Once Upon a Time in Queens
It is much easier to determine when rap music became political and significantly more difficult to pinpoint when it became dangerous. There is a belief, I’m sure, that it is impossible to imagine a world in which those two things were not always on a course toward each other, especially if you believe that everything is political. I don’t think the house party is always political, at least not as a universal element—though it might be political for someone who is finding their own small piece of freedom within a party’s walls. But the first bits of hip-hop were born out of DJs breaking apart funk and disco beats and relegating every other sound to a graveyard until all that was left was the percussion, cut up into small, danceable portions for the people in the audience to sweat to. And sweat is sometimes political. Say, if it comes off the back of someone who is working in a field that is not their own field in a country that wasn’t always their country. Sweat is sometimes political when it falls from the shoulders of an athlete who is playing for a college in a place where they might be one of few black people on campus. But sweat isn’t always political—not when it’s the small river being formed between two warm bodies in the midst of some block party or basement or anywhere music is coming from hands touched to records.
To DJ is hard work, and it can be argued that DJs were also composers—not in the sense of classical music composers, but a case can be made that early hip-hop DJs not only had to find the right groove in an old record but also had to know when to unleash that groove onto a room to get the bodies vibrating at the correct pitch. It’s easy to reduce touching fingers to vinyl to a simple act. But it is, in a way, commanding an orchestra, an orchestra of skin to skin and yes, sweat. But even with this in mind, the art of the turntable is not inherently political.
The lights went out in New York City in July 1977. Lightning struck an electricity transmission line in the heart of the city, causing the line’s automatic circuit breaker to kick in. The initial lightning strike wasn’t the problem—it was the second one, which struck about twenty minutes after the first, hitting an electrical substation in Yonkers, which took out two more transmission lines. At some point, if anything is pushed far enough, it is impossible to sustain.
To “shed a load”—in the electrical sense—means to do away with voltage. Electric companies lower their overall voltage use in order to spare some power for the entire grid. In other words, it’s a disposal of energy. It goes nowhere in particular. It just vanishes. Con Edison tried to shed the load to save the city from a massive blackout. And it worked at first, with engineers lowering voltage across the board in a series of events that allowed them to reduce the overall load. But a problem occurred in the chain reaction of substations tripping in Upstate New York and New Jersey, making it so that the load could not be dropped quickly enough. In a desperate attempt, Con Edison began dropping customers from the grid to manually shed the load. Spare a few, save the city. But the city’s major power lines were already overtaxed. It was too late. The Ravenswood 3 power generator was the largest generator in New York City. When it went out, it took the entire city with it. And then, blackness.
New York in the summer of 1977 was wildly hot, the city was already broke, and the Son of Sam had already attacked eleven people by the time the lights went out on July 13, and he was still out there. I’m not talking about the lights going out, or the birth of rap music, so much as I’m talking about the kind of landscape in which something frivolous might become political. Looting, rioting, and fires spread throughout the city that night, and there is something to be said about an urgency that arises in the struggling and afraid when what appears to be a basic right is taken away with the snap of a finger.
On the night the lights went out, DJ Grandmaster Caz and his partner Disco Wiz were spinning in a park, with their equipment plugged into a lamppost. They thought they had shorted out all of the city’s power themselves. When they realized that they hadn’t, Caz found himself among the looters, pulling a mixer out of the store where he had once purchased DJ equipment. A mixer does a lot of things, but a big thing that it does is allow a wider audience to hear what a DJ is spinning. Rap needed a megaphone, DJs couldn’t afford them, and then with darkness came a new kind of wealth.
It must also be mentioned that the birth of hip-hop is pretty much a mythology at this point. And so like all of the best stories told by anyone, anywhere, any part of it could be true or not true. But I like this idea: I like the idea that the lights went out, and on the other side, a genre found new life. I like to imagine that hip-hop became political when someone threw the first rock or brick into a glass door or window and walked inside a store to retrieve a mixer; that hip-hop became political when it took food out of one person’s mouth to put food into another’s.
