Vibes and Stuff: A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory at 30

Thirty years later, A Tribe Called Quest's The Low End Theory remains a stellar execution of hip-hop methodology.

A Tribe Called Quest, The Low End Theory

I still remember hearing A Tribe Called Quest’s 1993 track “Electric Relaxation” for the first time in my high school boyfriend’s broken-down Volvo. The music was cranked all the way up, windows rolled all the way down. My slushie left a wet imprint on the passenger seat as those six hypnotic, sticky-sweet jazz chords made a permanent imprint in my memory. We were two ethnic kids in a small Southern city, a Mexican girl and Blasian boy, zooming down streets where Confederate flag bumper stickers were not an unusual sight.

A Tribe Called Quest’s music became the soundtrack to my teenage liberation. For the first time, I felt connected to a movement authored by people of color—specifically black people. The iconic hip-hop group was devoted to the art of opening minds and moving butts, and as I was shaking mine, I studiously took notes. “I like them brown, yellow, Puerto Rican, and Haitian.” (My people!) “Name is Phife Dawg from the Zulu Nation.”

At the time, I had to Google “Zulu Nation,” and I discovered the concept of Afrocentricity, the Native Tongues rap crew, and the power of racialized subjects resisting an imposed culture by calling on their autochthonous roots. I came of age on a very pale, male, and stale diet of classic rock and punk, and A Tribe Called Quest was my gateway drug to ’90s hip-hop and my initiation into a sonic universe where black and brown people acted not only as protagonists, but as the originators, authorities, and arbiters of knowledge.

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A Tribe Called Quest’s 1991 breakthrough album, The Low End Theory, is as much a totem to today’s youth of color as it was when it came out, which is equally a testament to its significance as the unshakeable hold that the album has on hip-hop past and present. The group—which, after the departure of their enigmatic spiritual guide, Jarobi White, was then made up of Phife Dawg, Q-Tip, and Ali Shaheed Mohammad—streamlined and souped up the blueprint of their Native Tongues elders, trading in the Jungle Brothers’s largely soul-based sampling palette for jazz and rock flavors, and sidestepping De La Soul’s more mystical lyricism for on-the-ground accounts of life as young black men in Queens, New York.

Caught in a perennial debate, most Tribe fans recognize either The Low End Theory or its 1993 follow-up, Midnight Marauders, as the group’s best album. Though the latter’s production is more intricate, it couldn’t have been made without the former’s pointillistic approach to sampling, a quantum leap in terms of sophistication from A Tribe Called Quest’s 1990 debut, People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm.

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Jive Records executives allegedly thought that the minimalism of The Low End Theory was too much of a contrast from the boldness of its predecessor and doubted that it would do well with the same audience. But they were wrong. A Tribe Called Quest didn’t have to sell out to sell records, because 1991 was one of those stars-are-aligned moments in time, where the bandwagon embraced the vanguard. What a coincidence that Nirvana’s no less envelope-pushing Nevermind came out the very same day as The Low End Theory.

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Anthropologists claim that an evolutionary function of rhythm is to lull our egos into a collective consciousness and help us build group identity. The bassline of the album’s opening track, “Excursions,” a slowed snippet from Art Blakely and the Jazz Messengers’s “A Chant for Bu,” oscillates between the major third and perfect fourth, soaking in the back-and-forth chromatic tension and making your hair stand on end in anticipation. Indeed, there’s something primeval and cosmic and unifying trapped in those arpeggios.

Part of A Tribe Called Quest’s philosophy has always been to acknowledge the cyclical nature of cultural heritage and pay respects to the ancestors. They honor their own positionality in time throughout “Excursions,” deploying a spoken-word sample from “Time Is Running Out” by Harlem’s the Last Poets. Q-Tip’s opening verse is bona fide hip-hop scripture: “Back in the days when I was a teenager/Before I had status and before I had a pager/You could find the Abstract listening to hip-hop/My pops used to say, it reminded him of be-bop.”

“Excursions” contains the essential ingredients of every other track on The Low End Theory: a bassline so contagious that it tattoos itself into your psyche, a backbeat that gets your pulse racing, and tasteful decade-hopping, genre-jumping melodic flourishes courtesy of samples of Jimi Hendrix, Average White Band, the Weather Report, and Cannonball Adderley, to name just a few. Q-Tip and Muhammad sourced and arranged these elements, indigenous to black musical traditions, to form a dazzling sonic textile, instead of the stop-start splicing that had characterized hip-hop sampling up to that point.

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From listening to our mothers’ heartbeats in utero, to the mechanical chug of public transportation, rhythm is a constant in our lives. The basis of popular music in the Americas originates in African polyrhythms, a culturally rich export predicated on the inhumanity of slavery. On The Low End Theory, A Tribe Called Quest consciously harnesses those ancestral rhythms but refrain from taming them, letting them interact with other, more modern contrapuntal patterns. On the outro of “Rap Promoter,” Q-Tip forgoes language altogether and offers his voice as an instrument of syncopation: “Diggi-dang-diggi-dang, di-dang-ga-dang-a-diddy.”

