When Katy Perry stands in front of the US Constitution projected on a screen and tells us that we need unity, I’m left to ask about the “we”—and if I am in the universal “we,” with whom am I being asked to unify? Paris Jackson takes to the stage and awkwardly pronounces the “NoDAPL” hashtag as though she’d just heard it for the first time moments before taking to the stage. There were vague pronouncements about “everything that’s been going on” and “the world we’re in,” but no one named names. No one made themselves large enough to seem impenetrable.
And then there was A Tribe Called Quest.
As legends in their final act with a dead member, A Tribe Called Quest could have arrived at the Grammy Awards and played the old hits, even with a sterling new album in their back pocket. That’s the thing. No one needed A Tribe Called Quest to be the ones to finally wrestle a real political moment out of the Grammy Awards, but there they were. Times were urgent—a moment for people to say what they really meant and leave nothing to chance. Leave it to rap, once neglected by the Grammys and then tediously embraced, to flip that switch. Every piece of A Tribe Called Quest’s Grammy performance was calculated, sharp, and, most importantly, openly angry—led by an artist, Q-Tip, who was clearly uninterested in wasting time. Introducing their performance, Q-Tip spoke the group into existence as a single body speaking for “all those people around the world, all those people who are pushing people in power to represent them.” It is a bold statement, and its spirit—devoid of self-service—runs counter to the general mood of the Grammys. But Q-Tip’s newfound urgency makes him believable as someone willing to fight the fight next to you, even if only from a stage miles away.
Halfway through Tribe’s performance, the voice and presence of Busta Rhymes arrived, taking direct aim at Donald Trump, whom he called “President Agent Orange,” and stating that he was “not feeling the current political climate.” The performance of the song was perfect. The chorus echoes and parodies his campaign promises; it is an unblinking anthem that strips the mask off of intolerance and fear and reveals the naked face, plain and ugly.
The song’s finest moment is a verse by Phife Dawg, which, that night, echoed throughout the arena while A Tribe Called Quest stood onstage with Busta, Consequence, and Anderson Paak, all of them with fists raised. When the song finally died down, there was Q-Tip at the center of the stage in all black, only briefly lit up by the thin gold chain around his neck, shouting the same word over and over: Resist. Resist. Resist.
It is a silly thing we do, attach awards to art and then judge it by what it can or can’t win. It runs counter to why so many of us first mine our passions for music. It is, perhaps, even more silly that a show like the Grammy Awards can suck us in with this model, promising a spectacle that feeds into the industry-wide reliance on crown-giving and gatekeeping. But if we must keep doing this, in these times particularly, thank God for A Tribe Called Quest. Everyone does not need to approach home plate, but for those who do, the time for watching pitches sail by is long over. Q-Tip watched time run out on his beloved friend and bandmate, and, I imagine, he could see the end for A Tribe Called Quest. What this has awakened in him is the ability to take big swings without fear. Tribe’s performance was the first rap performance on the Grammy stage in the era of this new presidency. It added to a lineage of statement performances by rappers at the Grammy Awards in recent years, but it was direct, jarring. When it was over, it did feel like it was for the people. It did feel like a group, for a moment, tearing the target from the backs of the endangered masses and putting it on its own chest.
Months later, in November of 2017, Q-Tip is on an Instagram video, frantically pacing in his kitchen while jazz fusion plays in the background. The Grammy Award nominations had been announced that morning, and to the surprise of many, A Tribe Called Quest was not nominated for a single award. The fact that they would be nominated seemed like a foregone conclusion after their stunning performance, but it also seemed that even if they weren’t, Q-Tip maybe wouldn’t care much.
In a long, several-video rant that was later deleted, Q-Tip begins by saying “Bismillah A Rahman A Rahim,” meaning “In the name of Allah, the most beneficent, the most merciful.” It is a gentle blessing for the wave of emotion that followed: Tip lamenting the Grammy Awards structure and goals, defending his album in the wake of applause surrounding the Grammys for being more diverse.
“Y’all think it’s a caveat because a white man wasn’t nominated in no major categories and shit? We were the most black, cultured group out. That’s all we stood on. That’s what we represented. This last Tribe album, this stands with everyone else’s shit that’s up there. I don’t give a fuck.”
He took aim at the history of the awards, pointing out all the legendary artists who had never received one: Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Marvin Gaye.
But what was most telling in the reaction was the moment when Tip, exhausted, recalled the Grammy performance from months earlier.
“Y’all fuckin’ busted y’all ass to try and get us out there and perform! You think a nigga wanted to fuckin’ go out there and perform after I lost my man? We closed y’all show and we don’t get no fucking nominations? The last Tribe album? My man is gone!”