By the 1990s, rap had become political to the world but not yet dangerous. Political tones were evident—as in Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message”—but these were more cautionary tales meet neighborhood reportage. Slick Rick’s “Children’s Story” falls in the same range. These songs and others were political but still felt as though they weren’t aiming at a specific target. A target can turn the political into something dangerous.
Who knows how long police have been beating on black folks, but I know some wise heads who will say that as long as there have been police and black skin to bruise, the two have been wed. What I’m saying is that some things just come to you as they have always been and you take them for what they are. Rap came to me as dangerous from the moment in the early 1990s when my parents banned listening to it in our household, and my eldest brother began to sneak tapes into the house.
N.W.A. members were detained by the LAPD for shooting at people with a paintball gun, which is perhaps when rap music became dangerous. While detained, they were taunted and forced to lie facedown in the street, and they had guns pointed at their heads. Real guns, not the paintball gun that one of the group members had in his possession—something that might have gotten them executed on another day, as we have seen played out in my beloved Ohio with the murders of Tamir Rice and John Crawford. But N.W.A. lived, and they went into a studio to record “Fuck Tha Police,” their most infamous and notable song.
“Fuck Tha Police” is a song for those who many imagine to be powerless and angry. The thing with N.W.A. was that they knew they weren’t powerless. They actually had an acute awareness of their power, particularly in 1988, before the release of their debut album, Straight Outta Compton. The group was buzzing and poised to shift the direction of rap, which was then still East Coast dominated. There were rappers from regions other than the East Coast and Northeast, but because of rap’s humble beginnings in New York, most of the notable MCs of the era lived east of Ohio. The voice of the West had yet to be fully defined, and the sound certainly hadn’t been defined. N.W.A. knew they were setting themselves up to be catalysts, shifting the genre out of its regional clustering.
“Fuck Tha Police” suggests—in part—that people should rise up violently against this country’s police force, and it must be said that nonblack artists have used controversy to sell records for as long as there has been both controversy and a place to sell it. And so yes, underneath some of N.W.A.’s rage and contempt was a marketing plan—one that was partially manufactured by then assistant director of FBI public affairs Milt Ahlerich, who wrote a sprawling letter to their recording company, Priority Records, on the FBI’s letterhead addressing the song but never naming it.
“Advocating violence and assault is wrong, and we in the law enforcement community take exception to such action,” the letter reads. “Law enforcement officers dedicate their lives to the protection of our citizens, and recordings such as the one from N.W.A. are both discouraging and degrading to these brave, dedicated officers.”
When the letter was made public, people set N.W.A. records on fire. Politicians denounced the group and urged parents to keep their children away from the music they made. And not just the music they made but also the musical genre they trafficked in. It was the springboard N.W.A. needed to brand themselves as the World’s Most Dangerous Group—something that was boosted dramatically when already-hysterical Christians and cops realized that their name stood for “Niggaz Wit Attitudes” the whole time.
And so it can be said that rap became political when the people making it needed it to be fed, and it became dangerous when those people being fed realized they had the power to feed themselves forever off the power they had.
A Tribe Called Quest arrived on the scene at the turn of the decade, in the spring of 1990. The individual members had arrived years earlier. Kamaal Ibn John Fareed and Malik Izaak Taylor grew up together in Queens, New York—childhood friends who used music as a bridge to each other. Before Fareed was Q-Tip, he was MC Love Child, performing occasionally with another pal from Queens Ali Shaheed Muhammad, who acted as his DJ. Before Taylor was Phife Dawg, he was Crush Connection, collaborating with MC Love and Muhammad regularly, before eventually joining their group.
Q-Tip and Ali Shaheed Muhammad went to high school with the group that would become the Jungle Brothers, and on a demo track, Q-Tip opened with a line about being Q-Tip from “a group called quest.” Jungle Brothers’ member Afrika Baby Bam told him to change it to “A Tribe Called Quest,” and so, like all good names, it came from someone else.
