A Tribe Called Quest

A Tribe Called Quest formed in Queens, New York, in 1985, built around Q-Tip (Kamaal Fareed) and his high school friend Ali Shaheed Muhammad, who began trading demos over Q-Tip's homemade beats. Phife Dawg (Malik Taylor), a childhood friend of Q-Tip's from the neighborhood, and Jarobi White soon joined, rounding the group out to four.^[1]

Q-Tip and Phife Dawg grew up together in the St. Albans neighborhood of Queens, and Q-Tip got his start as a battle rapper known as MC Love Child, sometimes teaming with Ali Shaheed Muhammad as a rapper-DJ duo while the two attended Murry Bergtraum High School.^[1]

As part of the Native Tongues collective alongside the Jungle Brothers and De La Soul, the group helped pioneer a jazz-inflected, sample-heavy strain of hip-hop across a run of albums in the late 1980s and 1990s, becoming one of the genre's most influential acts before tensions between members led them to disband after 1998's The Love Movement.^[1]

That run began with 1990's People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, whose playful, lighthearted tone and eclectic mix of jazz, funk, soul, and rock samples earned it the first five-mic rating ever given by The Source. The Low End Theory followed in 1991, marking Phife Dawg's emergence as a prominent vocalist and fusing hip-hop with a minimalist, bass-and-drums take on bebop and hard bop. By 1993's Midnight Marauders, the two rappers' interplay had grown so sharp that critics described it as nearly telepathic, and the album's lead single, "Award Tour," became the group's highest-charting hit to date.^[1]

The group's long-dormant chemistry resurfaced during a surprise reunion performance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on November 13, 2015, the same evening as the terrorist attacks in Paris. Q-Tip later said the moment convinced him the group could make new music together, and the four members began recording in secret at his home studio in New Jersey, nicknamed the AbLab.^[2]

Phife Dawg had lived with type 1 diabetes for decades and was managing dialysis treatments several times a week even as he traveled to New Jersey to write and record with Q-Tip for roughly four months. He died on March 22, 2016, from complications of the disease, midway through the making of what became the group's sixth and final album.^[3]

Q-Tip finished We Got It from Here... Thank You 4 Your Service after Phife's death, keeping the title Phife had chosen. Released November 17, 2016, days after the U.S. presidential election, the album was read as both a tribute to Phife and a protest record, and its lead single, "We the People...," became an anthem confronting the xenophobia and racial fear of that political moment, later performed on Saturday Night Live and at the Grammy Awards alongside Busta Rhymes and Consequence.^[2][4][5]