Push It Along
Let it first be said that it would behoove you to have a crew of some kind if you are of the wandering sort, or the dancing sort, or the scrapping sort, or the hustling sort. It would maybe behoove you to have a crew if you are the rapping sort, but it is certainly not required. I had a crew first in middle school, and let it second be said that it is not easy to form a crew. But, again, it would behoove you to do so, and so you find a crew out of whatever ashes of coolness you have left after your confidence has been burned to the ground by the rigors of early teenage life.
My crew was easy to drag out for me. I hung with the kids who were not entirely uncool but who were also decidedly not the cool kids. There’s a lot of currency in the space between immensely cool and not at all cool. If they’re lucky, a crew can define coolness on their own terms, because in the larger ecosystem of popularity, they are often forgettable. My crew sometimes wore our clothes backward in the era of Kris Kross, and my crew sometimes pretended not to like sports even though we kind of liked sports. My crew couldn’t afford the coolest sneakers on the market, but we could afford ones just cool enough to get by—black ones that could go with any and all of our clothing, some of mine hand-me-down or sewn at home by the hands of my mother or passed down from my older brother, who had them passed down from my oldest brother.
My crew stayed under the radar mostly because we couldn’t fight like some of the other crews filling the halls of our school. My brother—a year older—was in a significantly cooler crew, because he could hoop well enough to be respected by the basketball players and he was attractive enough to be desired by the girls. And even though we were from the same home, with similar circumstances and similar genes, he had the confidence to be cool in a way that I didn’t. He wore his clothes better, smiled easier, and was generally more appealing to a wider audience of people in our age group. I envied this, of course, even though I found comfort in my crew’s relative anonymity. My brother was an actively good person who was also good to be around and good at the things he undertook. I was a significantly less good person who was sometimes fine to be around and marginally good at some of the things I undertook. I say this to say that having my brother be who he was at our school and having me be who I was at our school seems like it would be awful on its face, but it added to the general idea of anonymity as a function of my ability to thrive. It’s not as if my brother didn’t claim me or acted ashamed of my presence in school. It’s just that when he was around, his presence rendered me somewhat invisible. I realized this early on, and instead of fighting against it, I found some comfort in it. I didn’t have to live up to the expectations of anything except for silence.
Once, when he was in the eighth grade, my brother’s crew got into a fight with some other crew. By this I mean nothing in the realm of gang violence. I do mean that one group of friends rubbed another group of friends the wrong way, and before you knew it, fists were being thrown in a field, and my brother charged into the fray. The fight was the scandal of that particular middle school year. The boy who was beaten up the most was white, and most of his assailants were black. The optics of the fight were difficult for parents to handle, and the violence seemed to be a stark uptick from the occasional scuffle that was often quickly broken up in the school hallway after some circling and yelling in faces.
My parents didn’t understand my brother’s involvement in the fight, or maybe they did but they had to be parents—showing remorse for the hurt boy and contempt for those who hurt him, even (or perhaps especially) if they were raising one of the perpetrators. Though I do expect and believe that my parents once also had a crew and they knew the inner workings of what it was to have a crew, there is still a line that gets crossed when blood ends up on someone’s asphalt. I have no hard evidence on the distance between a crew and a gang, or what makes someone designate one group a crew and another a gang. I imagine it might depend on who owns the eyes looking upon the cluster of people considering themselves a crew, and what skin is most prominent on that cluster of people, and perhaps the clothing they have on—how it hangs or doesn’t hang from their bodies.
I also imagine that there is something to be said about violence, and how it manifests itself in crews or doesn’t. I can’t speak for the concern of my parents, but I imagine that a small part of it had to do with the fact that a group of boys had inflicted violence on another group of boys, and this was in the 1990s, when gang hysteria was at its peak in our neighborhood and in our school. Some of the hysteria can be attributed to that, but some of it was firmly rooted in what was playing out in the neighborhood: boys who were young and impressionable were being pulled into gangs as a way of forming their own communities.