While N.W.A. found themselves stirring up hysteria on the West Coast in 1988, in Queens, Q-Tip was being featured for the first time on record, on the Jungle Brothers’ song “The Promo”—the final track on their classic 1988 debut album, Straight Out the Jungle, which was released exactly three months to the day after N.W.A. released their classic 1988 debut album, Straight Outta Compton. These two groups point out the ways that rap artists had begun to craft their own mythologies, like wrestlers in the ring: N.W.A. with their fearless, hyperviolent personas, rooted in some truth but absolutely rooted in some idea of what would make young white people most excited and old white people most afraid; and the Jungle Brothers, with their heavily Afrocentric imagery, tone, and aesthetic, rooted in some truth but absolutely rooted in some idea of what would make young black people most curious and old black people most welcoming. The turn of the decade is when rap’s identity took new and more interesting turns, but it can be argued that the most fascinating spark of it began here: with two albums on two coasts, and two groups laying claim to what they were coming out of.
And within that, there is Q-Tip, on the song “The Promo.” He opens with, “My name is Q-Tip from A Tribe Called Quest.”
The first single by A Tribe Called Quest was actually “Description of a Fool,” though no one ever really heard it until their first album was released, where it was the final song. The first commercial single that A Tribe Called Quest released was a song about losing your wallet. “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo” is an interesting choice for a debut single on its own, made even more interesting by the fact that songs like “Bonita Applebum” and “Can I Kick It?” were also on the album, released as later singles.
El Segundo is a real place—it is a suburban city in Los Angeles County, named El Segundo, Spanish for “The Second” because it was the site of the second Standard Oil refinery in California. El Segundo is also a part of a running gag on the show Sanford and Son. The Sanfords lived in Watts, close to El Segundo, and Fred Sanford would often talk his way out of messes by telling wide-ranging stories about something happening in the world around him, with the punch line resting on something absurd happening in El Segundo.
“On the news, there was a Cyclops!” he’d say. “And the Cyclops, he was crying, and he cried into the ocean, and he cried so much that it started a tidal wave in El Segundo!”
And with that, the laugh track would roll.
Q-Tip wrote the title for the song because of Fred Sanford, not because of any affinity to the geography itself. The title came before the song, and therefore, the song had to be built from what the title was asking us to believe.
There are many ways to approach a lead single for a group entering the arena for the first time: you can give the people something that will make you a star, or you can give the people something that best defines who you’ll aim to be going forward. If you’re lucky, you hit some combination of both. “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo” is definitely the latter of the two options, though it can be said that the single acts as a showcase for the idea that A Tribe Called Quest was going to be driven, largely, by Q-Tip’s ambition. He birthed the name, he birthed the title for the first single, and he’s the only person performing on the song.
Q-Tip was never interested in a Point-A-to-Point-B perspective as an MC or as a storyteller, so it makes sense that A Tribe Called Quest’s first single is a sprawling narrative with an inconsistent narrator telling a story about going on a road trip after his mother left him home alone, and ending up in California after driving from New York for two days. The song’s story and lyrics would have one imagine that Q-Tip had perhaps never been to California before, with his branding of it as an entirely desolate wasteland in the middle of nowhere. In the song, Tribe drives through miles of desert before finding a single gas station and a bite to eat. They lament the middle-of-nowhereness of their surroundings, and yet, at the hole-in-the-wall diner they end up in, Q-Tip sees one of the most beautiful women he’s ever seen, prompting him to lose his wallet. This is more comically played out in the music video, where all members of Tribe are crammed into a rusted blue Cadillac, looking like a bunch of kids who never expected to be on camera in the first place.
This song shows something about rap and the way rappers on each coast imagined one another and their landscapes at the early turn of the century, before the East Coast–West Coast rap war exploded and so many rappers were confined to their singular bubbles. I don’t know for a fact whether or not Q-Tip had ever been to California, but he wrote about it as I imagined it when I was young and living in the landlocked Midwest. Heat and sand, a large and endless sky, a place to get lost, a place to lose things.
