Phife Dawg: the socially conscious rapper who gave 90s hip-hop its good vibes

Phife Dawg, AKA Malik Taylor, doesn’t feature on many greatest-rapper-of-all-time lists – but you have to wonder if he might had he been a solo act. As it was, in A Tribe Called Quest, he naturally received less attention than the group’s charismatic founder Q-Tip, but even though he didn’t join ATCQ fully until their second album, he was a long, long way from being just a sideman. In the most straight-up musical rap act of all time, it was the interplay of Phife’s bouncing enunciation and Tip’s sly drawl that gave them their identity, just as much as their sophisticated jazz and soul sampling, or their Afrocentric boho image.

Phife, like so many movers and shakers in hip-hop’s early days, from Kool Herc to KRS-One, came from a Caribbean immigrant family – Trinidadian in his case – and wore this on his sleeve. “To Jah I give thanks, collect my banks, listen to Shabba Ranks,” runs a typically upbeat line on Jazz (We’ve Got) from 1991’s Low End Theory, his first album as a full member. Throughout his lyrics you can hear the skippetty triplet runs of 80s and 90s dancehall exemplified by Shabba: a signature that would be echoed by many MCs in the mainstream rap of the 90s.

The rise of ATCQ in the late 80s, as part of the Native Tongues collective with artists such as De La Soul, the Jungle Brothers and Queen Latifah, seemed to signal an openness in hip-hop. They represented scholarship, complicated lyricism, musical eclecticism and internationalism (as in Phife’s Caribbean twang) rather than street-corner parochialism; what hip-hop scholar and professor of global studies at New York University Jason King calls “the rise of a European, classically influenced concept of the artist in hip-hop; the rapper as more than a showman but a philosopher, individualist, soul-searcher”.

While Chuck D hailed him a “true-fire social narrator”, Phife was never a rapper to let seriousness take over anything. For all the reverence that is rightly given to ATCQ, especially from ageing rap bores who hold them up as exemplars of meaningfulness in order to knock what they see as the modern nonsense of, say, Lil Wayne or Young Thug, the group were always rooted deep in hip-hop’s origins as party music. It’s no wonder that Low End Theory’s closing posse cut Scenario can still cause riotous scenes in clubs to this day. And the best of Phife’s verses always tended to be based in rowdy, bawdy expression.

“I like my beats hard like two-day-old shit,” he says in the rumbustious and club-demolishing Oh My God on 1993’s Midnight Marauders. Elsewhere,women are on his mind, as on Electric Relaxation from the same album, where you can practically hear the wink as he raps: “I like ’em brown, yellow, Puerto Rican or Hatian / Name is Phife Dawg from the Zulu Nation”. This might look cheesy on paper, but on record Phife’s flow has incredible, hypnotic, energising power, his Caribbean-tinged delivery constantly pushing the good vibes. It’s not all love, scatological humour and sauciness, however, and there are some problematic lyrics – Phife’s dancehall rhetoric stretched to calling himself “the anti-battyboy”, for example. But 99% of the time, the balance between grit and jollity was struck perfectly.

ATCQ will always be best known for the run of albums they released in the early 90s, but the group never made a bad record, even when Phife and Tip’s personal chemistry was disintegrating amid jealousy and music-biz politicking towards the end of the decade. The tragically small amount of solo work Phife released stands up brilliantly, too. Like his collaborators J Dilla and Pete Rock, he was able to make a distinctly 90s strain of “boom bap” hip-hop sound fresh in the 00s, thanks in part to a constantly exploratory approach, but perhaps more so because of his instinctive drive to make rap tracks that slam out of the speaker and grab you by the crotch.

Notwithstanding the false dichotomies of old v new or conscious v gangsta, Phife’s influence is found in every part of rap. ATQC had a clear influence on the more creatively expansive hip-hop auteurs of today – you can hear their echoes in Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar for starters. But you can bet your bottom dollar that any wilfully dumb party rapper of today – say, DJ Khaled – will be able to recite reams of their lyrics, and that any rap fan asked for their favourite lines is as likely to pull out one of Phife’s untold “quotables” as they are Tip’s laid-back poetics.

“Yo, microphone check, one, two, what is this? / The 5ft assassin with the roughneck business,” he rhymed, announcing his arrival on Low End Theory’s Buggin’ Out. Again, it looks simple, but in his delivery, in its immediacy and its signalling of the torrent of rhymes that are about to come, it’s one of the greatest opening couplets in the whole of hip-hop, and it still reverberates through global culture as such.