The difference between a gang and a crew sometimes boils down to reputation or intention. My crew was not preoccupied with appearances, and neither was my brother’s, but the point I’m making is that sometimes you run into the fray in the name of people you love, even if you don’t share blood with them. And that might make you a gang or a crew, depending on who is assessing the fray, or who is defining the kind of love that might make one throw a fist on behalf of another.
My crew didn’t throw fists, though I’d like to think we would have scrapped for each other if need be. We cracked jokes at a high rate, and that’s what kept us sharp. Like Phife Dawg, we were small and of dark skin, and we knew that our wit could be weaponized in tense moments. If cornered in a hallway, for example, we might be clever enough to briefly win over the heart of a bully by cracking jokes at the expense of someone lower on the spectrum of popularity than we were. This, again, is why we existed at what appeared to be the best intersection: the place where there is someone below you that you could turn to and lay a joke on in order to escape what might be a more physically painful fate for yourself. I am, of course, not advocating for this chain of command now, as an adult. But the primary language around having a crew or being a crew also had to do with survival.
By all accounts, me and my boys were nerds, but we were acceptable nerds. We were kind of ahead of our time in this way, though it is laughable to try and sell that now, as I’m sure you know. But there is an age where that became cool, and an age where it still appears to be cool now—one where black people age into some kind of alternativeness that allows for a celebration of simply doing nothing but appearing smart or interesting or witty. If nothing else, my boys and I were tuned in to popular culture in a way that many of our more popular peers simply weren’t at the time. Some of them were going out at night with other cool kids from other schools, and some of them were on sports teams, or some were simply reveling in the type of teenage debauchery that makes memories for adulthood. My crew and crews like mine were at home, watching sitcoms and cartoons, or dubbing tapes from the radio. This, too, was a feature of survival. We weren’t cool, but people would come to us to find out what was cool. To that end, we had a purpose. To have a purpose was to be needed, and to be needed was to be slightly protected. I would ride the back of the school bus with headphones on, attached to my Walkman, and people would talk to me because they knew I was listening to good music, and they’d want to know what music was good so that they could talk about it in their far cooler circles.
If nothing else, me and my crew of weirdos understood our way around a soundtrack.
If you were of the rapping sort in the 1990s, it would definitely behoove you to have a crew, and everyone had a crew, so if nothing else, having a crew just meant you weren’t left out. After the respective successes of the Jungle Brothers’ Straight Out the Jungle in 1988, De La Soul’s Three Feet High and Rising in 1989, and A Tribe Called Quest’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm in 1990, rap music had an interesting assortment of sounds on its hands. The sounds on the albums weren’t too drastic of a departure from East Coast rap’s percussion-based sounds, but the evolution in each album was reaching toward something new and refreshing, so that by the time Tribe’s album dropped, there was a clear and direct lineage mapped through each album released to that point.
A pivotal point in the history of the Native Tongues collective is the song “Buddy,” which appeared as the eighteenth track on the sprawling Three Feet High and Rising. The song, produced by Prince Paul, provided the rap world with what would eventually come to be known as the first Native Tongues collaboration. The De La Soul song also featured Jungle Brothers, Monie Love, and the first notable guest verse by Q-Tip. De La Soul and Jungle Brothers had previously met at a show in Boston, and they linked up for the recording of the song shortly thereafter. At one point during the recording, Q-Tip was summoned to the studio at some time past midnight. The video was drenched in Afrocentric garb and also turned into a comical dance party, with the members of De La Soul riding about town on scooters. It was a ridiculous but fun venture that acted as an introduction for what was to come.
