Go Ahead in the Rain

by Hanif Abdurraqib

  On top of this, Phife moved to Atlanta after recording Midnight Marauders—in part because he thought the breakup of Tribe was an inevitability after that album. Midnight Marauders had been the group’s most difficult album to make. Despite—or perhaps because of—the sacrifices made to comfort each member, infighting in the group escalated, until it got to a point where the group’s tours were no longer sunny affairs, and their chemistry began to spiral in early 1994. Phife found himself exhausted by New York and the impact it was having on his health. He wanted to start a family, and Atlanta, at the time, was intriguing. A burgeoning rap hotbed like New York was in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Atlanta was slower paced and less demanding. Phife had in some ways decided that he was done with the group before the group was officially done.

  On the other side, Q-Tip decided to convert to Islam in 1994. He had previously been leaning toward Islam, but a reading of the Quran refueled his desire for faith, and he became devout. By the time A Tribe Called Quest set out to record their new album in 1995, the group’s chemistry had entirely shifted. Phife would have to travel up from Atlanta to record, and sometimes the studio would be entirely empty when he arrived. Anticipating that Phife’s input could potentially be minimal or inconsistent, Q-Tip added his cousin, a young rapper named Consequence, to flesh out the group’s rapping and fill in some verses in spots. Additionally, in 1996, the production team expanded to become The Ummah, Arabic for “Community.”

  This is when the legend of J Dilla begins. In 1995, during the making of the Beats, Rhymes and Life album, Dilla was a twenty-one-year-old phenom from Detroit, who had little experience producing except for some underground work in his hometown. Less than a year later, he would have formed Slum Village and begun to cement his sound, but in 1995, he was a producer Ali and Tip had an eye on, thinking that he might help transition their group’s sound.

  Dilla’s reputation had preceded him, even with his minimal output in 1995. His parents claim that Dilla could match pitch-perfect harmony by the age of two months, and that he began collecting vinyl before he could read. As a child, he spun records in Detroit parks for recreation. Much like Q-Tip, he took up beat making in high school using tape decks as his studio. He trained himself on stop tapes, drawing sample sounds from his massive record collection.

  In this way, Dilla was a perfect fit to fold in with the desired evolution of Tribe. He was of the same generation as Q-Tip, with a similar self-taught technique but a different sound palette and execution. Dilla was utilizing unique and unexpected drum sounds and unconventional sample chops that dipped heavily into 1960s rock and soul.

  All of this meant that Dilla was supposed to push Tribe toward a more modern sound. Gone on Beats, Rhymes and Life was their characteristic bottom-heavy, thick bass, replaced by a newer, airy and soul-sample-based quality, rooted in tricks that would become Dilla’s signature. This album’s sample template was significantly smaller, with most songs having only one sample and a few having none at all. The album essentially showcased J Dilla’s blooming talents. It took Dilla mere minutes to make some beats on the record, like the ominous and sparse “Get a Hold,” the second song on the album, which features samples from William DeVaughn’s “Be Thankful for What You Got” and The Cyrkle’s “The Visit.” According to Shoes, a collaborator of Dilla’s, it took him twelve minutes total—most of the time was spent getting the drums. Once he got those, he chopped the sample and put the loop on top in three minutes. Where Tip was meticulous and microscopic in his pursuit of perfection, Dilla was immediate and haphazardly brilliant, and he provided the group with a sonic balance.

  The world already knew what Q-Tip could do and, on a slightly lesser scale, what Ali Shaheed Muhammad could do. Dilla was a talented but unknown entity. Beats, Rhymes and Life gave the group an opportunity to see if they could catch on to rap’s newer production waves, but it also gave Q-Tip an opportunity to scale back the burden of carrying the group’s sound.

  The creation process with the album felt, at times, as if there were two entirely different groups working on the project. Newly converted to Islam, Q-Tip and Ali Shaheed Muhammad would take breaks during the album’s creation to make prayer, which made Phife uncomfortable and widened the distance between members of the group.

