Thank You 4 Your Service
The Grammy Awards aren’t supposed to be political. They pretend to be, in the ways that all award shows pretend to be: artists take to the stage during their acceptance speeches and sometimes present a half-hearted rallying cry for or against something in the political moment. The Grammy Awards, in particular, cater to this type of performance, as its audience is one that likes to pretend that music is still an untouched political force. The result at the Grammys is a special type of clumsy, though. Artists get on stage and stumble through half-thought-out opinions on issues that they perhaps haven’t had the time to fully dive into. The performers who are especially passionate and well researched often go on too long, getting awkwardly played off by a chorus of strings. Few performers actually use their performance space to make a statement, even though it is the one time when they are on stage with the entire audience looking at them and at least have a more flexible time range to make a point. It all makes for a messy bit of performative politics—the kind that sends fans running to the internet and asking why their beloved musicians don’t simply stick to music.
Despite this, the Grammy Awards also have a relationship with rap music that is tenuous, at best. Even though it has spent the most recent decade attempting to make up for it with its nominations and by affording more stage space to rappers, it cannot be ignored that on its face, it seems as if the Grammys think about rap as a lesser genre. Since 1989, when rap was first introduced to the Grammys as a category, only two rap albums have won Album of the Year. It bears mentioning that the two albums—Outkast’s Speakerboxxx / The Love Below and Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill—leaned aggressively into sounds that could be considered more palatable for a mainstream audience. Particularly in the era of their releases, when mainstream rap was seen as especially drowned in an obsession with either excessive materialism or a very specific hustler narrative, peppered with violence, the two releases allowed the stuffier academy to honor how “unique” and “unlike rap” the two albums were. Hill, with her conscious album, half-sung, kind of acoustic. And the always-inventive Outkast, pulling from old soul and funk tropes to reel in casual listeners. The two albums are phenomenal and certainly deserved their awards. Hill’s was a surprise, not just because it was the first, but also because in winning, Hill had to beat out Madonna, Sheryl Crow, and Shania Twain, artists who were beloved by the Academy and who had a history with the awards. In the year Outkast won, Missy Elliott was a nominee for her album Under Construction, which made the second year in a row that two rap albums were up for the award, as 2003 had both Nelly’s Nellyville and Eminem’s The Eminem Show. After 2004, two rap albums were not nominated for Album of the Year until a decade later, when Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D City was nominated next to Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’s The Heist. Daft Punk won the award for their album Random Access Memories.
No rapper has ever won the award for Record of the Year or Song of the Year, and I say this knowing the politics behind awards shows, flimsy as they may be. And I say this knowing that a Grammy Award means nothing to a hood where Kendrick Lamar’s music plays at a protest and urges young black organizers to push against a boundary once more. And I know a Grammy Award means nothing to that shit we rap to ourselves in our cars with our homies, or the shit we play on a basketball court during an endless summer, or the shit we use to drown out our grief or turn up our joy. To say the Grammys don’t care about the culture is easy, but it’s much more difficult to define the vastness of what that culture is and the many ways it manifests itself and brings itself to life in ways that live beyond an award. It’s even harder to make peace with that, though, when the system of awards remains the only way that art is validated by an establishment.
Despite the Grammy’s flimsy political standing and its strained relationship with rap, at the inception of that relationship, it was rap music that gave the Grammy Awards a crash course in political urgency. In 1989, when the Grammy’s introduced a category for Best Rap Performance, there was a boycott. DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince won for their song “Parents Just Don’t Understand,” winning over other nominees Salt-N-Pepa (“Push It”), J.J. Fad (“Supersonic”), Kool Moe Dee (“Wild Wild West”), and LL Cool J (“Going Back To Cali”).