De La Soul and the Jungle Brothers were something like older siblings to A Tribe Called Quest, the younger and sometimes irresponsible brothers who were not yet as able to channel their fun and quirky-but-righteous concepts into polished products the way Jungle Brothers and De La Soul did. The idea was that People’s Instinctive Travels was a fun album made by kids who got a blueprint from their older, cooler pals—if not older by age, then older by experience. This initial run of Native Tongues albums that existed before the collective had even named themselves presents a fascinating glimpse into a moment in time. Crews and collectives had existed in rap well before Native Tongues—rap itself was founded on the pillars of collectives. The Universal Zulu Nation was started by Afrika Bambaataa in 1974, its bones formed by reformed gang members, who, together, were looking to organize events for young people in the Bronx that combined music and dance and art, pulling together some of hip-hop’s original elements. Zulu Nation didn’t have a consistent run of members, but it did lay the groundwork for the idea of crews taking on the world of hip-hop as a unified force. The Rock Steady Crew rose to prominence in the late 1970s, gaining notoriety for their breaking and dancing performances, first in the Bronx and then later in Manhattan. A group of six teenagers from the Harlem projects formed and called themselves the Crash Crew, one of the first groups of MCs to be recorded in 1980, when they dropped the song “High Power Rap” under the name Disco Dave and the Force of the Five MCs. Later, there was the infamous Juice Crew, consisting of mostly Queens rap artists in the mid-1980s: Kool G Rap, Big Daddy Kane, Marley Marl, Biz Markie, MC Shan, and Roxanne Shanté, to name a few. To some extent, hip-hop’s entire legacy revolved around finding a group of your people and taking on whatever the world had to offer with them at your side. So by the early 1990s, still at the height of the collective era, A Tribe Called Quest knew they needed a bigger group.
The core members of Native Tongues were the Jungle Brothers, De La Soul, and a fully formed Tribe Called Quest—with Phife and Jarobi locked in to complete the group. Other members considered part of the original core group were Monie Love, Queen Latifah, the group Black Sheep, a group of young rappers called Leaders of the New School—which featured a charismatic young MC named Busta Rhymes, French MC Lucien Revolucien, upstart group Fu-Schnickens, and a sixteen-year-old rapper named Chi-Ali.
The musical breadth of the group was wide, which made Native Tongues more fascinating than any other rap collective before them. They were only loosely tethered, by a set of imagined and always-shifting ideals. Afrocentrism, sure. But the idea of Afrocentrism within the collective was a rapidly changing thing. The Jungle Brothers would wear the massive black leather medallions, sewn together with a red, black, and green Africa in the direct center. This was a fashion staple for a very particular kind of black person in the early 1990s. My oldest brother would wear them to school, and I’d see them in corner stores on the block, selling for $10 a pop. The idea was eschewing the gold jewelry so prevalent in rap at the time and getting back to their idea of what their roots were. In the early nineties, Queen Latifah wore kente cloth prints, and sometimes animal prints, and sometimes crowns atop her head.
While the gender politics in Native Tongues were fairly progressive for the time they existed in, it could be argued that Latifah’s 1989 album All Hail the Queen is the most forward-facing Native Tongues release of them all from the standpoint of lyricism and content. For as invested in Afrocentrism and a free-flowing brand of spiritual uplift as they were, Native Tongues was still largely a boy’s club. Latifah—and later her protégé Monie Love—upset that concept in different ways: Latifah was interested in turning a lens toward the layers and complexities of black womanhood. It would be reductive to paint Latifah as a matriarch in contrast to the skilled and rambunctious group of young men making up the rest of Native Tongues. To be aware that your presence in a space is political is to sometimes assume and take on the responsibilities that come with that presence, whether or not you feel as though you should have to. Though they existed in an era when women were more prominent on the mic than in any other era of hip-hop, Latifah and Monie Love, being the only women in the collective, didn’t allow themselves to shrink from what their presence as respected peers among a group of exciting young rappers gave them an opportunity to do. Latifah was a particularly skilled and feared MC—All Hail the Queen was critically acclaimed in part for Latifah’s ability to rap circles around her guests on the album, including De La Soul and KRS-One. Yes, there were feminist politics on the album, but Latifah’s greatest act was her ability to lyrically ascend not just to the level of her direct male peers but above their level, and to do it effortlessly.