  The album’s first single was “1nce Again,” which featured R&B singer Tammy Lucas and sampled Cannonball Adderley’s “Untitled” and Gary Burton’s “I’m Your Pal.” That they lead with a single that sampled two jazz acts is the first part of the lie: Tribe wanting their audience to think that they’re actually who they’ve always been, returned after three years to the same clothes they left in the closet, and they all still fit fine.

  The single opens with a familiar refrain:

  “You on point, Phife?”

  “Once again, Tip.”

  It is a callback to five years prior, on The Low End Theory’s “Check the Rhime,” where Q-Tip poses the same question, and Phife responds with “All the time, Tip.” This, perhaps, is the second part of the lie, or the part that exposes the lie more clearly: a group known for pushing boundaries, relying on their own nostalgia in an era that no longer felt like their era. Rap was no longer as sample based, and when it returned to being sample-heavy just a few years later, the approach to sampling would have changed. The divide between that which was commercial and that which was “real” seemed larger, and what was real didn’t always sell, so there was pressure from both sides of that divide: be real enough to stay underground, or go pop enough to get money. Tribe found themselves at the center of this tug-of-war, having already established an underground following, but with enough pop chops to get played on radio. There is selling out, and then there is simply being good enough to reach everyone at once.

  Still, when Tip and Phife echo each other, insisting that they are both on point once again, it feels as if they are asking an audience to believe what they know is not true anymore of themselves or their relationship.

  When people talk about Beats, Rhymes and Life now, it is labeled a grand failure—the beginning of a sharp and rapid decline that would end in the disbanding of Tribe just two years later, in the summer of 1998. Which isn’t entirely accurate.

  Because Tribe walked the commercial-underground line so well by 1996, and had already mastered catering to their underground roots, a tip in the opposite direction seemed inevitable and almost necessary. Still, between Consequence and Dilla’s additions to the Tribe, the formula was noticeably off, as was Q-Tip and Phife’s comfort within the new formula.

  The production was clean but didn’t exactly serve the group’s needs very well. The addition of Consequence flourished in spots, like on the song “Stressed Out,” for example. But in other spots, he was clunky and slowed down momentum. Despite being skilled, on a song like “Motivators,” Consequence quite simply took up too much space, eagerly nestling in between Q-Tip’s and Phife’s verses to pull the track further and further away from the sharpness that Tribe had just seemed to get comfortable with. In many ways, Consequence’s presence on the album acted like a wedge between the group’s two MCs, holding each of them at arm’s length. It’s much easier to make that commentary now, of course, with the group’s tensions during the making of the album well known. But even in the moment, when Consequence was on, he was effective, but when he was off, he was disruptive to the group’s natural confidence and rhythm. Which makes sense, of course. He was brought in because the group was lacking the confidence and rhythm that had gotten them to this point.

  Being good is only a failure if you’ve been impossible three times in a row. If you’ve carved new paths out of seemingly nothing, people might become confused when you don’t do it again or when you veer into different territory that feels both new and uncomfortable rather than groundbreaking.

  A Tribe Called Quest didn’t fail with Beats, Rhymes and Life. The album had more than enough bright spots to not be a complete failure. While not as critically adored as their first three effo
rts, the album did get four stars from Rolling Stone and a four-mic rating from The Source. The problem was that, for the first time, A Tribe Called Quest made an album that didn’t feel as though it was setting a pace for the genre. They made the album the genre wanted, not the album they wanted to see in the genre. And there’s nothing wrong with that, really. But when you set a precedent on pushing forward, it’s hard to simply be good.

