A love interrupted: A Tribe Called Quest’s resilient path of rhythm

Abstract

In 2016, the rap group A Tribe Called Quest returned with their long-awaited sixth and final album, We Got It From Here... Thank You 4 Your Service. Behind it was a long and turbulent story without which the record’s full significance cannot be properly understood. In this longform critical essay, hip hop scholar and critic James McNally examines that history, drawing on an extensive archive of historic interviews and visual material to illuminate the impact this pivotal group made on hip hop’s golden age. It maps the disruption in music and values created by the freewheeling collective they belonged to, the Native Tongues; in particular the new, looser, more expressive modes of Blackness and everyteen vitality they injected into hip hop’s late-1980s moral and stylistic universe. Unpacking the tropes of familiality the Native Tongues promoted, the essay is drawn in particular to the de facto sibling relationship between Tribe’s two core MCs – Malik ‘Phife’ Taylor and Kamaal ‘Q-Tip’ Fareed (born Jonathan Davis). It argues their friendship – as ultimately embodied in the sound of Tribe’s music, but also, increasingly, as public biographical knowledge – was central to the group’s appeal. Engaging with their fraternal ambivalence as well as their love, and with the group’s drawn-out implosion after 1998’s The Love Movement, the essay explores themes around masculine friendship and platonic male love, around estrangement, reconciliation and resilience, and, ultimately – following the interruption of We Got It From Here… by Taylor’s untimely death – the personal tragedy of loss. Bringing these themes together, ‘A Love Interrupted’ provides a critical reading of A Tribe Called Quest’s poignant final album.