The album’s most lasting cut is the track “Ladies First,” which introduced the rap world to Simone Johnson, a UK rapper who started in the British rap crew known as Jus Bad, before branching out on her own as Monie Love. Love’s debut album, Down to Earth, was released a year after Latifah’s in 1990. The album also had the in-house Native Tongues sound, produced by Afrika Baby Bam of the Jungle Brothers. Love was also a skilled MC, but she utilized her skill set differently from Latifah. She was more of a romantic—a hippie in a twenty-year-old body. Her music was saturated with a very specific type of joy and freedom, her album cover speckled with flowers. Her biggest hit was “It’s a Shame (My Sister),” which garnered her a Grammy nomination. The song is a cautionary tale about a woman in an abusive relationship, which cemented Love as a rigorous and detailed storytelling MC, like fellow UK MC Slick Rick. But beneath that single, Love was far more interested in partying in innocent fashion, digging through old poetry, and dancing than in writing tales of despair and abuse. She didn’t run counter to Latifah in this way; she was interested in the type of uplift that sisterhood could find at the house party.
Native Tongues allowed themselves to be fleshed out in this way: there was a character or a personality for everyone. Dres and Mista Lawnge made up Black Sheep, a vehicle that allowed Dres to escape a life that had landed him in prison during his not-so-distant past. For them, Afrocentrism was about defining your way out of anywhere that kept you confined.
The Leaders of the New School were teenagers at the time of their first album’s release, rapping on A Future Without a Past about P.T.A. scandals, teacher drama, lunchroom and after-school shenanigans. They predated the idea of “carefree black youth” that we often see now attached to black youth running through streets or diving into pools of cool water or living when a young black child elsewhere has died. But Leaders of the New School embodied that. Most of the Native Tongues were fairly young at the time of their inception, but not all of them wore their youth boldly and unapologetically. Leaders of the New School were kind of proudly immature and comfortable in their raucous playfulness. The group consisted of Dinco D and Charlie Brown, who were skilled enough but were largely acting as a vehicle for the talented, wildly animated, and consistently show-stealing Busta Rhymes, who was eighteen at the time of the album’s release. Leaders of the New School lasted just two albums, but—particularly on their debut album—they provided an insight into a youthful absurdity that some of the younger Native Tongues fans could attach themselves to.
And speaking of youth, it was Chi-Ali I found myself most fascinated by at the time. Ali was the youngest member of the Native Tongues, at only fifteen years of age when the collective came to life. He was also the most fashion-forward, as one might expect a teenager still in high school to be. He wore Cross Colours, the fashion trend of the moment; large sweaters with names of historically black colleges on them; baggy jeans with Nike tennis shoes. While so many of the other Native Tongues were interested in distancing themselves from the mainstream projections of hip-hop and blackness, Chi-Ali was immersing himself in them. He was also interesting because he seemed to take pleasure in both his status as the collective’s little brother and his ability to rhyme about topics that, for him, seemed mature. A few years after his decline, a close comparison to his role in the Tongues would be Shyheim, who was the boy wonder of the Wu-Tang Clan, often on the outside looking in but valuable for a topical dexterity that belied his age. Chi-Ali was a precursor to that, with his album The Fabulous Chi-Ali being released in 1992 when he was sixteen, featuring production from Mista Lawnge and guest verses from Phife, Dres, Trugoy, and Fashion on the song “Let the Horns Blow.” Chi-Ali’s age was unmistakable in his wavering, sometimes cracking voice. But, unlike Leaders of the New School, his topical range went beyond tales of school and teenage debauchery. He rapped about sex and romance, violence and fantasies of violence, and material wealth. As far as bad boys went, Chi-Ali was the bad boy of Native Tongues merely by drifting slightly from the path of his older counterparts. He was the edgier glimpse of youth, a kid who grew up on a slightly rougher end of the tracks and had the mind and language with which to make that plain. At one point, he felt to some like the most promising member of Native Tongues, not just because of his youth, but because of the wide range he could traverse almost seamlessly. He was the offshoot of what Native Tongues aspired to be: young people making music with each other, hoping to feed off of each other’s strengths. Chi-Ali was as sharp and fearless as Queen Latifah, as clever as Q-Tip, as fashion-forward and streetwise as Phife and Dres. It seemed as if he was the most likely to sustain a long and adventurous career.