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The Low End Theory is a jazz-rap touchstone through and through, powered by the vitality and chemistry between Q-Tip and Phife Dawg, who truly go head-to-head here. Both rappers subverted the figure of the hyper-masculine rap god: Q-Tip was the bespectacled loverboy and front-stoop poet with a nasal but mellowed-out flow, while Phife was the high-pitched Five-Foot Assassin, the charmingly self-deprecatory Funky Diabetic with a potty mouth. Together they were a union of soul and mind, the concrete and the abstract, the lowbrow and the highbrow, the worm’s eye view and the bird’s eye view, the feet on the ground and the head in the clouds, with Muhammad, overseen by Q-Tip and assisted by engineer Bob Power, orchestrating from the DJ booth, dishing out the blood, flesh, and muscle that composed the Tribe corpus.

No track better encapsulates Q-Tip and Phife’s chemistry than “Check the Rhime,” which contains the most famous call and response in all of hip-hop: “You on point, Phife?” “All the time, Tip.” As you’ll know if you’ve seen Michael Rapaport’s controversial documentary Beats, Rhymes & Life, it was rare for Q-Tip and Phife’s relationship to be that effortlessly harmonious. Childhood friends turned embittered business partners, they were driven apart by misaligned goals and motivations, thankfully reconciling to record the group’s stupendous swan song, We Got It From Here… Thank You 4 Your Service. (Phife sadly passed away from diabetes-related complications before the album’s release in 2016.)

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Hip-hop has no shortage of iconic duos: Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth, Andre 3000 and Big Boi, Talib Kweli and Mos Def, Method Man and Redman, Prodigy and Havoc, Pimp C and Bun B. But Q-Tip and Phife may be the greatest because they complemented and completed each other. In Shadow and Act, Ralph Ellison wrote, “Each true jazz moment…springs from a contest in which each artist challenges all the rest, each solo flight, or improvisation, represents…a definition of his identity: as individual, as member of the collectivity and as link in the chain of tradition.” Like Ellison’s jazzmen, Q-Tip and Phife defined their individual identities by reviving traditional materials and playing off of one another. And it’s fair to say that each MC found himself in the other, even if that meant losing a piece of his individuality along the way.

The Low End Theory’s sequencing stimulates without requiring the listener to exert great effort to engage with it; like cruising on a skateboard through an urban landscape, it elicits a pleasant alertness and awareness of the present. On “Buggin’ Out,” dueling percussion samples, drums from Lonnie Smith’s “Spinning Wheel” and Jack Dejohnette’s Directions’s “Minya’s the Mooch,” make for a harmonious though slightly off-kilter union. When the drums drop out altogether, the spotlight is solely on Phife delivering one of his most self-possessed performances. “Vibes and Stuff,” “Skypager,” and “What?” are jazz-rap concoctions that go down smooth and easy, the latter song composed of a catalog of questions. And on the showstopping “Butter,” Phife bemoans the trials and tribulations of being a player, accompanied by an electrifying saxophone lick from a Gary Bartz tune.

Though “Show Business” and Q-Tip’s coinage of Industry Rule #4080 (“Record company people are shadyyyy”) still rings true in today’s music business, other moments on The Low End Theory, like the cringe-y “Infamous Date Rape,” feel antiquated in retrospect. There’s a tendency to look back on the album as sacred hip-hop doctrine, but the group’s members were by no means enlightened prophets or model adherents to progressive politics, though some of Q-Tip’s early verses are very much begging you to see them that way.

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The Low End Theory has often been called the Sgt. Pepper’s of hip-hop. And, undoubtedly, it’s as influential to its respective genre. But the album is more of an organic progression of hip-hop, rather than a rupture from it. Where the Fab Four aimed to conquer new frontier, looking to English vaudeville, Indian classical music, and psychedelic drugs for inspiration, A Tribe Called Quest recontextualized and reinvented old into new—which was the ethos of rap from its inception—drawing inspiration not from some exterior entity, but from experiential and inherited knowledge, acquired from coming of age on Linden Boulevard and poring over their parents’ old Minnie Riperton and Roy Ayers records. The album is a stellar execution of hip-hop methodology, proving just how ripe with potential it was and continues to be.

Inspired by a beat that he heard Pete Rock working on, “Jazz (We’ve Got)” uses a slowed-down clarinet sample from Jimmy McGriff’s “Green Dolphin Street,” molding it into a plaintive wail that seduces the listener, urges us to stay immersed in the sonic soup of the song. Jazz is A Tribe Called Quest’s lodestar, but I suspect that they’re referring to more than just the musical tradition when they recite over and over, “We got the jazz.”

For A Tribe Called Quest, jazz is an outlook, an ability to improvise when life throws you curveballs, to adapt and create even as the forces around you would suppress or silence you. Q-Tip has said that The Low End Theory’s title refers to the album’s bass-loaded sound as well as the status of the black man at the low end of the social hierarchy. Living life in the way of jazz, being able to roll with the punches and innovate against all odds, is A Tribe Called Quest’s response to that struggle. Decades later, that positive jazz-inspired outlook on life is The Low End Theory’s enduring legacy.

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Sophia Ordaz

Sophia Ordaz was the editor in chief of The Echo. Her writing has also appeared in Spectrum Culture.

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