at a glance...

Hometown: Queens, NY
Year Formed: circa 1988

Members:
Q-Tip -MC
Phife -MC
Jarobi White -MC
Ali Shaheed Muhammed -DJ

Bands in the Family:
Jungle Brothers, De La Soul, Beastie Boys, Leaders of the New School, Flipmode Squad, Black Star, Dee-Lite, Mos Def

Notes:
left-of-center movement of positive, thoughtful hip hop amid the growing popularity of gangster rap in the early '90s. With the "sound provider," Ali Shaheed Muhammed, on the turntables, MCs Q- Tip, Phife and the often-MIA Jarobi steadily tightened and developed their lyrical interplay over five albums. Debut People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, featured the hits "Can I Kick It" and "Bonita Applebum" and sold 500,000 copies. The group released The Low End Theory in 1991, marking a move to more bass-heavy beats, with samples from the Average White Band and Funkadelic, and a tighter lyrical approach. Midnight Marauders came out two years later amid the height of gangster rap, and the album was laced with verbal fronts on gun toting but still reached platinum. By 1993, the Questers and De La Soul had made significant crossovers into the collegiate and non-traditional hip-hop audience, marked by Tribe's 1994 appearance on the Lollapalooza tour. Beats, Rhymes & Life didn't quite meet the enormous expectations placed upon it, but nevertheless contained some subtle, lyrically complex tracks. The band's fifth release, The Love Movement, continued Tribe's minimalist approach to beats and rhymes, and marked the finale for one of hip-hop music's truly innovative groups.

“Minimalist art,” a hipster term coined in the '60s that described art without pretense, doesn’t mesh with hip-hop music, since deception, either through creativity or posturing, has largely propelled the music to mainstream success. But there are always exceptions to the rule, and Midnight Marauders is indeed minimalist art, just in the form of beats and rhymes.

Whereas the genius of De La Soul’s Three Feet High & Rising stemmed from lyrical complexities and a barrage of eclectic samples, their Native Tongue brethren take the opposite approach in creating their masterpiece. On this record, and its predecessor, The Low End Theory, Tribe embraces jazz music as a consciousness and disposition, not simply as a catalogue of music from which to sample. Though Ali Shaheed Muhammed does employ funk and jazz samples to create the beats, his patience in doing so provides both texture and pace, neither of which are often found on a hip-hop album. Likewise, nearly all of the tracks on Marauders have the lyrical feel of a freestyle, hip hop’s version of the jam session, with Q-Tip and Phife trading verses that sound spontaneous long after the first listen.

The content is vintage Tribe: basic, but with plenty of backdoor jabs and commentary hidden by jocular boasts and clever metaphors. Although “Award Tour” got plenty of radio airplay, this is not music you’d hear in a club. Tracks like the idyllic love song “Electric Relaxation” make this the soundtrack for that rainy weekend afternoon loungin’ with friends, which is exactly its intent. On Low End Theory’s “Verses From the Abstract,” Q-Tip prefaced Midnight Marauders droitly: “Our perfection is at work, perkin’ up the art.”

If you like A Tribe Called Quest, check out:

De La Soul Buhloone Mindstate
Brand Nubian One For All
Leaders of the New School Future Without a Past
A Tribe Called Quest The Low End Theory
A Tribe Called People's Instinctive Travels...

-- Jim Welte

---

Copyright © 1997-2002 Ink Blot Magazine. All rights reserved.