In March, the world learned of Malik “Phife Dawg” Taylor’s passing at the age of 45, due to complications from the Type 2 Diabetes he’d been managing diligently since the early 1990s. The “Five Foot Assassin” was a founding member of A Tribe Called Quest, the game-changing group of Queens rappers who spat about safe sex, healthy living, Afrocentrism, and positive mental attitudes rather than the aggressive gangsta machismo dominating the rhymes of the time.
In the months since Phife’s passing, there’s been much more Tribe in the world: Taylor had a Queens street named after him (at the intersection of 192nd and Linden, the Boulevard name-checked in many a classic Tribe cut). The group shared a documentary that captures the creation of a mural painted at the site where its 1991 video, “Check the Rhime” took place. And Ali Shaheed Muhammad, Tribe’s resident producer, was tapped to score Marvel’s Netflix series, Luke Cage.
But before all that, Tribe’s original four members were hard at work on their first album in 18 years, what’s since been billed as their final record. Earlier today, The New York Times published a revealing profile about the record’s creation, and how the group’s members are soldiering on with Phife’s beats, rhymes, and life in their hearts. Before We Got It From Here, Thank You for Your Service drops next Friday, here’s everything we know about what’s bound to be an emotional album.
L.A. Reid revealed the album’s existence in early August: In an interview on RapRadar, the Epic Records C.E.O. broke the news that a Tribe album, the first since 1998’s The Love Movement, was on the way. “Man, it’s really something special,” Reid said. “It’s one of the things that I’m most excited about of everything we’re working on.”
The entire original group is included: Reid also told RapRadar that each of Tribe’s original four members — Q-Tip, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, Jarobi White, and Phife — feature on the then-untitled project, which was recorded before Phife’s death. Though White has performed with the group, he has not appeared on a Tribe album since the group’s debut People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm in 1990, when he left Tribe to pursue a career as a chef.
A reunion performance inspired the group to get back in the booth: Anyone who has seen Michael Rapaport’s excellent but at times difficult to watch 2011 Tribe documentary knows that Q-Tip and Phife had a strained relationship following the group’s disbandment; and Tip speaks to the NYT at length about the pair’s recent efforts to rebuild their longtime friendship. Even during its rockier points, “Phife repeatedly asked about doing another group album,” the paper reports, but Tip didn’t feel the time was right. “I wanted to rethink my life as an artist and as a man,” he explained of his self-imposed sabbatical, a years-long period in which the artist was celibate, and did a lot of reading (music theory, Toni Morrison, George Orwell, Nikki Giovanni, and Duke Ellington, to be exact). In November 2015, Tribe commemorated the 25th anniversary of its debut album with a performance on Fallon. That night, the group got back into its groove. “Let’s just do an album! Let’s just start tomorrow!” said Tip.
The record has an insane roster of features: Longtime Tribe collaborators Busta Rhymes and Consequence were previously named as guest rhymers on the record. Today, the NYT revealed that André 3000, Kendrick Lamar, Elton John, and Jack White will also make appearances. Both the Outkast ATLien and the White Stripes frontman spoke to the paper about the group’s enduring influence. “Tip’s kind of like the father of all of us, like me, Kanye, Pharrell,” André 3000 said. “They were trying to break new ground, and they had a musicologist’s attitude toward what they were doing with their samples,” White added. “I mean, you’ve got ‘Can I Kick It?’ over a Lou Reed sample from ‘Walk on the Wild Side.’ That really showed that they were miles and miles deeper than most other people in pop music.”
Everything was recorded at Q-Tip’s house: Tip’s firm rule throughout the We Got It From Here, Thank You for Your Service sessions was that everyone contributing needed to work in his studio, located in the basement of his palatial New Jersey home. Busta Rhymes was very down (who wouldn’t be? The million dollar studio is packed with music history: its main board has recorded stuff by Blondie and The Ramones, and according to the NYT, there’s a tape reel used by Frank Zappa). “If you wrote your rhyme somewhere else, you still had to come back and lay your verse in Q-Tip’s house,” Rhymes said. “So we pretty much did every song together. Everybody wrote his stuff in front of everybody. Everybody spat their rhymes in front of each other. We were throwing ideas around together.” White rolled up without any gear. “He just took a guitar off the wall and plugged it in and just got his wizard on,” Q-Tip said.
Phife made frequent trips to the studio, too, and his health likely suffered for it: Once Q-Tip and Phife made peace, the Oakland-based rapper committed himself to the record. Just weeks after that energizing Fallon performance, Phife began flying across the country to New Jersey — where he found a dialysis clinic — twice each month. He’d stay at Tip’s house while crafting his verses, but Tip thinks rebuilding their relationship was far more important to the Funky Diabetic. “I really believe he did the traveling back and forth, not for this record, but to make sure that me and him, Malik and Jon, were O.K.,” said Tip. “Doing this album killed him,” White told the NYT. “And he was very happy to go out like that.”
Phife was working on the record until the very end: In the NYT piece, Tip emotionally recounts a conversation he had with Phife about laying verses down over a “fire” beat. Less than 24 hours later, his lifelong friend and collaborator was gone. Deisha Taylor, Phife’s wife, says he even has a solo record on the way. Its lead single, the J Dilla-produced “Nutshell,” was released in April.
Phife chose the record’s title, We Got It From Here, Thank You for Your Service: But Q-Tip has no idea what it means. “We’re just going with it because he liked it.”
Related: The enduring legacy of A Tribe Called Quest’s understated street style
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Text Emily Manning
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