Lament
DEAR PHIFE,
Do you know that it wasn’t the ball trickling through Bill Buckner’s legs that lost the Red Sox the 1986 World Series? It’s funny, isn’t it—the things that play on our screens and in our heads for years, detached from any fullness. Maybe you remember this. It helped deliver a World Series to your beloved Queens. But I’m going to talk to you for a second like you don’t remember. I’m going to talk to you like this isn’t about facts, but about memory.
Bill Buckner should maybe not even have been on the field for that game six. Bill Buckner was an All-Star once, in 1981. My college roommate had a dad who loved Bill Buckner. Or maybe my college roommate had a dad who felt sorry for Bill Buckner. I’m always thinking about the distance between love and sympathy, Phife. How quickly one can feel like the other in the right light, or in the right season, or with the right song acting as its anchor. But this isn’t about love. I’m saying that I, too, felt bad for Bill Buckner once, because I thought he lost an entire city its closest hope at a World Series. This was before the 2000s, when the Red Sox won it all and became dominant. This was when there was still talk of the curse, and we know how it is with sports and scapegoats.
Earlier that year, in January of 1986, the temperature in South Florida unexpectedly dropped to twenty degrees overnight. This would have been an unspectacular flash of weather if not for an O-ring attached to the Challenger space shuttle. The rings were designed to keep pressurized hydrogen out of the rocket boosters, and because the shuttle was launching from Florida, engineers stopped just short of testing to see if the O-rings would function in cold weather. The O-ring, as it turns out, stopped functioning at any temperature below forty degrees. The Challenger, seventy-three seconds into its flight, converted into a bomb, killing everyone on board. If Florida hadn’t had a record-low morning, or if one engineer would have thought to test at any temperature below forty degrees, the Challenger is a success story instead of a tragedy.
What I’m saying, Phife, is that sometimes, it’s just the one thing. In life, but rarely in sports. In sports, it’s the melting pot of several things, boiled down into one digestible highlight of a thing. In the 1986 World Series, Bill Buckner was batting .143. He was 0 for 5 in game six, before the ball rolled through his legs. He had been failing on defense throughout the series. Dave Stapleton had been coming in as his defensive replacement in the later innings all playoffs long, but for some reason, that didn’t happen here. When the game went into extra innings, Buckner was still in the game.
You know how this goes, Phife. Everything is a game of small movements—of jolts and bumps and unexpected turns. A baseball is thrown at one hundred miles an hour, and then comes off a bat, speeding along uneven ground. In the moment, anything can take a player briefly away from their focus. The thought of someone they love, the idea of being a hero before completing the heroic task, the fear of what might befall them if they don’t complete said task. It’s all so impossible to keep up with. I don’t blame Bill Buckner as much as I blame the impossibility of the moments so many of us are asked to rise to, when we would likely be better off playing catch in the backyard or kicking freestyles with our brothers in the basement inside a home where we first heard the songs our parents sang falling from their mouths while a record played.
It was game six, anyway. No one ever mentions that part, do they? I get it. I know. It’s easier to point at the one thing. But it’s never just the one thing in sports. Even if Buckner would have executed the play, the game would have simply gone to another inning, and then who knows, right? I’m saying that I’m an optimist, overwhelmed with sympathy for those who touched the hem of greatness but then let it slip through their fingers. Bill Buckner was 2 for 4 in game seven and scored a run. But it didn’t matter. New York still won. No one talks about game seven, though. But I’m sure you knew that. Maybe you were a kid who celebrated the Mets winning a World Series and maybe you threw back your head to laugh at the misfortune of Bill Buckner, as I would have if I were in Queens, New York, and young, and a lover of sports as you were. We take what we can where we can, Phife. I guess that’s what I’m saying. I guess I’m saying mercy is something I’ve reserved for even the people who surely don’t need it from me, and I’m wondering if you’ve ever done the same.
I heard the album that no one listened to and I played it over and over again during the fall of 2000. I got it, Phife. Ventilation: Da LP. You had things to get off your chest, and who wouldn’t? You were done being the punch-line-heavy comedic foil of a group that you felt distant from, finally. I loved that on the cover you wore a Jets jersey with your name on the back, because it was the early 2000s when everyone wore jerseys, and the Jets had the best ones in the game. I loved how bitter you sounded, Phife. I always wanted you to sound like you wanted to prove yourself again. I get that you thought you didn’t get your shine, and I believed you then, and I believed you always. I saw you in the interviews, sometimes bursting at your edges to speak, only to be drowned out. I saw you in photos, playing the background. What you gave in song was so much larger than what you were asked to give outside of it. I was thankful for your anger, Malik. I played Ventilation for my friends who loved Tribe but didn’t believe any of you could make it on your own, and none of them believed in you, but I did. You only get to be the underdog once, you know. You only get to fight back from something that seems insurmountable one good time before people get tired of seeing you do it, and I loved you for trying. I loved you the way I loved my hand, balled into a tight fist and thrown at the jaw of a bully in my ninth grade year, the year my older and bigger brother and I weren’t at the same school and I became a target. I loved you the way I loved the way the grass felt as I fell to my knees after upsetting the greatest high school soccer team in my league when I was a senior, nearly a year after Ventilation had come and gone.