The song was quirky and delightful enough for a listener to ignore any glaring plot holes, like the fact that in the story, it takes Q-Tip three days on the road before he realizes that he lost his wallet. By the time of the song’s release, rap had already seen its fair share of narrators, chief among them the aforementioned Slick Rick, who wove tales of caution with tales of his own sexual mischief and whimsical, fairy tale–based stories of the world in his head. Hip-hop artists had already cemented themselves as griots, telling stories from their own corner of whatever land they claimed and broadcasting them to a world that might not have access to the interior of that land. If you’re N.W.A. or Public Enemy, you want to rattle the cage of public consciousness and push for some uprising among the people to take back what is theirs, or to incite some violence against an oppressor. If you’re Too Short, you want to captivate a listening audience of young men who imagined sex but hadn’t experienced it beyond their imaginings or the pages of some illicit magazine swiped from the room of a parent or an older sibling.
If you’re A Tribe Called Quest, or at least if you’re Q-Tip, the story you tell is one that is mundane on the surface, built around something meaningful only to you and a handful of your pals, piled in a car, driving on a stretch of road that seems endless.
People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm is certainly A Tribe Called Quest’s debut album, but it could be read entirely as Q-Tip’s introduction to the world at large. Q-Tip made the bones of most of the album’s production on pause tapes when he was still in high school. The pause tape was something that aspiring producers would dabble in before they had access to proper studio equipment. Back when record stores sold tapes, and dual cassette decks were the norm in most homes, the hopeful producer would play an album and sample from another tape or a record, stopping the tape when the sample finished its rotation. The trick was in the second part, where they would rewind to the beginning of the sample and unpause the tape, which would extend the sample for longer. It was an amateur trick, but it played a huge role in the evolution of rap’s sound and the sampling that hip-hop was rooted in. It was akin to the DJ finding the proper groove in a record and flooding a room with drums. Hip-hop’s architecture was based on extending the sounds laid by other hands, and the pause tape was an expansion of that. The products of these tapes were often imperfect but good enough to record some vocals over and get a demo tape done. The process was tedious, taking hours of work to perfect and draw several sounds out in sections. It was hip-hop’s version of the Wall of Sound, Phil Spector’s production technique that involved layering sound over sound to create one cohesive wave of music.
Q-Tip insists that he made the song “Bonita Applebum” first on pause tapes when he was fifteen, and if you listen to the song’s components, this would make sense, even when you hear the cleaned-up and sharper version that eventually made it onto People’s Instinctive Travels. The beat to “Bonita Applebum” consists of five samples.
Appearing first is a sitar riff from the Rotary Connection song “Memory Band” from their 1967 self-titled album. The riff appears in this song sparingly, but Q-Tip stretched it out in “Bonita,” peppering the song with it throughout the instrumental.
The next sample is the first part of the song’s backbone—the drum beat is built from the beat in Little Feat’s “Fool Yourself” from the 1973 album Dixie Chicken. In “Bonita,” the drums are looped in a sped-up fashion, played back at a pace a bit sharper than Little Feat drummer Richard Hayward played the original.
The second part of the song’s backbone comes in the third sample: the breezy, funky keys and guitar from RAMP’s “Daylight,” from their 1977 album Come into Knowledge. This sample is the most important one, because it is the glue that holds all of the others together. When layering sounds in this manner, there has to be a unifying one that each of them can fit into comfortably without throwing the groove off. RAMP’s song is both gentle and airy, leaving enough space to be filled by any other chosen noise.
The final two samples operate in the song’s ending moments: In Cannonball Adderley’s “Soul Virgo,” from his quintet’s 1970 album The Price You Got to Pay to Be Free album, there is a spoken interlude, a voice chanting words like “sex” and “peace.” At the end of “Bonita,” Q-Tip slows down that voice and uses it as a bridge, with the dying saxophone behind it. This gives way to the closing notes of the song, which bleed into the next song on the album, “Can I Kick It?” The light piano and drum groove was lifted from the Eugene McDaniels song “Jagger the Dagger,” which exists briefly before transitioning into the “Walk on the Wild Side” Lou Reed sample that is the major component of “Can I Kick It?”
