC who was seen as the next evolution of Rakim, asked Q-Tip to produce his single “One Love,” which was on the solo album, Illmatic, he was preparing for a 1994 release. Q-Tip had also worked on Run-DMC’s Down with the King album and a track for another up-and-coming MC from New Jersey, Apache. While this didn’t impact his work for his own group, it did broaden his sense of sounds and what he was capable of. Producing for a wider range of MCs with different skill sets allowed him to return to the Midnight Marauders sessions renewed, with a new set of sounds to play with. His skills on the production side moved past his singular ability to stack loops and evolved into extracting subtle sounds from sample sources and stitching them together cleanly. There is a more controlled restraint in the production of Marauders, like the subtle sample on “Award Tour” of just the keys on Milt Jackson’s “Olinga,” which is used to flesh out the song’s other elements but not dragged to the forefront, as Tip might have done on Tribe’s earlier albums. He was understanding how to make the sound bend to his ideas without forcing its movement.
Midnight Marauders was to be the Tribe Called Quest album that they entered into as a known commodity and most comfortable with one another. They faced pressure from the outside—the question of “Can they do it again?” loomed heavy in the industry. People’s Instinctive Travels gained the group a surprising notoriety among the underground rap elite, and The Low End Theory was a bona fide success, which primed the group for what some thought would be an inevitable letdown. Jarobi White, who left the group again halfway through the recording of The Low End Theory, was welcomed back into recording sessions, but merely as comic relief. When pressure in the sessions got too high, he would come in the studio and make jokes or do impressions until everyone in the studio was doubled over in laughter. Tribe had to stay loose during the making of the album. When the stakes are high, the hardest thing to do is not succumb to the stress that accompanies them.
In some ways, Midnight Marauders is the great Tribe album. It might not be the most perfect Tribe album—though it is yet another classic—but it is the album on which Q-Tip and Phife were most tuned in to each other’s needs and desires. With regard to the production, Q-Tip and Ali Shaheed Muhammad worked to maintain an eclectic sample base, but—perhaps responding to the shift in sound coming from the West—Q-Tip substituted funk samples for jazz ones, giving the album a denser sound, which was complemented by the layering of drums.
Years later, in 2012, Tip would elaborate on this, saying that when he went into the studio for everything after The Low End Theory, he thought of himself as competing with Dr. Dre. “Everybody deals with shit in a competitive way. But not in like an egregious way, how shit looks a little bit today,” he explained in a radio interview on Shade 45’s All Out Show. “But more like one-upsmanship in the music. Tryin’ to stay fresh . . . just keeping your eye on that dude. And for me, personally, when I went in, that dude was Dre. The bar was set very high. Musically, my main thing was Dre. That was like trying to make something he would like and appreciate in a way. Musically. The group was N.W.A., and to me, that was the benchmark.” In this way, the work was an exchange, similar to the 1960s, when Brian Wilson was pushed by and pushing the Beatles. Although the coasts were drifting apart in some ways, Q-Tip was driven enough by the sounds coming out of the West to try and hold the region close.
Now it was the Meters, the Ohio Players, and James Brown when once it was Eric Dolphy. The album also used fewer samples than their previous work, with most songs having only two or three, instead of the sprawling number on their earlier releases. The album’s samples, like the Bomb Squad’s, also began to nod back to the hip-hop before it. On “We Can Get Down,” Ali Shaheed Muhammad dices up Eric B. and Rakim’s “My Melody,” and “The Chase” borrows elements from Biz Markie’s “Nobody Beats the Biz.”
The album is diverse in sound and topic, with Q-Tip—the group’s deft romantic—making a canvas of the sexy and well-paced “Electric Relaxation,” and Phife going on lyrical runs that don’t allow a listener to get up off the mat. On “Award Tour”:
I have a quest to have a mic in my hand
Without that, it’s like Kryptonite and Superman
So Shaheed come in with the sugar cuts
Phife Dawg’s my name, but on stage, call me Dynomutt
When was the last time you heard the Phifer sloppy
Lyrics anonymous, you’ll never hear me copy
On “Oh My God,” he’s his classic balance of deprecating and triumphant:
Some brothers try to
diss but Malik, you see ’em bitching
Me no care about them dibby MC, my shit is hitting
Trini gladiator, anti-hesitater
Shaheed push the fader from here to Grenada
Mr Energetic, who me sound pathetic?