I will spoil the story here and say that like all great things in music and beyond, the Native Tongues were short lived as a fully formed idea. Of course, the collaborations continue to this day, largely between De La Soul and Q-Tip. But the collective itself began to derail around 1993, less than three years into its run. It was difficult for the members to maintain a path toward each other with careers and levels of popularity reaching different heights for each. The 1993 Jungle Brothers album J Beez wit the Remedy faltered after running into significant release delays with their label. By 1993, A Tribe Called Quest had released Midnight Marauders, the crown jewel of the Native Tongues albums, which also broke them out of the Native Tongues sound and ethos and into the larger world beyond. De La Soul had released Buhloone Mindstate, which was only a small sonic departure from their earlier work instrumentally, but lyrically, on the track “In the Woods,” Posdnuos made the group’s intentions clear with a simple line:
“Yo that native shit is dead.”
For the Native Tongues, there was no loud and messy breakup that echoed for years after. There was just a kind of quiet dislodging that—given the continued careers of most of the collective—would have gone unnoticed if not for the sheer lack of collaborative efforts that followed 1993. That was the year the collective found themselves moving in different directions. Queen Latifah—who by then had enjoyed small roles in the films Jungle Fever and House Party 2—signed on to a show called Living Single, a sitcom about the lives of four black women. The show was a hit, enjoying a five-year run, during which Latifah also starred in major feature films like Set It Off and Hoodlum. After the early success of three great albums, Latifah didn’t release new music from 1993 until 1998. Leaders of the New School put out a lackluster album in 1993, T.I.M.E., which charted above their first but wasn’t nearly as critically acclaimed; most listeners by that time were only tuning in for Busta Rhymes and no one else. In an infamous clip, the group was seen arguing in an appearance on Yo! MTV Raps in the fall of 1993, with Busta Rhymes and Charlie Brown having an intense conversation about Busta stealing the show from the rest of the members. It was a rare thing, to watch a group of young and promising rappers disband right in front of an audience’s eyes. The group made it official shortly thereafter, and Busta Rhymes went on to individual success in 1996 with his debut album, The Coming. Monie Love’s second album was also released in 1993, titled In a Word or 2. It featured production by Prince on a song called “Born 2 B.R.E.E.D.,” which was an acronym for “Build Relationships where Education and Enlightenment Dominate.” The song was a minor chart success, peaking at number eighty-nine on the Billboard Hot 100. Love’s second album, though much like her first, didn’t show enough growth for people to remain excited about her, and it crept away with a whisper, as did her career, until she resurfaced several years later as a radio DJ. After hitting gold with their 1991 debut album, A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, boosted by the single “The Choice Is Yours,” Black Sheep released their second album, Non-Fiction, in 1994. With very little promotion or label interest, particularly after the Native Tongues hype had all but died down, the album fell by the wayside and became instantly forgettable. The group disbanded shortly thereafter. “The Choice Is Yours” plays in car commercials sometimes, and I hear it when I’m out with pals, but when I ask them if they remember Black Sheep, no one does. But they know all the words to the song.
The case of Chi-Ali is both confusing and heartbreaking. After the moderate success of The Fabulous Chi-Ali, he largely vanished from hip-hop altogether, without a sound. At the end of the 1990s, he made an appearance on Dres’s solo album Sure Shot Redemption, offering a short verse in the song “It’s Going Down.” And then he disappeared again.
He resurfaced in January of 2000, when he shot and killed Sean Raymond during an argument in the Bronx. Raymond was the brother of Chi-Ali’s daughter’s mother. Raymond was staying with Chi-Ali and his family, while Chi was hustling, selling drugs to support his new family. Once Chi and his daughter’s mother fell out, he moved to Harlem. About a year later, there was an altercation between his baby’s mother and her brother, and Chi was summoned with a phone call that escalated into an argument over money and drugs, which got tense. Chi went to the corner where he knew Raymond would be hustling. The dispute became heated. Chi carried a gun with him to the block, as he often did. He pulled it out and shot Raymond twice before running away and throwing the gun in the water. He spent over a year on the run, first in Atlanta, and then bouncing around various East Coast cities. His friends held him down, or he would hustle in places where he knew he’d be safe. He stayed south of New York, selling drugs and committing small robberies. He hit America’s Most Wanted in late 2000, and then again in early 2001. In March, he made the mistake of returning to New York City. He was staying with a friend when police banged on the door, and I imagine that he was perhaps too worn down to run anymore. Being a fugitive can be exhausting, particularly with safe havens dwindling and with no crew to hold you up.
