The third death of A Tribe Called Quest occurred last week with the passing of Phife Dawg. The first death came after The Love Movement, when the group broke up; I witnessed the second death in Michael Rappaport’s documentary Beats, Rhymes, and Life. We will never be able to see Phife and Tip go back and forth again or create new recordings together. Phife was far from my favorite rapper, but he was utterly unique, and rather than re-hash all of his memorable moments (a basic Google search will provide plenty of material along these lines), I feel pulled to meditate on his consistent injection of dancehall style and references in his rhymes, one aspect of the way he absorbed and translated the total sphere of New York City’s black musics, pop culture, sports, and street slang. Phife had roots in Trinidad, and in his rhymes he scatters an archipelago of allusions to the island sounds that are both ancestors and siblings to hip hop.
When Phife kicks off his verse on “Jazz (We’ve Got)” with “Competition, them must come sideway / Competition them must come straightway,” he simultaneously taps into the historical roots of hip hop and the contemporary cultural matrix of New York. In the metropolis, Great Migration blacks and new-American and first-generation blacks from Haiti and Trinidad and Jamaica combined sound flavors in irresistible ways, and Phife’s ease on the mic was in part attributable to his authentic relationship to the texture of these soundways and lived rhythms—he was a New Yorker’s New Yorker. His dancehall styling also resonates with the song’s bass signature, reminiscent of the subtle, deep rumblings of dub that constitutes a key protein in the DNA of the low end theory sound. The beat doesn’t actually come from Q-Tip, but from an uncredited Pete Rock, who is himself of Jamaican heritage. Later on in the verse, Phife casually mentions that he listens to Shabba Ranks, whom he quotes on “Award Tour” an album later, when he puns that he’s “livin mad phat like an oversized mumpy!!”
Sometimes his injection of island style was just a word here or there, such as the opening punchline on the Midnight Marauders album—“Brothers wanna flex / You’re not Mad Cobra”—or when he tells “wack competition” to “seckle” on “Buggin’ Out,” which is quite possibly his most memorable verse (though, “Scenario” is unforgettable, and his first verse on “Electric Relaxation” is a great handful of bars, too). Phife’s ease on the mic was consistent—“Brothers find this hard to do, but never me”—as were his fluent excursions into dancehall style and songs, whether in “Oh My God,” where he calls himself the “Trini gladiator” just after injecting a patois barb (“me nah care about them booty mc / My shit is hitting”), or in the full-blown sound clash-type intro and outro on “His Name is Mutty Ranks.”
The islands, of course, infuse the flesh of hip hop. DJ Kool Herc came from Jamaica to the South Bronx and, along with other Jamaican immigrants, brought with him the culture of sound innovation and engineering acumen that gave rise to the mighty sound systems of Kingston. Long before Tribe, KRS-ONE pioneered the balance of rap and Jamaican song styles on such classics as “My 9mm Goes Bang,” a balance he perfected by the time he went solo and released the a capella track “Uh Oh.” Like KRS, Phife absorbed the sound atmosphere of the various black New Yorks, where generic divisions are loosely drawn, porous, even absorbent.
By the time the Fugees blew up (led by Wyclef Jean, from Haiti), such blends of dancehall/rap battle flow were well-established by other groups like Smif-n-Wessun, not to mention legendary collaborations, such as Super Cat’s “Dolly My Baby (Remix),” where the world first sees and hears a virtually unknown Biggie Smalls. The Brooklyn giant’s short verse on this dancehall cut serves as the source for the hook sample on “Big Poppa,” which is now a basic datum of American pop culture. The imbrication of dancehall and hip hop was not a fad but a natural crossing based on true affinity. Super Cat, like Buju Banton, Terror Fabulous, and the aforementioned Shabba Ranks, had become a fixture of BET’s video rotation, and made hip hop heads like me realize that the irrepressible energy in hardcore hip hop had a sibling, that the pure joy it provoked also circulated through other musics. Super Cat’s flow on “Ghetto Red Hot” alone broke down and rebuilt my sense of the possibilities of melodic flow, of the musicality of alliteration and assonance, and of just how cool someone could sound on the mic.
I met Phife once back in the late 90s after watching Tribe perform. At the time, their most recent release was Midnight Marauders. After they performed, Phife, along with Ali Shaheed Muhammed, were hanging out on a bench by the stands at the old Polaris Amphitheater, like normal people. I approached them and introduced myself, and I don’t remember what we talked about. Phife was absolutely down to earth; Ali was friendly but quiet. Phife wore Tims and extra long jean shorts just like me and my friends; I remember noticing that his teeth were a bit crooked on the bottom, and that he had acne, just like me and my friends. He was the first celebrity I met, but was nothing like a celebrity, as far as I imagined them. In a way, he was simply one more hip hop head, just like me, the only small difference being that he also happened to be a member of one of the greatest music groups of all time. But there was nothing about his demeanor that indicated arrogance. I was confused, probably because I knew that if I had had his level of success in my teenage years, I wouldn’t have been as humble as he was when I met him.
At age 45, Phife died of complications from diabetes. It is a sad irony that a titan whose gift was to absorb the liquid vibrations around him and strain them into a flow of beauty lived in a body that could not pull the impurities from his blood. But the sadness doesn’t come close to overwhelming the gratitude I feel for the way he reached into the air of my rural, middle-of-nowhere Ohio adolescence, and reminded me that the invisible vibrations that swirled in the air of my brother’s bedroom, along with incense smoke and designer cologne, connected me to something somewhere else, something vital, an essence called hip hop that was not static but alive, an organism that defied the space-time continuum and reached back to Jamaica, to Africa, and beyond that, to the source of all things.
Phife was small, a little over five feet tall, a size eight shoe, ailing, a lover of sports, his physical stats giving no indication of the giant we knew him to be. In closing, I’d like to offer a few lines from Q-Tip, wherein he reminds us not to “believe in stats,” not to turn physical facts or sociological data into deadly self-fulfilling prophecies. On “Believe,” his majestic collaboration with the black mystic D’Angelo, Tip nods ever so slightly—with a clipped plural here and a shaved-off ending there and a mention of “Babylon”—toward the Jamaican styles Phife infused so splendidly. From now on, these lines will make me think of “the five foot assassin”: “Never disbelieve when you see human miracle like ghetto children shinin bright in Babylon / Believe in that, don’t believe in stats / To the contrary, gotta stay leery of them theories, carry on.”