When the Grammys announced that the award would be presented in a preshow segment and not televised, this caused a rift with the nominated acts and the genre at large. The Grammys supposedly recognizing that rap was more than just a category addition. It was a statement for the still-young genre, an acknowledgment that it should be taken seriously and that it had a future beyond just a handful of bright years. The establishment was sending a message that the genre should be honored as more than just an upstart. To then say that the award wouldn’t be televised felt like a half measure, like putting a tray of food outside for someone starving but not offering them any shelter from the storm. Rightfully, all of the artists nominated chose to boycott the awards—except for Kool Moe Dee, who was already slated as one of the presenters. During his presentation for Best Male R&B Vocalist, he kicked a brief rhyme in the name of his boycotting peers, also attempting to paint rap in a positive light. Because, make no mistake, that is also what this was about, and perhaps what it has been about since: the Grammys’ Recording Academy attempting to sell rap through the lens of respectability. Moe Dee’s presence was an antiboycott in some ways. Then an elder statesman of the genre, he felt it was his responsibility to put rap music on the map the best he could in his allotted time. So he took to the mic, even briefly setting aside his then-still-brewing feud with LL Cool J, though not mentioning him by name:
On the behalf of all MCs,
my co-workers and fellow nominees
Jazzy Jeff, J.J. Fad,
Salt-N-Pepa and the boy who’s bad
We personify power and a drug-free mind,
and we express ourselves through rhythm and rhyme
So I think it’s time that the whole world knows
rap is here to stay. Drummer, let’s go.
Meanwhile, in another corner of Los Angeles, then–Def Jam–heads Russell Simmons and Lyor Cohen held a party, boycotting the Grammys. Yo! MTV Raps was there. All of the other nominees attended, as well as other artists seen as hip-hop royalty. The Grammys were charged with treating hip-hop like a stepchild and “ghettoizing” the genre, according to Def Jam spokesperson Bill Adler. In an era before social media, the boycott still made waves, becoming one of the biggest stories of Grammy night. The Grammys were dismissive at the moment, making a statement about the number of categories versus the time allotted to air them. (“When you have 76 Grammy categories and only time to put 12 on air, you’re going to have 64 unhappy groups of people,” a Grammy spokesperson said the night before the show aired.)
But rap won its small battle, simply by denying access. The Grammys knew that if they were to acknowledge rap music going forward, they would actually need the artists on board. It was a loud statement made by the rappers who didn’t attend—one that said, if you want the access to our culture, you actually have to honor it and honor it loudly, because we’re not going anywhere. Because rap was such a young genre at the time, and all of the rappers participating in the boycott were so young, the stakes were high. Even though it seemed that there was confidence in the outcome of the boycott, it seemed just as likely that the Grammy Awards might have decided that rap music wasn’t worth the trouble and dismissed it wholeheartedly in years going forward.
They didn’t of course. Rap categories were expanded in the following years, including Best Rap Song and Best Rap Album, with at least one of the categories being televised each year until 2015, when rap was inexplicably left out of the televised broadcast.
In some ways, rap’s relationship with the Grammys has always been tainted by its original protest of them. The Grammy Awards treat rap like it should be lucky to be there, because in the eyes of the establishment, it seems to always imagine that it is doing rap a favor. Rap was ungrateful early, so the Grammy Awards threw rap a bone, and in exchange, rap music has to be the deeply thankful subordinate, bowing at the throwing of the award and asking for scraps, even as the often-white music world around rap music gets rewarded for borrowing from its sounds, aesthetics, and tropes. When a rapper is nominated for one of the major awards now, most in the community of rap fans don’t expect a win, and yet our hearts still break when watching the sadness of someone like Kanye West, who went 0 for 3 on Album of the Year wins after being nominated three times in a row for his brilliant run of three albums, The College Dropout, Late Registration, and Graduation. The loss is expected but still mourned. This is a genre that caters directly to a people who have spent their lives mourning the loss they always knew was coming.
When the 1989 Grammy boycott took place, A Tribe Called Quest hadn’t released an album yet. They weren’t at the boycott, but it’s safe to imagine that they might have been, had it taken place a year, or two years, or five years later. A Tribe Called Quest didn’t get nominated for a Grammy Award during the run when they made their most critically successful albums: People’s Instinctive Travels, The Low End Theory, and Midnight Marauders all flew under the Grammy Awards radar. They weren’t nominated for a Grammy Award until 1997, when Beats, Rhymes and Life found itself nominated for Best Rap Album, and the album’s lead single, “1nce Again,” was nominated for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group. The album lost to The Score by Fugees, and the song lost to “Crossroads” by Bone Thugs. In 1999, Tribe was nominated one more time. The Love Movement was nominated for Best Rap Album, losing to Jay-Z’s Vol. 2 . . . Hard Knock Life. In all years of their nominations, Tribe chose to sit out the Grammy Awards, not attending as guests.