  “Baby Phife’s Return” is a track of Phife’s best rapping, buoyed by a Consequence hook. He’s at his best on the song, pop culture and self-deprecation hidden under boasts:

  Big up pop Duke, that’s where I caught my athleticism

  My mama, no doubt, that’s where I got my lyricism

  My nana, that’s where I got my spiritualism

  As for Tip and Shah, they made me stop from smokin’ izm

  In many ways, Phife is the star of the album, which is only interesting because of how disconnected he was from its creation. He runs a clinic on the productions, playing with breath and pace but remaining light on his feet. He steals the show on “The Pressure” and “The Hop,” both comical and vicious in his rhymes, as in this excerpt from the latter:

  You see you, your career is done like Johnny Carson’s

  Get me vexed, I do like Left Eye, start an arson

  Now that I got that out my system

  Watch me stab up the track as if my name was OJ Simpson

  I packs it in like Van Halen

  I work for mine, you, you’re freeloading like Kato Kaelin

  It makes sense that the album on which Q-Tip decided to take his hands slightly off the wheel was also the album where Phife shined the brightest, but it was also the album seen as a letdown to the general public. Beats, Rhymes and Life is an album of conflict, laid over a sonic calm. It is not a happy album. Gone are the upbeat crew cuts and the odes to ease and community. Instead it includes songs about depression, stresses of fame, and bemoaning the industry they were in. The very first track is “Phony Rappers,” where Phife and Q-Tip trade stories about the decline of artistry in the game. The tone of the album feels very bitter and dark, reflecting a group no longer interested in uplifting their genre and more interested in performing an autopsy on it.

  Still, Beats, Rhymes and Life was A Tribe Called Quest’s first Number 1 album. It was long overdue for them to achieve commercial success, after being critical darlings for years. The album was certified gold, and then platinum. And this is how it works sometimes: when there is a crisis of faith, both musical and personal, the things we create become beloved, even though we know the interior of that creative process and want never to imagine being inside it again.

  Just two months after Beats, Rhymes and Life was released, Tupac Shakur was dead. After a shooting in Las Vegas on the night of September 7, 1996, he was rushed to the hospital, where he eventually succumbed to his wounds on September 13. The feud that had been threatening to spill over for years finally had a high-profile death, marked with its name. Six months later, the Notorious B.I.G. was shot dead in Los Angeles while sitting in a parked car.

  Few people talk about the time in between and the time immediately after the two deaths, but I remember distinctly thinking that it was over. Rap had had a good run, but now it needed to end, because blood was being shed, with no sign of when it would stop. It seemed to me that all of the white talking heads on the news were right. There was no turning back from this violence. No place that rap could go. This was extreme, of course. But the tensions in the coastal battle had hit the highest of breaking points, and it didn’t seem like there was any direction the two sides could go in except for an all-out violence that canceled the music altogether.

  I am saying there was a moment when I thought Beats, Rhymes and Life would be the final album A Tribe Called Quest ever made, and so I forced myself into loving it, believing I would never hear their voices again.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Source Cover

  If you were a resident of a home that cared about hip-hop in the 1980s and 1990s, your home probably got a monthly delivery of The Source magazine. And if your home didn’t get it, you maybe knew the home of some other hip-hop fan who got it, and you maybe knew you could sneak off with it after they were done with their initial read. My brother kept his issues stacked in a corner, next to the large chest that held all his cassette tapes. Even in the nineties, when the CD player was becoming more and more prominent as the cost of one declined from the early to mid-1980s, allowing more CDs to be produced, my brother stuck with his loyalty to the cassette tape, influencing me to also develop a loyalty to the cassette tape. In all the ways people have listened to music over the past forty or fifty years, it can be argued that the cassette tape is the most tedious and least practical. It offers some of the same satisfaction as listening on vinyl: due to how difficult it is to skip songs, it makes the whole album listening experience vital—something worth celebrating. But the cassette is more fragile and less beloved when viewed through a lens of nostalgia. In the battered Walkman I owned, the tape inside the cassette would often get wound around one of the spokes inside the player, forcing the tape to unravel from the shell of the cassette. Countless tapes were ruined this way, by having to hand-wind the tape back into the cassette’s plastic body, warping the insides and leaving a listener with a cacophony of only barely decipherable warbling.