I don’t know why people did not love your solo album, Phife, but I did. I loved the soaring and swooning production, and I loved how focused you sounded on it. It is easy to pretend now that you were never interesting enough to sustain a solo career, but we both know that’s a lie. And maybe I was just always cheering for you because, in some ways, cheering for you felt like cheering for myself. And we both needed that.
Phife, it is late now, in a whole other year beyond the one where you gave the world your album, and I can’t find it anywhere. They took it out of print, and I wish I knew why. I found it in an old CD shop in New York once, and they were selling it for $30. When I talk to people about it now, no one remembers it, or talks about it the way I did when I spent an entire season playing it from start to finish. I think a lot about what it means to take an album out of print, and how it erases a small part of an artist’s past. And this was it for you—your big payback, the loudest thing you made, which no one heard.
The term “commercial failure” is only the tip of the iceberg, and the rest is not built so well underneath. You get what I’m saying now, Phife. You and I, we’re sports fans. We know all the drama and narrative of success and failure and wins and losses. Ventilation is the ball that skipped through your legs, but it was never your fault. You were at the mercy of unfair machinery, the same way Bill Buckner was at the mercy of an unpredictable and unforgiving plot of land, and a ball that decided its own destiny.
But I think fools believe in curses, don’t you? Some teams are just bad, some shots just miss, and some albums just aren’t met with the hands they deserve to be met with.
But people only remember the big things, the things they can point at—in joy or in some type of defeat. Here’s another one that I know you know already, Phife, but I am going to talk to you like you maybe don’t remember, because some people out there don’t, and I’m talking to them as much as I’m talking to you, anyway.
When Willis Reed limped out onto the court in the 1970 NBA Finals, the game seven was perhaps already won for your beloved Knicks. Willis Reed only played the first half, though, scoring two buckets and harassing Wilt Chamberlain into a bad offensive outing. But what won the game was Willis Reed limping onto the court. That’s all people remember. That’s all people talk about. That’s the bright thing that people point at, and it almost doesn’t even matter what Reed’s statistics were. He came out on a bad leg and stood, and that was good enough.
I don’t know where you are or what you are doing these days, but I do hope that you’ll find a tunnel to limp out of soon, Phife. I do hope that we remember you always for your fight and not your failure. I paid $30 for the old copy of Ventilation that I found in that New York CD shop, because I didn’t know if I’d ever find a copy again, and I refuse to let that album die. I’ll still play it for people who think that you didn’t have a solo career worth celebrating, just because no one was there to call you a genius. Some will remember it as the ball going through your legs, but I’ll remember it as you limping out of the tunnel and standing.
I know you get where I’m coming from. We’re sports fans, you and I.
DEAR ALI SHAHEED MUHAMMAD,
You will be pleased to know that we did in fact dance to Lucy Pearl underneath the fluorescent lights of Beechcroft High School’s gym during a lunch period sock hop that had no business taking place in an afternoon when some of us had to get back to class right after, but we did it anyway. There is something about showing up in a place of learning with fresh sweat sitting on your skin from the flailing of your body up against something as immovable as a school day with more school left on the other side of your flailing.
Did you ever think people would dance to you anywhere you crawled out of a speaker? There’s something black about this urgency, sure. But I must imagine you saw it, perhaps in a dream. Wherever there is a day when people are living, there might not be one after it, and so I will not waste the capabilities my legs still have, you know?
It was the song “Dance Tonight,” and I recall this because I have never heard it again as I did in that moment and, Ali, I was an awkward and nervous kid and I maybe could not dance as well as I thought I could dance (but who can?), and it was the end of the 1990s and I had never kissed a girl I actually liked, and when I say fluorescent lights, what I really mean is that someone turned out all the lights in the auditorium and dragged in a couple of stage lights from the spring production of Romeo and Juliet, and our drama teacher was really mad about it, but by the time he found out, the song was already being played on repeat for its third time and there are some parties you just don’t want to stop, even if they are being built on the back of the things you consider sacred.