In February of 2017, Tribe was on stage at the Grammy Awards for the first time. The awards that night had already proven to be overwhelmed with tension and awkward moments. It was now three months after Donald Trump’s election, and almost one month since his inauguration. The Americans who first walked around in a haze of shock and misery were just now beginning to snap out of it and come to terms with the world around them being the world they were in. It must be said that for several marginalized communities, this world was all too familiar—something many of us had been living under for years, even before Trump took office. Still, there were newer fears to navigate, and newer ways to resist, and new people along for the ride, needing to be both shepherded and watched anxiously. We were all just settling into the new normal: news alerts flying at us from every direction, and almost always with bad news. Now, less than a year later, we’re used to it. We wake up, sigh, scroll through the news and imagine the various ways that our undoing might arrive. But in February 2017, the exhaustion was new.
The Grammys came at a very particular time, as well: The Dakota Access Pipeline protests came to a head in February. The protests, which began in April 2016, were finally being broken apart by police and the military, even after some moments of hope throughout. The fight ignited around the building of the Dakota Access Pipeline in the spring of 2016. The pipeline is 1,172 miles long, cutting through land in both North and South Dakota before ending up in Patoka, Illinois. The oil pipeline route, at the time of its proposal, was set to cut across land of spiritual and cultural significance for the Lakota Nation and other surrounding nations in the Dakotas. The pipeline was opposed not just for the impact it would have on cultural and spiritual spaces but also for the very obvious environmental risks: oil spills contaminating the water that people in these communities used to fulfill their everyday needs. The Standing Rock Sioux tribe was the most visible in the protests, and young members of the tribe were on the front lines of the protests, remaining the face of the #NoDAPL campaign that captured the attention of social media and drew the world’s eyes to the small revolution. The protest was long and arduous, with many people camping out on the land and refusing to move in the face of police violence and military threats. In September 2016, construction workers bulldozed land that the tribe had identified as sacred ground. When protesters pushed into the area to protect it, attack dogs were unleashed on them, biting some of the protesters. The incident was recorded and placed on YouTube, where it went viral. In October, police with riot gear and military soldiers used excessive force to clear an encampment in the pipeline’s path. It was a violent clearing, and was again recorded for the world to see.
It is one thing to throw your hands in the air and say “the world is burning again, oh the world is burning,” but to see a people fight for access to clean water in the face of a very particular American greed is haunting. By November, people from all over the country joined the protests, making the trek from wherever they were to North Dakota. By December, crowds of protesters from all over were fighting off the brutal cold occupying the land every day, unmoving.
But by January 24, 2017, mere days after his inauguration, Donald Trump signed an executive order to advance the construction of the pipeline. By February 7, Trump advised the army engineers to proceed with the pipeline at all costs. Less than a week later, protesters were being forcefully removed from the land. All of them would be gone by the end of the month. There was briefly power to the people, and then not. At a time when people needed to believe that they had the capacity within themselves to change things, all that was left was the hollow echo of empire, molding the land, again, into whatever it wants.
If there was a year for the Grammy Awards to be staunchly and explicitly political, it was 2017. If there was a year to write a large check and attempt to cash it on stage, it was this one, when so many people felt like the ability to entertain was a luxury, when I needed to see someone, anyone, taking a risk while the stakes were high for them, or even higher for someone they may care about. What we got, for much of the show, was a performative bore.
When Katy Perry stands in front of the US Constitution projected on a screen and tells us that we need unity, I’m left to ask about the “we”—and if I am in the universal “we,” with whom am I being asked to unify? Paris Jackson takes to the stage and awkwardly pronounces the “NoDAPL” hashtag as though she’d just heard it for the first time moments before taking to the stage. There were vague pronouncements about “everything that’s been going on” and “the world we’re in,” but no one named names. No one made themselves large enough to seem impenetrable.
And then there was A Tribe Called Quest.