  But despite the fragility of the cassette, when I was young, I appreciated what it demanded from a listener. A cassette locked a listener into a commitment, particularly in the mid to late 1990s, when rap albums were sprawling, overrun with skits and Easter eggs. To skip a song could also mean you’d miss something. On Wu-Tang’s 1993 Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), for example, one would be wrong to pass over the skit before the song “Method Man,” where Meth and Raekwon playfully spar over excruciating acts of torture; or in 1999, before MF Doom’s “Hands of Doom,” where two graffiti artists discuss Doom as a character, building out the ethos of both artist and persona in a few lines; or any of the children’s storybook skits that littered the 1991 De La Soul album De La Soul Is Dead, creating a narrative around a young kid finding a De La Soul album in the garbage, only to have it stolen from him by bullies who listen to and critique the tape as the album unfolds, ending with them putting the album back in the same trash can where it was first found. The nuances of the album were part of the journey, so one had to endure whatever one must to take it all in.

  The value of the tape was also the crafting of a mixtape. I am from an era when we learned not to waste songs. If you are creating a cassette that you must listen to all the way through, and you are crafting it with your own hands and your own ideas, then it is on you not to waste sounds and to structure a tape with feeling. No skippable songs meant that I wouldn’t have to take my thick gloves off during the chill of a Midwest winter to hit fast-forward on a Walkman, hoping that I would stop a song just in time. No skippable songs meant that when the older, cooler kids on my bus ride to school asked what I was listening to in my headphones, armed with an onslaught of jokes if my shit wasn’t on point, I could hand my headphones over, give them a brief listen of something that would pass quality control, and keep myself safe from humiliation for another day.

  The trick was recording from CD to cassette. Recording from cassette to cassette was an option, but only for the desperate, because the sound quality in that transfer would drop significantly. But if you had a good CD recorder—as we did in my house—you could set your tape to record songs straight from a compact disc, which not only improved sound quality but made for fewer abrupt stops in the process of recording. I would get CDs from the library near my house, which allowed you to take out five at a time in seven-day bursts. If you were particularly strapped for time or feeling especially confident about an artist or a group, you might just set the CD to record for the entire length of it, copying a whole album’s worth of songs and then sorting them out later. When Beats, Rhymes and Life came out, for example, I remember reco
rding it all the way through. By that time, Tribe had earned a type of currency that engendered that kind of trust. It was assumed that any album with their name on it would surely be worth its weight in gold, with no outright skippable songs. On each of their previous albums, even the less-than-great songs managed to be tolerable.

  That trust fell apart on Beats, Rhymes and Life—which doesn’t mean the album was bad so much as it means the album couldn’t live up to the impossible standards of my own imagination. It sat in my Walkman during the winter of 1996, and I would pull my fingers out of gloves and rush to fast-forward what I could before the wind forced my hands back to the warmth they craved, and then I just stopped listening to it altogether.

  While undergoing the task of making cassettes, I would often sit on the floor next to the stereo and read through the old issues of The Source that had accumulated over the years. The thing about The Source, in those days, was that it acted as a multilayered beacon for hip-hop culture. There was the unsigned hype column, which turned an eye toward acts that were underground but on the verge of breaking out. There were long, sprawling profiles of rappers that ranged from the delightfully absurd to the emotionally engaging and enlightening. Every issue opened with the hip-hop quotable, highlighting the best rap verse from the past month. Before social media provided a platform for discourse, these would be debated in person, in parks during breaks between basketball games, in barbershops, or in basements. Also, The Source had covers that now seem comical but seemed brilliant at the time—covers that painted black rap stars as larger-than-life and sometimes heroic. Timbaland and Missy acting out a scene from The Matrix, or Puff Daddy hooked to a giant glowing machine, or Dr. Dre putting a revolver to his own head.