When laid out this way, it would appear that the art of the sample, in the mind of Q-Tip, was science. He began by laying out pause tapes in his home until 1989, when he had the opportunity to be present for the recording of De La Soul’s iconic album Three Feet High and Rising. It was in those moments when he was shown around the studio by the in-house recording engineers and afterward was allowed to tinker with all the sampling devices. Seeing his potential and interest, the rapper and producer Large Professor taught him how to use other studio equipment to most effectively hone his sound. Not all young producers have a group of welcoming mentors like Q-Tip had, but not all young producers were as uniquely skilled from their teenage years as Q-Tip was, and not all were as willing as Q-Tip to “dig deep in the crates” to search for sounds. Q-Tip was, in many ways, an extension of rap’s early DJs, chipping away at a massive block of music and peeling off only what he needed.
People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm was a far-reaching album that was a new variation on black psychedelia. It wasn’t particularly hazy in the way that, say, Hendrix was hazy. But it does feel, instead, like Love’s album Forever Changes in the way it is utterly unconcerned with anything except for its own vibes and the celebration of them. The album is awash with samples, some of them unfocused and scattered, coming together when least expected. Now, with knowledge of its origins and the mind behind it, people can look back and hear the unpolished excitement in Q-Tip’s flights of fancy as a producer. “Public Enemy” is jam-packed with lifted sounds from Luther Ingram and Rufus Thomas and Billy the Baron and his Smokin’ Challengers and Malcolm McLaren. “Go Ahead in the Rain” mashes up Jimi Hendrix and “Brother” Jack McDuff while also managing to sneak in a Slave sample. “Push It Along” pairs Grover Washington Jr.’s “Loran’s Dance” with “All You Need Is Love” by the Beatles.
It is an album stuffed with a cast of characters, all orchestrated by Q-Tip’s vision. Yet he still finds a way to carve himself out as the central force, his somewhat nasally and melodic flow slicing through the tracks with ease. Of all the album’s characters, there is one that doesn’t find a home as easily.
Phife Dawg is almost an afterthought on People’s Instinctive Travels. It may not seem like this, because he appears in all of the visuals, and he’s present on the album’s most popular track, the aforementioned “Can I Kick It?,” but beyond that, Phife is only present on three other tracks, or four out of the album’s fifteen. The entire group was young—teenagers preparing to enter their twenties—but Phife was the least mature of the bunch, by his own account. He was living at his grandmother’s place, running the streets all day and night. Q-Tip wrote all of the lyrics for the album, even the lyrics Phife rapped. Phife stole the show on “Can I Kick It?,” but his other verses were largely muted, acting as small bridges to Q-Tip’s vocal and instrumental ambition. Phife often had to be dragged to the studio, his stubbornness clashing with Q-Tip’s drive and vision. The album was recorded a couple of blocks from Madison Square Garden, at Calliope Studios. Phife would make a brief stop in the studio and then sneak off to Knicks games, leaving Q-Tip and Ali Shaheed Muhammad frustrated but committed to the album’s completion, with or without him.
Another part of the story, which speaks to Phife’s ambivalence about the project, is the fact that he wasn’t signed as an official group member at that point. A Tribe Called Quest was officially only Q-Tip and Ali. Phife and Jarobi were going to start their own group, independent of Tribe, but Jarobi decided to go to culinary school in the middle of this planning, leaving Phife somewhat out in the cold. Tribe welcomed him into the recording sessions and for his contributions to the album, but he wasn’t signed to a contract as an official member. It makes sense, then, that he might not be as open to being pushed in the studio in the very particular way that Q-Tip could push people. Because Q-Tip’s mind operated at almost unimaginable speeds, his major function was to carry everyone else to his level. The stakes were higher for Q-Tip on this album than they were for Phife, who had no real promise of being signed to the group when the album was complete. Phife was still simply making music with his friends in his spare time, but Q-Tip was trying to build a sound that would carry him for an entire career.