There is a clip I love of Chi-Ali on Yo! MTV Raps from 1993, when the Native Tongues were crumbling, but his career still seemed like a promising one that could lift itself up from their ashes. It’s a simple promo clip, maybe thirty-five seconds long. Chi is in a leather bomber jacket too big for his small frame. He kicks a brief freestyle. His voice cracks in the middle of it, and he flashes a confident sneer when it ends: the youngest Native Tongue, left to his own devices, with seemingly endless potential.
The thing about Native Tongues is that they were like my crew, or potentially your crew. They were uncool enough to define a new type of cool on their own terms. They were successful, but not entirely always what the popular kids were listening to. They fashioned themselves as outsiders, and the thing about fashioning yourself as an outsider is that no one can call you anything that you haven’t already decided for yourself. The Native Tongues briefly built a world in which they knew themselves as each other’s people. The collective is, more that anything, a support system. Musically, yes. But beyond that, it is a grouping of friends telling each other that their ideas are valuable, that someone will believe in them, even if the people who believe in them are confined to the same studio, tinkering in all of the same weird ways. There is a sadness there—from a knowledge that nothing as pure and self-mythologized as that can last. The worlds most at risk of collapsing are the ones we pull together ourselves, out of thin air, or thin ideas, but with dear friends.
A Tribe Called Quest outgrew the Native Tongues quicker than anyone else. Arguably, Q-Tip’s vision outpaced any reasonable future the collective could have had together. Beyond that, it was a question of ambition. Not everyone wanted to act, or DJ. A Tribe Called Quest wanted to make as many classic records as they could. Sound and style are fleeting in hip-hop—more so now than they were then—but there was an urgency to Q-Tip and Tribe’s approach. They wanted to run fully into the moment while they still had one to run into. The joy of collectivism aside, there was a process that had to be catered to.
I miss loosely defined collectives in rap music, and I think the genre misses them, too. They aren’t entirely obsolete, though. The Los Angeles collective Odd Future, formed by Tyler, the Creator in 2007, is unlike Native Tongues in sound but similar in spirit: a bunch of young, talented artists, tethering themselves together for the sake of community or collaboration, or just from the desire to be weird together. So many crews now are tied together by the same record label, which makes things difficult when the business end of things begins to fall apart. Cash Money Records has gone through so many iterations, with only Lil Wayne remaining as a core functioning member, it’s hard to consider them a crew. When hard business is involved—I mean when one member’s business directly affects whether or not you will be consistently paid—it’s difficult to put that into the context of a crew, who are just looking to one another for creative lighthouses or for some emotional respite from a grueling industry. The songs begin to sound like they have checks being chased at the end of every hook.
In the mid to late 1990s, a new era of rappers and producers took up the Native Tongues mantle, like a group of superheroes, subbing into the old, dormant costumes of their departed elders: Common, J Dilla, Mos Def, The Pharcyde. It was cool in name only. The new class didn’t collaborate nearly as much, beyond J Dilla providing soundtracks for several of them. This group didn’t have the same free-flowing spirit of the first collective. Rather, it was a band of artists trying to lift a flag but being worn down by its weight before the wind could catch it.
Still, I understood it and valued it from my small corner of the world. I know what it is to have heroes and want to slide a foot into their shoes, whether or not the fit is perfect. I know what it is to walk into a world that seems wild and eager to swallow you whole and want someone at your side, even if they are at your side in name only and nothing else. There is plenty out there worth doing alone, but for everything else, there is a need for your people. It would behoove you to have a crew.