![]() Indeed listening to Umar Bin Hassan from The Last Poets riffing in that signature wheeze from “Time,” reminder that A Tribe Called Quest was obsessed with time, cause you gotta be able to keep time, if you gonna change the times-the reason why Flava Flav had that damn clock around his neck in his role as Public Enemy’s Eshu Elegbara asking “What Time Is It?” Those opening bass lines on “Excursions”, The Low End Theory’s opening track are as iconic as any sounds produced in Hip-hop in that era signaling new inventions and dimensions to give a nod to another Hard-Bop God, Herbie Hancock, whose own career arc from keeping the time to time traveling, served as an example of the possibilities. ![]() One might think of The Low End Theory as a theorization of bottoms in part inspired, by NWA’s Straight Outta Compton, and a Hard Bop minimalism drawn from samples from Art Blakey and his Jazz Messengers-the finishing school for a generation of giants, including the Brothers Marsalis and A Tribe Call Quest favorite Freddie Hubbard-and guitarist Grant Green. The richness of the bottom, with its resonances of Black bodies gendered, sweaty, sexy, intricate and in darkness (perhaps), was the will to locate a politics (hard bop as the soundtrack to the pre-movement of the Civil Rights Sixties), an artistic sophistication that the embrace of Jazz signaled, and a connection to Daddy, whose music this once was-a nod to Jonathan Davis, Sr., who provided his son Q-Tip with a portion of the archive that A Tribe Called Quest is built on, the grand-daddy of CL Smooth, who gets a shout on “They Reminisce Over You” (“nodding off to sleep to a Jazz tune, I can hear his head banging on the wall in the next room”), and trumpeter Olu Dara, who appears on “Life’s a Bitch” from his son Nasir Jones’s debut Illmatic. If A Tribe Called Quest’s debut was a sonic invocation to diasporic movement-in the music, in the tri-State area, where a subway ride from Brooklyn to the Bronx might as well have been a flight from Jamaica to Ghana, on the dancefloor-their follow-up The Low End Theory was an attempt to find grounding, a bottom, within shifting terrains of consumption and political discourse. You might think of the late 1980s and early 1990s as Hip-Hop’s most wide open period, premised in part by the national circulation of a sound born and raised in the Afro-Caribbeanized Bronx (the actual mixtape of that moment as analog social media)-success less the matter of a Blueprint-though KRS-One did in fact drop one in the summer of 1989, the same summer that Public Enemy told u that it was was “a number, another summer.sound of the funky drummer” from the metaphoric theme-song for Spike Lee’s attempted takeover of the business of producing relevant cinematic images of Blackness. In the backdrop, the shooting death of a Black teenager, named Yusef, whose name rang out in a world both without hashtags or platforms to do anything with them. Finding the beats and rhymes that adhered to the Brand New that was the Hip-Hop generation coming to political maturation amidst Jesse Jackson’s run for the White House and the release from prison of a South African political prisoner only known to this generation by a dated black and white photo nearly three decades-old released two months before A Tribe Called Quest’s debut People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm. ![]() ![]() Liner Notes: A Tribe Called Quest, The Low End Theory (1991)
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