People’s Instinctive Travels was critically acclaimed upon its release, though it struggled commercially, taking nearly seven years to achieve gold status. Some of the commercial failing was simply an inability on the part of listeners to understand Q-Tip’s sonic vision. When we talk about artists being “ahead of their time,” the remarks are often peppered with vague complimentary aspects about some futuristic soundscape sold to an audience that would later come to appreciate it as sounds around them evolved. An example would be something like the frantic and hectic album Tusk by Fleetwood Mac, which was a stark departure from the pop-drenched sounds of their previous album, Rumours. The album helped signal the New Wave sound, but at the time, it was a confusing release, loved by a few critics but only a fraction as commercially successful as their previous two albums, until the middle of the 1980s, when the sound they were reaching for began to make more and more sense to people.
Q-Tip and A Tribe Called Quest weren’t selling futuristic grooves as much as they were selling new interpretations of past grooves, layering samples from every corner of the crates and pulling out only the useful parts of the music. People’s Instinctive Travels was, indeed, a blueprint for what was to come. Tribe’s sound didn’t just shift the direction of hip-hop; it offered alternative windows into the world of sampling, cadence, and language. That the album sold better as it aged was simply a reflection of people catching up to it. The mastery in the album was the fact that these were all relatively young artists. Q-Tip was still figuring out how to make the music sound the way he wanted it to sound. And yet, out of all that, he created a stunning, singular debut.
I admit I lost my wallet in another city one time and I did turn back to get it in West Texas, leaving Odessa after reading the book Friday Night Lights in some late-teen haze and insisting that I must see the town. The thing about Odessa, Texas, is that it really is a desert. I mean, I’m not saying that there’s nothing else there, but I am saying that at one time the town became rich from oil and then the oil left. So you maybe can imagine what I mean when I say that there is a big sky and a lot of land with nothing on it below. That’s beauty, though—a kind of America that can make someone feel like the wide-open spaces are calling them and all of that, that is, when not factoring in the people, some of whom wave Confederate flags on their front porches or glare ominously at an unfamiliar black face in a gas station when the person who owns the face puts their wallet on the counter with a bottle of sweet tea and a pack of peanut M&Ms and then gets the hell out of town before anyone else gets too suspicious. And who is to say really why I drove to Odessa, except for the fact that it was summer and I had nothing better to do and I sure didn’t have a job or much money except for gas and the occasional road snacks and I wanted to get the hell out of town, and anywhere would have done. Like Q-Tip in his own story, I had the space and freedom and four wheels and a map that pointed me to a place I’d heard of and only imagined. And the thing about road trips is that nothing at the end of the journey can live up to the anticipation of the unseen destination once we arrive there, and so, in my haste to get out of Odessa, I drove an hour or two and reached into my pocket when passing the first fast-food sign I’d seen in miles. And I wish Q-Tip would have gone on to describe the feeling that hits you when you realize you have lost your wallet, or some other precious thing—the way shock begins in your legs and carves a home in your stomach for a while, before even getting to the part of your brain that asks the “What do I do?” question. And I knew I’d left it in the gas station, and I knew I left the gas station in too much of a hurry because once you’ve seen a harsh look in one too many small towns, you start to get a feeling for what might be on the other end of that look if you stick around too long. And yet, I did a complete U-turn, kicking up sand and dust as I sped back to the gas station, where my wallet was most certainly waiting for me, and the person behind the counter handed it to me without a word, and I got in my old car and headed back east, and the muffler on that car was so loud, but instead of getting it fixed, I just got a louder stereo and I fingered the leather seams of my newly retrieved wallet and I laughed at the absurdity of it all and then I remembered: there’s a song for this.