A Tribe Called Quest

Why they matter

Q-Tip (Kamaal Fareed) and Phife Dawg (Malik Taylor) were childhood friends in St. Albans, Queens. Tip teamed with his high-school classmate Ali Shaheed Muhammad as a rapper-and-DJ pair, and starting in 1985 they made demos over Tip’s pause-tape beats. Phife came in, then neighborhood friend Jarobi White, and the Jungle Brothers gave them their name in 1988. With the Jungle Brothers, De La Soul, Queen Latifah and Monie Love they became the Native Tongues.

After a demo deal at Geffen went nowhere, they took a modest deal at Jive. People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm arrived in 1990, loose and funny, sampling jazz, funk, soul and rock. Then The Low End Theory in 1991 narrowed everything down. Q-Tip produced most of it, and the sound is vocals, drums and bass, with Ron Carter on upright on one track. Mix engineer Bob Power was tasked with removing the surface noise and static that come with sampling old vinyl. It’s also the record where Phife, who until then had been mostly in the background, starts trading verses with Tip as an equal. Midnight Marauders followed in 1993 with dirtier drums and even tighter interplay.

All six of their albums went gold or platinum. The last, We Got It from Here… Thank You 4 Your Service, came out in 2016 with contributions from Phife, who had died earlier that year. In our view, no group made a stronger case that smart, warm and hard could share one record.

What a working rapper can take from it

Start with what you have. Before there was a label, there were pause tapes: a cassette deck, a record and a finger on the pause button. The tools were crude and the ideas came through anyway. If you’re waiting on gear to start making beats, don’t. The sample-chopping guide is the modern version of that same instinct.

Write for two voices, not two verses. On The Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders, Tip and Phife play off each other instead of just taking turns at the mic. If you’re in a group, write some songs together in the same room and decide who has which line based on whose voice it fits, not whose turn it is.

Leave room in the low end. Their best beats are mostly drums and bass, and the vocals sit right on top. Before adding another sample layer, check whether the kick, the bass and the voice each have their own space. That’s mixing, not just producing.