When’s the last time you heard a funky diabetic?
Throughout, Tip and Phife are no longer pushing each other toward some imagined greater heights, but the rappers have seen the goal; they know exactly how high it is, and they spend an entire album boosting each other toward it. Tip, cupping his hands for his brother to place a foot into, and Phife doing the same.
It is important to talk about the album’s cover now. A Tribe Called Quest were not often fixtures on their album covers anyway, so the fact that their faces don’t show up on the cover of Midnight Marauders isn’t much of a surprise. But it’s who was on the cover that makes it interesting, given the time when it was released.
Q-Tip didn’t want to part with the idea of the red, black, and green–striped woman who had adorned the previous album’s cover. He wanted her on a bed at first, wearing headphones with her hand on her crotch. The label rejected that. He then wanted to have her walking in front of the Flatiron Building in New York with headphone jacks coming out of her head, with connected headphones being worn by a group of people following behind her. The photo shoot for this failed, and the idea was nixed.
In the end, the two concepts blended, somewhat. On the Midnight Marauders cover as it stands, the striped woman appears, legs spread and hands joined downward, near her crotch. Wearing headphones behind her is a mass of familiar faces. To get the cover right, A Tribe Called Quest reached out to various hip-hop artists they respected from everywhere hip-hop was currently being made and asked if they could get a headshot with them wearing headphones. The artists were all supposed to put on headphones and make a face as though they were listening to the album for the first time. What began as a small idea bloomed into a significantly greater one. By the time the project was complete, the album was overflowing with faces of collaborators, peers, and respected icons of the industry: Chuck D, Grandmaster Flash, Daddy-O of Stetsasonic, Oakland rapper Too Short, Beastie Boys MCA and Mike D, Ice-T, Pee Wee Dance from the Rock Steady Crew, Ant Banks, Special K of the Awesome Two, Chi-Ali, all the members of the Bay-area rap group The Pharcyde, A-Plus from Souls of Mischief, Buckshot from Black Moon, and a handful of other rap luminaries, both new and emerging, including Dr. Dre, and a little-known record man named Sean “Puffy” Combs.
It was a small show of unity, which echoed large as hip-hop’s coasts began to fracture more loudly. Something was brewing on the horizon, though Tribe didn’t know that at the time. It’s a pure nod to what they loved about hip-hop, and the people they loved who were making it. The Midnight Marauders album cover is a who’s who of the genre in its 1993 state. I would sit with the small cassette tape in my room, unraveling it and seeing how many faces I could point out without looking at the names on the back—seeing who might be hidden among the background, headphones on, mouth agape with wonder.
This gesture—though it may have seemed small at the time—acted as a point of pride for Tribe and was something deeply in line with their ethos. They were proud New Yorkers, of course. But they were chasing good sound, and would consume it wherever it arose. A Tribe Called Quest listened to N.W.A. to make The Low End Theory, at a time when Ice Cube ventured east to make his first solo masterpiece, and shortly after that, A Tribe Called Quest turned back to what was bubbling out of the West to inform their newer, harder sound. The Midnight Marauders cover is a nod to who and what had managed to carry A Tribe Called Quest to that point. At a time when the two coasts were engaged in harmless but escalating sniping, A Tribe Called Quest was giving thanks, endlessly.
This album was a quicker success than the first two, registering a gold certification with sales of 500,000 only about two months after its release. Its songs were played on radio, particularly “Award Tour,” the first Tribe song I remember memorizing from front to back. It seemed, in the moment, that A Tribe Called Quest was immovable.
There was another reason why Midnight Marauders contained fewer samples than the albums before it. The golden age of sampling in hip-hop took place from about 1987 to 1992. In this time, record companies still seemed to think that hip-hop was going to come and go, so they didn’t pay much attention to what the artists in the genre were doing or how they were using their music. This gave artists the ability to do what Tribe and Public Enemy were doing—layering massive amounts of samples one on top of the other. Lawyers didn’t care, labels didn’t care, and it was virtually a free-for-all.
In late 1991, Grand Upright Music sued Warner Brothers because Gilbert O’Sullivan’s song publisher noticed that Biz Markie’s song “Alone Again” made a clear and obvious use of O’Sullivan’s original song of the same title. It seemed obvious to O’Sullivan that this shouldn’t be allowed without some legal recourse. The song belonged to O’Sullivan, after all, and he was getting no financial gain from it. Sampling is creativity until a judge decides it is theft, and that is what a judge did—going so far as to suggest that Biz Markie should serve jail time for his appropriation of the song. Right after that, the Turtles brought a suit against De La Soul for using elements from “You Showed Me.”