I kissed someone I liked during the fourth time I heard the first verse, and she liked me back—or at least she liked me back in that moment. I’m saying that you built a world for me then, like you always did. What I have always loved about you, Ali, is that you were a builder of soft spaces for anyone who needed them. What you never got enough credit for was the way you made even silence a commodity.
I kissed someone I liked during the first verse of “Dance Tonight,” which I was hearing for the fourth time in a row, and I retreated to a classroom that afternoon, baptized in sweat and whatever a teenager imagines as love, and I let the song rattle around in my head for hours, tied to the end of countless possibilities.
And you maybe don’t need to know that the girl I kissed transferred schools shortly thereafter and we never saw each other again, and maybe the kiss was both of us having the idea of taking a big risk before the world as we knew it changed. But I’m telling you that anyway, and I’m telling you so that you know every time I hear that song I think of a moment when I was not afraid. I think of a moment when I truly escaped into the urgency that it was pulling from me. It’s a song that demands that. It’s a song that asks us to do what we might do if we knew we were going to die the next day.
Ali, what was it about Dawn Robinson that made all of us fall for her, and did you fall, as I did? As your brother Phife did when he rapped I used to have a crush on Dawn from En Vogue in “Oh My God?” It’s funny how things come full circle like this, without our even knowing. In the video for “Dance Tonight,” there is Dawn, dancing in a room full of dancers and still making it look effortless. In the video for “Don’t Mess with My Man,” there is Dawn again. There are all of you, actually. Sweaty, but just the right amount of sweaty. The kind that doesn’t seem like it would be uncomfortable during a rooftop party at the end of summer. And here I was, wanting Lucy Pearl to never end. I heard the story once about how D’Angelo was supposed to be in the band instead of Dawn, but no. I think the Gods got this one right. Something echoed down and got this one as right as it could ever have been.
Speaking of our Gods. My middle name is Muhammad—the same name that anchors your own. I sometimes thought it was because my parents ran out of cool ideas after having three children before me. I am saddled with the name of the Prophet, as you are. As many are. What a way to be part of a religion—to have yourself named after the greatest prophet the faith has to offer.
Of all the stories we hear in Muslim households—and I’m sure you’ve heard as many as I have, if not more—the one I return to most is the story of the Archangel Gabriel coming to Muhammad and demanding that he read. He couldn’t read, but the angel held him close and demanded again that he read, and the words just came to him, like they had been there all along. I don’t know where you are with your faith or if you, like me, have spent countless days, hours, and months praying and losing hope and then finding it somewhere else. But I don’t know if I’m talking about faith or God here as much as I’m talking about what it is to offer someone sight where there was no sight.
I wonder if you listen to things with your eyes closed sometimes, as I do. I am wondering if in the summer, you climb to the rooftops and put on headphones and let a world be built around you, a world better than whatever one you’re currently in. I open my windows in summer and let the breeze in while music plays. Last summer, it was hot, and not the romantic kind of hot. It was the kind of hot where you sweat and the sweat comes on heavy the minute you step out of the door. But I still opened my windows one night and just let the sweat arrive. I played the Lucy Pearl album. It’s a relic now, but you should know that when I closed my eyes, I still saw everything just as I think you intended it. It was all blue. Everything hanging under some stolen lights made newly fluorescent. A room so packed that no one could move but for their frantic dancing.
I’m saying there’s a language for this that I never quite understood but for you showing it to me. I hope whatever path you take leads you back to the arms of Tribe, but even if it never does, you’ve found a way to make a world again. You’ve found a way to give someone like me a place to land this time, and it wasn’t just in a high school gym, but also in the open mouth of a window in a summer when it was too hot to breathe. Lucy Pearl was a feeling, Ali. I imagine you first as the angel that held me close and asked me to read when I could not see the words for myself. I imagine you first as the person who guided my hand, who guided the language onto my tongue.
Q-TIP,
I am glad it was not you that we lost in the fire, though records are also worth mourning. When I first read the story of the fire at the end of the 1990s, I thought of how impossible it seemed for any one person to own twenty thousand records. But I’d heard this about you—how you dug through all of the sounds you could possibly find to make your own brand of magic. I imagine it was the unreleased songs that hurt most. It was early 1998, and I’m sure you already knew that Tribe was going to be finished. I imagine you knew before the rest of us did. But the foolish among us were still holding out hope that you all would be together forever.
Everyone uses the same metaphor about fire: how those immersed in it rise from the ashes newer and sometimes better. It’s tired, to be sure. But it works here. How you—with no records to sample—learned to make the music you had been hearing in your head the whole time. You learned to translate the beating on the table from the school where you and Phife were once young.