The other parts are perhaps more sensational and historically on point, but for anyone who has ever had to mourn, this is the part that stood out. The way Tip’s voice broke from anger to sadness when briefly reinviting Phife into the room. The way he fought through the statement, as he had fought through the past several months since the album’s release without his friend by his side. This isn’t how it was supposed to be. He wasn’t supposed to have gone on a tour without Phife, and he wasn’t supposed to perform at the Grammy Awards without Phife by his side, and he definitely wasn’t supposed to be fighting for the validity of his album without his brother Malik there to push him forward.
It isn’t as if Q-Tip had hidden his pain before that moment, it was just that he had never peeled back the layers intensely until them. It was brief—he gathered himself and continued his rage at the Grammys shortly after. But it was a moment when one was reminded of the void, and how that void shifted the stakes of the album. And in the moment, it seemed foolish to imagine that Q-Tip wouldn’t have cared if they didn’t get nominated. Of course he cared, more than anything. It wasn’t just for his legacy anymore. It never was.
I spent a lot of 2017 in schools, and I imagine that I will spend a lot of future years in schools. Because of this, I spend a lot of time talking to people younger than I am, and I spend a lot of time talking to them about music. This creates an interesting discussion point for me—I spent 2017 finding myself remembering that when I was young and wanted to talk to someone older about music, I mostly wanted validation that the thing I liked was not, in fact, awful. This had mixed results in my teenage years. My love of the so-called “shiny suit era” had its detractors, many of them older than me, many of them longing for the days of what they imagined to be “real hip-hop.”
The question I spent most of my time answering in 2017 was how I felt about what is now called “mumble rap” in the popular discourse—rappers who eschew lyrical prowess in the name of drum-heavy trap beats and melodic choruses. If there is one thing that is for sure, changing trends in music will forever have their scapegoats, and because the trends in rap music shift so rapidly, scapegoats appear and then are replaced by new scapegoats nearly every two or three years. Shiny suit rap was a scapegoat once, back after Biggie was murdered and Tupac was murdered before that, and conservative media outlets were delighting in what surely was soon to be the death of the genre they hated most. But then songs about money and partying and living like no death would ever arrive for you ended up on the radio. Auto-Tune was a scapegoat for a while, until Kanye West made 808s and Heartbreak in 2008, and people decided Auto-Tune was a worthwhile artistic endeavor until Jay-Z released the song “Death of Auto-Tune” in the summer of 2009, and then it was done for good.
&nb
sp; “Mumble rap” is the most active and vigorous scapegoat rap has had in years, in part because the internet—particularly social media—has created a landscape for it to thrive and be a hotly debated topic, engaging in the ideas of language and whether or not rappers should have to adhere to them, or whether or not this so-called mumble rap is actually pushing the genre forward, past some of its bowing to establishments.
The real truth is that the rappers don’t actually mumble. Rappers like Lil Yachty, Lil Uzi Vert, and Young Thug aren’t really aesthetically or sonically similar, and all of them rap fairly clearly. What people are really angling at is the drug-drenched persona of young rappers who seem to have no substance, as they put it. What people are really pointing at is what they believe to be a lack of lyricism. I don’t necessarily rebuke this in its entirety, but I rebuke the idea that my pals and I weren’t young once and didn’t listen to shit that moved us to dance or get reckless no matter what the rapper was saying. I rebuke the idea that every lyric written when I was a young hip-hop lover was sent down from the heavens and written with a golden pen. I rebuke the idea that the “turn up” is new or something that anyone in need of it should be ashamed of. Or the idea that the turn up isn’t flexible. That it doesn’t happen in the middle of a gospel song on Sunday, or in a trap house on any day when people in the hood get paid, or in a nightclub in New York when the horn player catches a good solo and the band lets him air it out until he’s gotten all he can out of his instrument.
And so, young people want to ask me what I think about mumble rap. Some of them wait eagerly, hoping I’ll validate their interests. Some—the ones I find more interesting—bemoan the state of hip-hop now, and wonder if it’s crumbling due to this new faction of young rappers largely existing in a haze of drugs and excess.
I am trying not to be the elder that I had access to in my days of young rap fandom. For them, it was the 1980s that was the holy grail, and everything in the late 1990s was a horn signaling the death of a genre. I don’t think that is where we are now. Some of the young people I talk to aren’t sure what so-called “real hip-hop” is, but they know enough to know what it isn’t. Early in the year, many of them had never heard of A Tribe Called Quest, and then later, only knew them as a phoenix, risen from the ashes—though they were unsure what the ashes were or how they got there. So many people have an idea of what “real hip-hop” is, or the standards of what it should adhere to, and that makes the genre narrow. So narrow, in fact, that many of those people can’t see the disciples of Tribe right in front of them. Artists like Anderson Paak, who joined Tribe on stage during their Grammy performance in 2017, eagerly drumming along with his heroes. Or even someone like Joey Bada$$, or Isaiah Rashad, or Danny Brown. Lineage is most important to preserve in rap music. It isn’t always what you hear on the surface, but what you hear trying to claw its way out. Tribe made it easy for all of us with jazz, but it’s not like that anymore. You really gotta want to sit down with an album. And I know, I know it’s hard to do, with one album leaving just in time for another to arrive. But if there is something that I know about whatever I imagine real hip-hop to be, it’s that it demands patience from a listener. It demands someone willing to sit awhile and let the music enter them.