Those two lawsuits opened up the floodgates and instilled fear into record companies, who realized that their back catalogs were all getting sampled freely, sometimes by artists they had signed to their label. The industry acted quickly before more lawsuits came down, setting a rule that if you release a record on any major label, you have to clear a sample.
“Clearing a sample” means that a fee has to be paid to whatever entity holds the rights to the sample, that is, whoever owns the actual sound recording, and whoever the song publisher is. So, one is paying for both the sound and the melody underneath the sound. The process takes a lot of money and time—labels weren’t willing to spend the former, and artists weren’t willing to spend the latter. And even if both were willing to, there was no guarantee that the rights-holders would allow the sample to be cleared. And if one was, but the other wasn’t, the sample couldn’t be used. Albums from the early 1990s that were built atop a mountain of samples became impossible and too time-consuming to make. The average price to clear a single sample could reach tens of thousands of dollars, which made albums with over ten samples per song just not financially viable anymore, particularly when some labels were still not sold on rap’s longevity and were concerned about sinking so much money into it. Dr. Dre found a way around this on The Chronic by re-creating the sounds of old songs with live musicians, manipulating notes here and there to lessen the number of samples he used. He was also fortunate to latch on to George Clinton, who was more than willing to hand over much of the Parliament-Funkadelic catalog for a fraction of the cost that others were charging. Dre built a sound on what was affordable, but some of his peers weren’t so fortunate and didn’t have the resources he had.
This was how the sun began to go down on rap’s golden era of sound. Sampling provided more than just a backbone for the music; it was a way to get a new generation to engage with the history of sounds the new music was pulling from. A lot of the music being sampled was rooted in past political moments, finding its way to newer political narratives by being pulled tight over a track where MCs would rap about their own desires for a fractured world. Sampling created a dialogue between past and present and helped bridge a gap between the music a rapper was first introduced to and the music they desperately wanted to share with the new world.
When the smoke cleared, everything felt like it required more work. Production styles had to adjust. Single or fewer samples had to be stretched out over fuller portions of a song. Fewer gems could be found hiding beneath tracks, waiting to be unearthed by a close listener. Producers like Pete Rock and the Bomb Squad suffered, and they saw their output first slightly decline and then drastically decline. The time it took to m
ake albums grew, so the space needed between releases grew, thus the anticipation revolving around releases grew, and so disappointment was often plentiful. A Tribe Called Quest released one of the last great albums of rap’s first golden era, and they had to find out how to survive whatever was coming next.
CHAPTER SIX
1nce Again
There is a cost to moving the world—a cost that one perhaps doesn’t consider when pushing an entire sound or genre or country forward. With your hands on the machinery of whatever you imagine progress to be, it is difficult to imagine the real-time drawbacks. Especially if you are immersed in it. The problem that A Tribe Called Quest found themselves wrestling with in 1996 was the perfect storm of several things. First, rap’s landscape had very literally shifted. Midnight Marauders was released in November of 1993, on the same day as another hotly anticipated rap album: a debut from the Staten Island rap group Wu-Tang Clan.
Wu-Tang Clan’s structure was mostly unique to the rap landscape of the 1990s because of its sheer size. At the time of the album’s release, the group had nine MCs and an MC/producer in Rza. What made the engines turn on Wu-Tang Clan was specifically the fact that there was no drop-off in skill from each of the MCs. On the album, it was hard to find any weak link in the group, as if they were each born to play their deeply specific role in the makeup of the band. Even Ol’ Dirty Bastard, first introduced to the world on the first verse and chorus of the iconic song “Shame on a Nigga,” was a vital cog in the machine—a less structured MC and more a hybrid of Flavor Flav and Eazy-E, he added a levity to the group’s grimy exterior. To pick a favorite rapper out of the group’s lineup on the first album was impossible. For a moment, it would seem that the star was Method Man, the tall and charismatic MC with an uneven but inviting flow. And then, before that thought could settle, it would seem that it might be Raekwon or Ghostface Killah, both storytellers with inviting but deeply unreliable narration, which added to the album’s tone and intrigue. The star might be Rza, the producer who crafted the sound that turned out to be the blueprint for the future of what some would call hardcore hip-hop.
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