What didn’t satisfy people about you is that your brand of genius never trended as close to madness as we’re used to seeing, or that people want to see. Everyone wants a performance from the people they consider to be brilliant. Everyone wants the genius to eventually fall apart as a penance, some punishment for getting too close to the sun. You just worked harder than anyone else. Sometimes, it’s a gift passed down from somewhere holy, and sometimes it’s just hard work, and sometimes it’s both. I don’t know the toll it takes to keep a group alive past their expiration date. To drag people to the studio when they don’t want to be there. To ask people to hear things that only you can hear. I’m sorry if I never gave you enough credit for that. I’m sorry that in the months after Tribe went away, I stayed mad at you, as if you could hold my anger in your hands and feel it from miles away. I’m sorry I blamed you for talking too much in interviews with the group, and for making Phife feel small. I think you maybe earned everything. But I hope you can understand wanting someone to blame for watching the greatness of an entire childhood slip through your fingers.
Tip, I must also admit that I found myself mad again when I heard your first offering, and I found myself mad again when I watched the video for said offering—drenched in black and white, half-naked women dancing on top of cars. Everyone I knew thought we’d lost you when Amplified came out in 1999, you on the cover with your arms stretched out wide with a silver shiny jacket adorning your shirtless body. I get it. It was the 1990s, and Big was gone and Tupac was gone and Big L was gone, and all white people could talk about was blood and bullets. Maybe you put away your records and decided to party for a while. To grab J Dilla by the collar and get him to lay down some drums motherfuckers could dance to.
I miss Dilla, Tip. Don’t you? Don’t you hear him sometimes when you close your eyes at night, as I do? If I could have one more year of him, I’d trade one hundred of our finest geniuses. But not you, Tip. Did you know that Dilla went to the same hospital to die as Biggie did? Did you know that inside his hospital room he rebuilt an entire studio so that he could finish Donuts? Did you know the story of his mother? How, when his hands were swollen and in pain from the disease taking over his body, she would massage them until the swelling went down so that he could finish working on the album? And, oh, what a joy Donuts was for us, Tip. How Dilla gave it to us with one hand, and then climbed his way to heaven with the other. I’m sure you knew all of this. I’m talking to you like maybe you didn’t.
I want you to know that I no longer determine genius by how much pain someone can endure, and I owe Dilla for that, and you owe Dilla for so much more. I wanted you two to have another run at something, Tip. I wanted you both to create something that I could receive in a season where I felt nothing for you but a deep and abiding gratitude.
I heard Arista shelved your album back in 2002 because they didn’t think it would hold up commercially, and can you believe that? This is why geniuses have to die first, I guess. I’m sorry that somewhere, someone behind a desk lost faith in you. I’m sorry that somewhere there are no horns or maybe no drums, or maybe somewhere there is a house on fire with every record that someone owns on the inside while they watch from a street where they can see the notes of all the music they love drifting into the air.
I’m not going to ask you to bring A Tribe Called Quest back. I read somewhere that you’re working on something new—a return to form, the magazines say. Tip, did you ever listen to Phife’s album? The solo album that no one bought and the one we were told no one listened to? I listened to it, Tip. It occurs to me now, all these years later, that he was maybe writing to you the whole time. Not as an apology—but just to show you how great he was all along. Do you know what it’s like to be a little brother? You’re always proving yourself, even when you think you’re not. I’ve started to wonder if no one loved Phife’s album because it was a love letter only to you and no one else. I want to know if you listened to it then, and I want to know if you still listen to it now. I want to know if you’re as proud of him as I was. You don’t have to tell him out loud, but I wish I could see the faintest smile spread across your face at the first opening of your brother’s rhymes, Tip. I hope you aren’t mad anymore, and I hope he’s not mad anymore, and I hope you can forgive me for being mad once, but never again.
I once balled up a small fist and swung it as hard as I could at my older brother’s face. Not because I wanted to hurt him, but because I wanted him to imagine a world in which I was unafraid to hurt him. There is a difference there—between wanting to harm someone and wanting to be feared. The part of the story that I don’t tell is that after I hit my brother—after the punch danced across his face and left a small red mark—I ran away and locked myself in a closet while he seethed with rage. I made myself small in a corner with a pile of dirty clothes. I held my knees to my chest and I wept, and I am not sure why. I was maybe afraid. Not of the consequences, but of the brand-new knowledge of what my fists were capable of. If we are blessed with working hands at our birth, we then spend our lives making them into the machines we want them to be.
What I’m mostly saying, Tip, is that I’m glad we didn’t lose you in the fire. I’m glad it was only music and a few songs and nothing else. I’m glad you learned how to rebuild, time and time again.
What I’m mostly saying, Tip, is that I haven’t thrown a punch in years. The last time I did, I left a small brown mark in a white wall, and I swear the only sound that echoed back was the sound of something you made with your bare hands.