I don’t tell young rap fans that, though. I tell them that I’m trying to get into the songs they’re into, and I am. I tell them that I listen to stuff that people younger than me are listening to because I never want to be out of line and out of touch. I want to know where rap is going, and I want to always be able to accept it, or at least find a path to acceptance, no matter how long or winding it is. I tell them that I like Lil Uzi Vert, and I do. I think that in ten years’ time, though, none of this will matter. Genre is going to be a thing of the past soon anyway, man. It’s all gonna be pop music before too long, so you might as well enjoy your safe houses now while you’ve got ’em. I tell the rap fans younger than me who don’t know it yet that A Tribe Called Quest made rap music that they might think is real enough. That it was just beats and rhymes—no gimmicks. That’s still happening now, too. The dream isn’t over yet. Find something you love before everything is washed away by a wave of sound pushing all rap closer and closer to the dreaded radio. Everything reaching for the pop charts. I tell young rap fans who haven’t heard it to listen to Midnight Marauders, to the way “Steve Biko” falls effortlessly into “Award Tour” and the small burst of marching and playful horns that feel like an endless summer coming. I tell young rap fans that they might have liked Phife, the eternal underdog—small, and yet still somehow towering. I tell them that at least we still have Q-Tip, who—even after all this time—is committed solely to his massive and impossible visions.
And we may never have anyone as great as them again. The idea of the rap group isn’t entirely gone, and it might go through another cycle—especially now, with the rise of groups like Migos and Rae Sremmurd. But a group like A Tribe Called Quest will never exist again. And what a tragic but perfect ending to what they gave. Of course there had to be a funeral. Of course there had to be a death during a dark year, painting the months even darker, and of course there had to be an album pushed into a country that needed it right as it arrived, and of course there had to be a performance on music’s largest stage with black fists raised in the air. Not every story in music ends with a group forced to throw in the towel due to a great and impossible loss, and not every story should. But had it not, I would want A Tribe Called Quest to return again and again, giving me the doses of updated nostalgia that I might need when no other music could provide it. At least now, I think, we can lay them to rest.
The music video for “The Space Program” came out right as the summer of 2018 got especially hot along the coasts. Right as New Yorkers said fuck it and crowded indoors by their fans and window A/C units. That “too hot to touch another person, no matter what the body desires” weather. It was the final Tribe video, released well over a year after their final album. It is a frantic and hectic visual, with Q-Tip, Ali, and Jarobi fighting to break free from a spaceship while also traversing a vast desert. Phife’s verse in the song is mouthed by a line of brilliant cameos from the group’s longtime peers: Erykah Badu, Questlove, Pharrell. At the end of the video, the viewer sees the group walking through the desert and into the sunset, before the three bodies become a blur. One might be reminded of the closing scene in the group’s first video, “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo,” which ended with the group, then a foursome, walking into the desert heat and becoming small. Once, they were young and aching to go home. Now, they are old, and simply looking to vanish into anywhere but here. A blur, swallowed by a horizon.
We can go about speaking the name of A Tribe Called Quest as we might speak the name of someone from our distant past who changed our way of seeing. If I close my eyes now, I think I see the world as A Tribe Called Quest would have had me see it. I think I can see my people dancing in the streets, like nothing they loved has ever been set on fire.
There are not enough roses in the world for me to lay at the feet of this impossible group, but I hope this effort counts. I hope Phife can see all of us still trying, from wherever he may be. I hope Q-Tip knows that he’s done something great. I hope when the time comes for the generation after mine to talk about what’s real, they’ll pull a Tribe CD out of their pockets, worn down from a decade’s use and perhaps an older sibling. I hope they’ll put it in a CD player and let a room be carried away.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Casey Kittrell for hanging out with me in Austin one spring afternoon in 2017 and pushing me to give this book a shot. Thanks to all of the staff and editors at the University of Texas Press for working with me on this project and helping it come out as stellar as possible. Thanks, as always, to Jessica Hopper, my once and forever boss. To Cheryl-Boyce Taylor for her generosity, her poems, her wisdom, and her kindness. To A Tribe Called Quest for allowing a landscape for me to make sense of the troubled times in my past, in my present, and
undoubtedly in my future. This book is for Malik.
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