As legends in their final act with a dead member, A Tribe Called Quest could have arrived at the Grammy Awards and played the old hits, even with a sterling new album in their back pocket. That’s the thing. No one needed A Tribe Called Quest to be the ones to finally wrestle a real political moment out of the Grammy Awards, but there they were. Times were urgent—a moment for people to say what they really meant and leave nothing to chance. Leave it to rap, once neglected by the Grammys and then tediously embraced, to flip that switch. Every piece of A Tribe Called Quest’s Grammy performance was calculated, sharp, and, most importantly, openly angry—led by an artist, Q-Tip, who was clearly uninterested in wasting time. Introducing their performance, Q-Tip spoke the group into existence as a single body speaking for “all those people around the world, all those people who are pushing people in power to represent them.” It is a bold statement, and its spirit—devoid of self-service—runs counter to the general mood of the Grammys. But Q-Tip’s newfound urgency makes him believable as someone willing to fight the fight next to you, even if only from a stage miles away.
Halfway through Tribe’s performance, the voice and presence of Busta Rhymes arrived, taking direct aim at Donald Trump, whom he called “President Agent Orange,” and stating that he was “not feeling the current political climate.” The performance of the song was perfect. The chorus echoes and parodies his campaign promises; it is an unblinking anthem that strips the mask off of intolerance and fear and reveals the naked face, plain and ugly.
The song’s finest moment is a verse by Phife Dawg, which, that night, echoed throughout the arena while A Tribe Called Quest stood onstage with Busta, Consequence, and Anderson Paak, all of them with fists raised. When the song finally died down, there was Q-Tip at the center of the stage in all black, only briefly lit up by the thin gold chain around his neck, shouting the same word over and over: Resist. Resist. Resist.
It is a silly thing we do, attach awards to art and then judge it by what it can or can’t win. It runs counter to why so many of us first mine our passions for music. It is, perhaps, even more silly that a show like the Grammy Awards can suck us in with this model, promising a spectacle that feeds into the industry-wide reliance on crown-giving and gatekeeping. But if we must keep doing this, in these times particularly, thank God for A Tribe Called Quest. Everyone does not need to approach home plate, but for those who do, the time for watching pitches sail by is long over. Q-Tip watched time run out on his beloved friend and bandmate, and, I imagine, he could see the end for A Tribe Called Quest. What this has awakened in him is the ability to take big swings without fear. Tribe’s performance was the first rap performance on the Grammy stage in the era of this new presidency. It added to a lineage of statement performances by rappers at the Grammy Awards in recent years, but it was direct, jarring. When it was over, it did feel like it was for the people. It did feel like a group, for a moment, tearing the target from the backs of the endangered masses and putting it on its own chest.
Months later, in November of 2017, Q-Tip is on an Instagram video, frantically pacing in his kitchen while jazz fusion plays in the background. The Grammy Award nominations had been announced that morning, and to the surprise of many, A Tribe Called Quest was not nominated for a single award. The fact that they would be nominated seemed like a foregone conclusion after their stunning performance, but it also seemed that even if they weren’t, Q-Tip maybe wouldn’t care much.
In a long, several-video rant that was later deleted, Q-Tip begins by saying “Bismillah A Rahman A Rahim,” meaning “In the name of Allah, the most beneficent, the most merciful.” It is a gentle blessing for the wave of emotion that followed: Tip lamenting the Grammy Awards structure and goals, defending his album in the wake of applause surrounding the Grammys for being more diverse.
“Y’all think it’s a caveat because a white man wasn’t nominated in no major categories and shit? We were the most black, cultured group out. That’s all we stood on. That’s what we represented. This last Tribe album, this stands with everyone else’s shit that’s up there. I don’t give a fuck.”
He took aim at the history of the awards, pointing out all the legendary artists who had never received one: Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Marvin Gaye.
But what was most telling in the reaction was the moment when Tip, exhausted, recalled the Grammy performance from months earlier.
“Y’all fuckin’ busted y’all ass to try and get us out there and perform! You think a nigga wanted to fuckin’ go out there and perform after I lost my man? We closed y’all show and we don’t get no fucking nominations? The last Tribe album? My man is gone!”
The other parts are perhaps more sensational and historically on point, but for anyone who has ever had to mourn, this is the part that stood out. The way Tip’s voice broke from anger to sadness when briefly reinviting Phife into the room. The way he fought through the statement, as he had fought through the past several months since the album’s release without his friend by his side. This isn’t how it was supposed to be. He wasn’t supposed to have gone on a tour without Phife, and he wasn’t supposed to perform at the Grammy Awards without Phife by his side, and he definitely wasn’t supposed to be fighting for the validity of his album without his brother Malik there to push him forward.
