By Odeisel
A Tribe Called Quest has created some of the cleanest, hard hitting Hip-Hop in the history of our music. 20 years ago, on a Tuesday that brought the return of the gutter with Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), the boys from Queens created what is arguably the most sonically balanced Hip-Hop record ever with the sublime Midnight Marauders. Tribe’s sound had evolved from the Bohemian aesthetic of their debut. Their second, The Low End Theory created a paradigm shift to that next shit; the perfect synthesis of jazz, funk, disco and Hip-Hop. Midnight Marauders brought the perfection of that formula.
The genius of Midnight Marauders was its connectivity with a rainbow of listeners. Heads went crazy trying to pick apart which samples were used. The conscious dudes could vibe to Sucka Nigga. The hood could get down with Midnight, and the jazz rap cats could groove to Keep It Rollin’ which featured fellow Queens beatsmith, Large Professor. Minnie Ripperton was brought back alive on the incredible Lyrics To Go.
Midnight Marauders dropped in the midst of the gangster rap furor, with people like Abyssinian Baptist Church pastor Calvin Butts and activist C. Delores Tucker calling for boycotts to rap music. Phife Dawg, who had furthered the improvement he showed on The Low End Theory on We Can Get Gown:
How can a reverend preach, when a rev can’t define/The music of our youth from 1979
We rap bout what we see, meaning reality/From people busting caps to like Mandella Being free
Not every emcee be with the negativity/ we have a slew of rappers pushing positivity
Hip-Hop will never die yo, it’s all about the raps/ Well Mayor Barry’s smoking crack, let’s preach about that…
Phife made it clear that while Tribe wasn’t gangster rap, they were a part of a larger Hip-Hop family and they would defend this music to the last.
Musically, the album was flawless. The sequencing was perfect and the album never got stuck in a rut. Every song bled seamlessly from one track to the next although the songs rarely shared the same musical base or signature. The atmospherics were layered and nuanced and Bob Power mixed the album like your grandmother in the kitchen making biscuits. Every scratch was crisp, every vocal sample was perfectly chosen and when you listened to the album in your headphones, diction was razor sharp and the voices were clear in both ears.
Tribe set muzak interludes as segues to different parts of the album and wasted no time on skits or fluff album lengtheners. The winding bassline of Electric Relaxation played below light tones and an unintelligible Q-Tip vocal that confounds listeners to this day. I went to a Catholic High School with a piece of shit Principal and I used to produce a weekly news show. Electric Relaxation was the only song that asshole agreed with, further proof that Tribe’s grooves were unassailable.
Unfortunately Tribe would never assail to this level again. Between Midnight Marauders and follow-up Beats, Rhymes & Life, there was a fire that destroyed countless records in Q-Tip’s collection. On top of that, the production added a burgeoning young producer J-Dilla to from the production collective the Ummah, which brought a radical departure of the sound Tribe had perfected. They depended less on samples and even less on that jazzy undercurrent that powered their first albums. Personal issues within the group, which would be highlighted later on, also ate at the once impenetrable chemistry between Q-Tip and Phife.
I can’t lie to you. I have always connected the addition of J-Dilla to the demise of the Tribe classic sound and right or wrong I have held that against him his entire career. I always respected the work he put into Hip-Hop but I could just never get into him as a producer and I trace it all back to the difference between Midnight Marauders and Beats, Rhymes & Life.
Midnight Marauders is arguably the cleanest produced Hip-Hop album ever. From the sequencing to the construction to the production and the change in beats per minute to the engineering of the record by Bob Power, the sound quality of that album is as flawless as you can get for a Hip-Hop album. In a year that included Enta Da Stage, Enter The Wu-Tang, Doggystyle and Bacdafucup, Midnight Marauders stood out thematically as well but never looked down its nose at its more rugged hardcore cousins. Phife took his game to another level and Q-Tip was at the height of his powers both on the mic and behind the boards. These factors all led to an album that plays the same no matter what era you listen in or compare it to. That is the definition of a real classic. Timelessness.
PS- For an extremely cool look at the album’s iconic cover (3 versions of it) peep the good folks at EGO TRIP
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