A Tribe Called Quest’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythmbegins with a shimmer — a soft static that sounds like the surf breaking in slow motion. At first it’s low. Then it gets louder and closer. It suggests a cosmic arrival, a visitor who is entering our world from a great distance. A wailing baby connotes we’re traversing a birth canal, but the celestial ambiance tells us if this is a child, it’s out of Stanley Kubrick, one with a pulsating galaxy brain who has been cocooned in the stars for centuries, watching our world from on high, and learning. Then the music starts, and it becomes unclear if what we’ve just heard was an alien coming to us in real time, or out of the distant past. Or back from the future. In actuality, somehow, that galactic paradigm shift has just turned 35.
On this day in 1990, Tribe Called Quest touched down fully formed with People’s Instinctive Travels, a totemic album that remade a section of hip-hop in the image of proudly intrepid kids from Queens. Amid the rage of so-called gangsta rappers and politically charged explosions, Tribe presented something simultaneously radical and tame. Their sonic and thematic identity is stitched into their very fabric; their moniker sounded more like a short story than the proper name of a rap group. Its afro-futurist album title could’ve been quoting Maya Angelou. Or Gil-Scott Heron. Or Spike Lee. Or Sun Ra. It wasn’t, but that’s the tradition they hailed from. They were old souls — intellectually curious art school kids who didn’t have the resources to go to art school. But as a cosmic gag, the city sent them to Murry Bergtraum Business High School, in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge on the Manhattan side, where they met the Jungle Brothers and began to find their Native Tongues.
There had been warning shots with the eventual members of that one of a kind sprawling artist collective. Q-Tip appeared on the Jungle Brothers’ “Doin’ Our Own Dang” on Done by the Forces of Nature”, and “Buddy” on De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising in 1989 (Phife joined him on the remix). At the end of that year, the Tribe released the first single from their forthcoming debut, “Description of a Fool”, which was selected over surefire jams like the lovely “Bonita Applebaum” and the goofy, addictive “Left my Wallet In El Segundo”, which would both go on to be bigger hits. It might have felt left-field at the time, but you feel the intentionality of making “Fool” their introduction. Over a vibrant Roy Ayers flip, Q-Tip delivers five minutes of observational comedy as he roasts the eponymous dumbasses in his community. It’s an unofficial mission statement for a Tribe that would soon be known across the universe. Sure, it’s “conscious” rap, but there’s no self-righteous fury. It’s political, but not overtly so. It’s warm. Funny. Lived in. Not the dire biblical moralizing of stone-faced elders like Rakim. It is instead the musings of a city kid who was as wry as he was well read. It was a measured — mostly casual — rebellion amid a storm of alchemized exasperation.
In the ’80s there had been an arms race between the U.S. and Russia as both nations were engulfed by the Cold War. At home, acts from Run DMC to N.W.A and Public Enemy basked in a slavish dedication to the drum and increasingly loud, layered, hyper-kinetic walls of sound rioting against President Reagan and his police state. People’s Instinctive Travels was released on the same day as its sonic inverse, Fear of a Black Planet.Fear of a Black Planet featured the Bomb Squad’s angriest, noisiest sound collages up to that point, with songs like the controversial, flame-spewing “Welcome to the Terrordome” emanating an ominous, confrontational wrath. In a contrasting approach, Q-Tip’s production slows rap down. If Public Enemy was being abrasive, Tip and Tribe were immersive. Q-Tip’s lush production defined the effect; these beats are laced with patient multi-bar loops that feel luxurious. They’re given room to breathe and thus had the texture of live instrumentation before Tip ever brought live instrumentation into the process. With beats like “After Hours” there’s a calm confidence, a latent realization — either by a genius or by a pragmatic kid composing with nothing but two cassette decks and a pause button standing in for a crossfader, (or both) — that just because you can sample everything, doesn’t mean you have to.
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Q-Tip isn’t Erick Sermon or Marley Marl or Pete Rock or Rick Rubin or the Dust Brothers. There is an immediate eclectic, refined aesthetic palate, Tribe knows what they’re into and what they want their music to sound like. It’s less chaos brained than the nutty professor/Prince who made beats for De La on their paradigm-shifting debut a year earlier. Tip is pulling Donald Byrd, Grover Washington Jr., Earth Wind & Fire, Billy Brooks, Cannonball Adderly, The Chambers Brothers, Sly & The Family Stone, and perhaps most famously, Lou Reed on “Can I Kick It?” It’s chill shit, all smooth jazz baselines and warm key progressions, an uncanny instance of a person’s taste in music perfectly matching the specific tone of their incredible voice. And that voice is perfectly matched, better than any voice in rap ever has been, to his childhood friend from St. Albans and mic partner Phife Dawg.
Doing more supporting work here than the co-lead he’d become, Phife appears on just four songs. They’re all album highlights, because from a sonic standpoint, as two instruments in harmony, he is the yin to Q-Tip’s yang. They flaunt that chemistry on “Ham ‘N’ Eggs,” a nerdy paean to clean eating that is indicative of some of the freer moments on the album that would be ironed out over time. These songs contain a playful, scatting, cafeteria table, “this word rhymes with that word” spontaneity to the super structures of Tip and Phife’s “verses.”
Alternating between bars for “Ham ‘N’ Eggs,” Q-Tip and Phife emanate all the juvenile energy of a school lunchtable cypher: “Ham “Eggs was fryin’, ham was smellin’/In ten minutes, she started yellin’ (Come and get it!)/And the gettin’s were good/I said, ’I shouldn’t eat it,’ she said, ’I think you should’/But I can’t, I’m plagued by vegetarians/No cats and dogs, I’m not a veterinarian/Strictly collard greens and the occasional steak.”
But within Tribe’s “Youthful Expressions” and diary entries, pinging off ideas like sugar and THC drunk kids scribbling in a marble notebook on the E train or the J train or the Long Island Railroad, there are constant surprises spilling out, observed beauty and beyond their years profundity that expanded conventional ideas of the function of a rap song.
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Their subsequent two albums have always been understood as their masterpieces, and they’re certainly more defined, complete, mature statements. But there is an unsteady pleasure to their debut that the others don’t have. It’s the group announcing themselves, trying on different looks and feels, and with some of these flourishes they would leave behind, the listener imagines decision trees branching out through a multiverse, the different groups they might have become if they had limitless lives and even more chances to define themselves.
A firmly held belief of mine is if you live in New York, you must listen to Boot Camp Clik every winter and Tribe every summer. Particularly the initial, perfect triptych of People’s Instinctive Travels, The Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders uncannily captures a hot and listless Saturday afternoon in a city under a blue sky, perhaps hopping a turnstile north en route to a matinee to hide in AC, or south to Coney Island to play in the surf with a nutcracker, perhaps setting up for a block party or park cookout or sunset rooftop function once the heat burns off, smoking weed on a stoop in a neighborhood you don’t live in, being in Washington Square Park and taking in the unfathomable, global diversity that has formed below an arch and around a fountain and how this human menagerie informed and will continue to form the minds of the city’s brightest children, as Jairobi White, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, Phife Dawg, and Q-Tip once were. This summer, and every summer for the rest of your life, on one of those Saturday afternoons before the heat gets oppressive, throw on People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, and you’ll see. Tap into the shared history and community of New York, and be reminded of your insignificant but existent place in its dense, infinite story.
