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.
#A tribe called quest keep it moving archive#
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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