It isn’t as if Q-Tip had hidden his pain before that moment, it was just that he had never peeled back the layers intensely until them. It was brief—he gathered himself and continued his rage at the Grammys shortly after. But it was a moment when one was reminded of the void, and how that void shifted the stakes of the album. And in the moment, it seemed foolish to imagine that Q-Tip wouldn’t have cared if they didn’t get nominated. Of course he cared, more than anything. It wasn’t just for his legacy anymore. It never was.
I spent a lot of 2017 in schools, and I imagine that I will spend a lot of future years in schools. Because of this, I spend a lot of time talking to people younger than I am, and I spend a lot of time talking to them about music. This creates an interesting discussion point for me—I spent 2017 finding myself remembering that when I was young and wanted to talk to someone older about music, I mostly wanted validation that the thing I liked was not, in fact, awful. This had mixed results in my teenage years. My love of the so-called “shiny suit era” had its detractors, many of them older than me, many of them longing for the days of what they imagined to be “real hip-hop.”
The question I spent most of my time answering in 2017 was how I felt about what is now called “mumble rap” in the popular discourse—rappers who eschew lyrical prowess in the name of drum-heavy trap beats and melodic choruses. If there is one thing that is for sure, changing trends in music will forever have their scapegoats, and because the trends in rap music shift so rapidly, scapegoats appear and then are replaced by new scapegoats nearly every two or three years. Shiny suit rap was a scapegoat once, back after Biggie was murdered and Tupac was murdered before that, and conservative media outlets were delighting in what surely was soon to be the death of the genre they hated most. But then songs about money and partying and living like no death would ever arrive for you ended up on the radio. Auto-Tune was a scapegoat for a while, until Kanye West made 808s and Heartbreak in 2008, and people decided Auto-Tune was a worthwhile artistic endeavor until Jay-Z released the song “Death of Auto-Tune” in the summer of 2009, and then it was done for good.
“Mumble rap” is the most active and vigorous scapegoat rap has had in years, in part because the internet—particularly social media—has created a landscape for it to thrive and be a hotly debated topic, engaging in the ideas of language and whether or not rappers should have to adhere to them, or whether or not this so-called mumble rap is actually pushing the genre forward, past some of its bowing to establishments.
The real truth is that the rappers don’t actually mumble. Rappers like Lil Yachty, Lil Uzi Vert, and Young Thug aren’t really aesthetically or sonically similar, and all of them rap fairly clearly. What people are really angling at is the drug-drenched persona of young rappers who seem to have no substance, as they put it. What people are really pointing at is what they believe to be a lack of lyricism. I don’t necessarily rebuke this in its entirety, but I rebuke the idea that my pals and I weren’t young once and didn’t listen to shit that moved us to dance or get reckless no matter what the rapper was saying. I rebuke the idea that every lyric written when I was a young hip-hop lover was sent down from the heavens and written with a golden pen. I rebuke the idea that the “turn up” is new or something that anyone in need of it should be ashamed of. Or the idea that the turn up isn’t flexible. That it doesn’t happen in the middle of a gospel song on Sunday, or in a trap house on any day when people in the hood get paid, or in a nightclub in New York when the horn player catches a good solo and the band lets him air it out until he’s gotten all he can out of his instrument.
And so, young people want to ask me what I think about mumble rap. Some of them wait eagerly, hoping I’ll validate their interests. Some—the ones I find more interesting—bemoan the state of hip-hop now, and wonder if it’s crumbling due to this new faction of young rappers largely existing in a haze of drugs and excess.
I am trying not to be the elder that I had access to in my days of young rap fandom. For them, it was the 1980s that was the holy grail, and everything in the late 1990s was a horn signaling the death of a genre. I don’t think that is where we are now. Some of the young people I talk to aren’t sure what so-called “real hip-hop” is, but they know enough to know what it isn’t. Early in the year, many of them had never heard of A Tribe Called Quest, and then later, only knew them as a phoenix, risen from the ashes—though they were unsure what the ashes were or how they got there. So many people have an idea of what “real hip-hop” is, or the standards of what it should adhere to, and that makes the genre narrow. So narrow, in fact, that many of those people can’t see the disciples of Tribe right in front of them. Artists like Anderson Paak, who joined Tribe on stage during their Grammy performance in 2017, eagerly drumming along with his heroes. Or even someone like Joey Bada$$, or Isaiah Rashad, or Danny Brown. Lineage is most important to preserve in rap music. It isn’t always what you hear on the surface, but what you hear trying to claw its way out. Tribe made it easy for all of us with jazz, but it’s not like that anymore. You really gotta want to sit down with an album. And I know, I know it’s hard to do, with one album leaving just in time for another to arrive. But if there is something that I know about whatever I imagine real hip-hop to be, it’s that it demands patience from a listener. It demands someone willing to sit awhile and let the music enter them.
