Four days after the 2016 presidential election, the surviving members of A Tribe Called Quest appeared on Saturday Night Live to perform songs from their just-released reunion album, the improbably great We got it from Here… Thank You 4 Your service. The group recorded the album before Donald Trump’s victory—as Dave Chappelle, who hosted SNL that night, repeatedly argued, Trump was merely sticking his finger in existing fault lines—but the results gave it new gravity. It was a moment of philosophical as well as aesthetic triumph for Tribe, their prescience made obvious.
Not all its members made it there to gloat. During the second verse of the galvanizing “We the People…,” when Phife Dawg’s vocals kicked in, Q-Tip and Jarobi shuffled to the stage wings, making room for a giant banner with Phife’s face to be unfurled. NBC’s cameras zoomed in on the late rapper’s picture until the living ones reappeared in the frame to play hypeman for their friend, their backs turned to the studio audience, egging on a static image.
The performance was less than eight months after Phife, born Malik Taylor, had died from diabetes-related complications at the age of 45. In the nearly 20 years between The Love Movement and We got it from Here, Phife, dogged by ill health and still frustrated over the dynamics that led to Tribe’s breakup, released little music. Forever, his first posthumous album—assembled by his longtime DJ, Dion Liverpool, from largely unfinished demos—reveals what had become most important to Phife in his post-Tribe years: family and a particular kind of integrity, where teaching a child to read and not fucking up a cypher are interconnected parts of one worldview. It also shows a dexterous vocal style that is more easily transposed across eras than longtime listeners might have imagined.
Phife and Q-Tip met when they were children attending the same Seventh Day Adventist church in Queens. But where Q-Tip was free to pursue his secular interests—his father was a jazz collector, and the opening verse to The Low End Theory recounts an informed back-and-forth about musical styles between father and son—Phife’s family adhered more strictly to the faith. He wasn’t permitted to hear hip-hop, much less participate in it, except in surreptitious doses outside the home. This is perhaps why, if Q-Tip could turn moodily inward or grapple with abstract social issues, Phife’s raps always felt more purely social. He was trying to intimidate or entertain, always playing to the block parties in his memory.