A Tribe Called Quest

New York's "Native Tongues" posse, perhaps the most creative of them all (Jungle Brothers, Afrika Bambaata, De La Soul, Queen Latifah) was best epitomized by A Tribe Called Quest: rapper Jonathan "Q-Tip" Davis, Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Malik "Phife" Taylor (and originally also rapper Jarobi White).

Their People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm (1990), that sampled both rock and soul musicians, and featured brilliant arrangements and smooth narratives (Bonita Applebum, I Left My Wallet In El Segundo), and especially their second album The Low End Theory (1991) were two of the earliest attempts at jazz-hop fusion. The latter has Ron Carter guesting on bass in Verses From The Abstract. While less innovative, Midnight Marauders (1993) was perhaps their most personal statement, and boasted the most accomplished songs (Oh My God, Award Tour).

Beats Rhymes and Life (1996), produced by Dilla (under the moniker Ummah), marked a turn towards more conventional songwriting, with plenty of quotations from pop and rock music, and and soul-infected hit singles. The underrated The Love Movement (1999) was marked by Dilla's warped, droning, booming sound that often made the samples unrecognizable and created a hallucinated mood (Like It Like That, Pad & Pen). The album also contains the single Find a Way and the catchy and hilarious Da Booty.

The "Native Tongue" movement heralded the advent of a generation of intellectual, philosophical, sociological rappers that investigated the condition of the African-American soul rather than the street epics of gangsters.

Q-Tip (Jonathan Davis) showed all the limits of his abstract" aesthetic on his solo albums Amplified (1999) and Kamaal the Abstract (2002), that would be released only in 2009 and marked the incorporation of soul (he also sings, not just raps), funk and jazz. After a long hiatus, he returned with The Renaissance (2008).

Ali Shaheed Muhammad released the solo Shaheedullah and Stereotypes (Garden Seekers, 2005), which is basically easy-listening music for rappers.

A Tribe Called Quest's rapper Phife Dawg died in 2016 at the age of 45, just when Q-Tip and dj/producer Ali Shaheed Muhammed had launched solo projects, but that didn't stop A Tribe Called Quest from reuniting and, after an 18-year-hiatus, releasing We Got it from Here Thank You 4 Your Service (2016), featuring Busta Rhymes, Anderson Paak, Jack White, Kendrick Lamar, Kanye West, Andre 3000 and Talib Kweli. An impressive return to form, the album is designed to be their magnum opus. It evokes the "boom-bap" sound of the 1990s while replacing the jazz overtones with a smooth and warm production (especially on opener The Space Program). Their leftist political anthems (notably the energetic We the People) mix with sentimental moments (Lost Somebody and The Killing Season), while the art of vocal counterpoint is brought to an almost baroque level (Solid Wall of Sound) and catchy hooks abound (Melatonin, The Donald).

Phife Dawg's Forever (2022) is a posthumous album, and certainly not a groundbreaking one. The rapper is mostly stuck in the sound of the 1990s, with mixed results (Nutshell Pt 2 is perhaps the most attractive of the vintage sounding pieces), and only occasionally ventures in slightly more courageous structures (Dear Dilla).