I don’t tell young rap fans that, though. I tell them that I’m trying to get into the songs they’re into, and I am. I tell them that I listen to stuff that people younger than me are listening to because I never want to be out of line and out of touch. I want to know where rap is going, and I want to always be able to accept it, or at least find a path to acceptance, no matter how long or winding it is. I tell them that I like Lil Uzi Vert, and I do. I think that in ten years’ time, though, none of this will matter. Genre is going to be a thing of the past soon anyway, man. It’s all gonna be pop music before too long, so you might as well enjoy your safe houses now while you’ve got ’em. I tell the rap fans younger than me who don’t know it yet that A Tribe Called Quest made rap music that they might think is real enough. That it was just beats and rhymes—no gimmicks. That’s still happening now, too. The dream isn’t over yet. Find something you love before everything is washed away by a wave of sound pushing all rap closer and closer to the dreaded radio. Everything reaching for the pop charts. I tell young rap fans who haven’t heard it to listen to Midnight Marauders, to the way “Steve Biko” falls effortlessly into “Award Tour” and the small burst of marching and playful horns that feel like an endless summer coming. I tell young rap fans that they might have liked Phife, the eternal underdog—small, and yet still somehow towering. I tell them that at least we still have Q-Tip, who—even after all this time—is committed solely to his massive and impossible visions.
And we may never have anyone as great as them again. The idea of the rap group isn’t entirely gone, and it might go through another cycle—especially now, with the rise of groups like Migos and Rae Sremmurd. But a group like A Tribe Called Quest will never exist again. And what a tragic but perfect ending to what they gave. Of course there had to be a funeral. Of course there had to be a death during a dark year, painting the months even darker, and of course there had to be an album pushed into a country that needed it right as it arrived, and of course there had to be a performance on music’s largest stage with black fists raised in the air. Not every story in music ends with a group forced to throw in the towel due to a great and impossible loss, and not every story should. But had it not, I would want A Tribe Called Quest to return again and again, giving me the doses of updated nostalgia that I might need when no other music could provide it. At least now, I think, we can lay them to rest.
The music video for “The Space Program” came out right as the summer of 2018 got especially hot along the coasts. Right as New Yorkers said fuck it and crowded indoors by their fans and window A/C units. That “too hot to touch another person, no matter what the body desires” weather. It was the final Tribe video, released well over a year after their final album. It is a frantic and hectic visual, with Q-Tip, Ali, and Jarobi fighting to break free from a spaceship while also traversing a vast desert. Phife’s verse in the song is mouthed by a line of brilliant cameos from the group’s longtime peers: Erykah Badu, Questlove, Pharrell. At the end of the video, the viewer sees the group walking through the desert and into the sunset, before the three bodies become a blur. One might be reminded of the closing scene in the group’s first video, “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo,” which ended with the group, then a foursome, walking into the desert heat and becoming small. Once, they were young and aching to go home. Now, they are old, and simply looking to vanish into anywhere but here. A blur, swallowed by a horizon.
We can go about speaking the name of A Tribe Called Quest as we might speak the name of someone from our distant past who changed our way of seeing. If I close my eyes now, I think I see the world as A Tribe Called Quest would have had me see it. I think I can see my people dancing in the streets, like nothing they loved has ever been set on fire.
There are not enough roses in the world for me to lay at the feet of this impossible group, but I hope this effort counts. I hope Phife can see all of us still trying, from wherever he may be. I hope Q-Tip knows that he’s done something great. I hope when the time comes for the generation after mine to talk about what’s real, they’ll pull a Tribe CD out of their pockets, worn down from a decade’s use and perhaps an older sibling. I hope they’ll put it in a CD player and let a room be carried away.