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4/7/2019 A beginner’s guide to hip-hop collective Native Tongues

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PRIMER

A beginner’s guide to hip-hop collective Native Tongues

Eric Thurm 7/05/13 12:00am

Primer is The A.V. Club’s ongoing series of beginner’s guides to pop culture’s most

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4/7/2019 A beginner’s guide to hip-hop collective Native Tongues

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Native Tongues 101

In the summer of 1988, two albums with eerily similar titles presented

radically different visions for the future of hip-hop. In August, NWA’s bomb

of a gangsta masterpiece, Straight Outta Compton, blew up the hip-hop

landscape, forever changing the posture, politics, and attitude of rap music

and rappers trying to be hardcore. But Straight Outta Compton was released just

a month after Straight Out The Jungle, the debut album from New York trio

Jungle Brothers and the first release from a future member of the Native

Tongues collective. Looking back, each album seems like a stylistic roadmap

for a different philosophy on the future of hip-hop: Where Straight Outta

Compton is aggressive and harsh and presents the members of NWA clad in

black Raiders Starter jackets, Straight Out The Jungle is as mellow and playful

as the ridiculous, endearing khaki safari gear Jungle Brothers wear on the

cover.

The image of Jungle Brothers looking unabashedly goofy while rhyming about

Afrocentric medallions and the difficulties of urban life in the late ’80s is

characteristic of the movement they spawned: Native Tongues. A loosely

affiliated crew composed of three founding groups (Jungle Brothers, De La

Soul, and A Tribe Called Quest) and a who’s who of innovative hip-hop at the

time, the members of Native Tongues were idealistic teenagers, hanging out

both in and out of the studio while making groundbreaking music. The

individual Tongues may have made better records as they matured, but the

core Native Tongues style can be traced back to the debut albums of its

founding members: Straight Out The Jungle, De La’s 3 Feet High And Rising, and

Tribe’s People’s Instinctive Travels And The Paths Of Rhythm.

Straight Out The Jungle is still very much a product of the boom-bap percussion

that was characteristic of East Coast hip-hop at the time, but Jungle Brothers

Mike G (Michael Small), Afrika Baby Bam (Nathaniel Hall), and DJ Sammy B

(Sammy Burwell) still include most of the elements of what came to be

known as the Native Tongues sound on this album. There’s some jazz

influence and extensive sampling (both of which appear on the Marvin Gaye

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homage “What’s Going On”), and the sort of social commentary made

popular by Grandmaster Flash And The Furious Five’s “The Message,” which

is sampled on the title track. It also features several verses from a young Q-

Tip, who inaugurates “Black Is Black” by shouting out his newly minted

group, A Tribe Called Quest.

A critical hit mishandled commercially by Warlock Records, Jungle Brothers’

label at the time, Straight Out The Jungle might not have spawned a follow-up

album, let alone an entire movement, if not for the group’s manager Fred

Krute, better known as Kool DJ Red Alert. A rising star at 98.7 Kiss FM (and

Mike G’s uncle), Red Alert also had a management company, Red Alert

Productions, which became home to several Native Tongues acts, including A

Tribe Called Quest and Monie Love. After Straight Out The Jungle failed to

perform to expectations, Red Alert helped the crew dent the singles charts

with the added track “I’ll House You,” which has been noted as the first hip-

house track outside of the subgenre’s native Chicago.

Red Alert was also a member of Afrika Bambaataa’s Universal Zulu Nation, a

quasi-religious organization promoting unity and cultural awareness through

hip-hop. The Zulu ideals, embodied primarily through Afrocentrism and an

emphasis on individual identity, would find a home in the music of the Native

Tongues, many of whom were and remain members of the Zulu Nation.

Though the Zulu Nation began as an organization of several reformed Bronx

gang members led by Bambaataa, its philosophy found its way into the music

of three kids from the Amityville area of Long Island. Those teenagers—

Posdnuos, Trugoy (now known as Dave), and Maseo—became Plugs One,

Two, and Three as they formed the trio De La Soul. With a few sketched-out

demo tracks ready, De La hooked up with Amityville producer Prince Paul,

then a member of live hip-hop band Stetsasonic. The result was De La’s

classic debut, 3 Feet High And Rising.

In many ways, 3 Feet High And Rising is the quintessential Native Tongues

album. The record’s loose “D.A.I.S.Y. Age” (a backronym for “Da inner sound,

y’all”) concept and bright, flowery cover art are the best available distillation

of the Native Tongues stereotype, but its musical innovations were far more

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significant. The album invented, for better or (mostly) worse, the use of skits

on rap albums with a light narrative about a wacky game show. And Paul’s

crate-digging production exploded the possibilities of sampling as a means of

creating not only new beats with a hodgepodge of classic and occasionally

kitschy influences (“The Magic Number” prominently samples Schoolhouse

Rock!), but also innovative pieces of music that could stand on their own

without any MCing (“Cool Breeze On The Rocks”).

Perhaps more important for the collective’s future, 3 Feet High And Rising

contained the first track to showcase all three founding Native Tongues:

“Buddy,” which featured Jungle Brothers and Q-Tip on the studio version as

well as Queen Latifah and Monie Love on the remix. “Buddy” inaugurated an

era of collaboration among the founding members of Native Tongues, as well

as the beginning of the collective’s recruitment of a second wave of members.

De La Soul might not have even had the opportunity to make the album

without Tom Silverman of Tommy Boy Records. Silverman, an environmental

science major from White Plains, New York, was immersed in the dance

music and disco scene (his first venture in the music business was a disco tip

sheet) and started Tommy Boy with a $5,000 loan from his parents in 1981.

After getting into the hip-hop business with Afrika Bambaataa And Soulsonic

Force’s danceable debut, Planet Rock, Tommy Boy became a natural home for

Bambaataa’s musical and spiritual descendents. In addition to Bam and De La

Soul, Tommy Boy hosted Queen Latifah, Naughty By Nature, and Prince

Paul’s solo work. Warner Bros. snapped up other artists in the Native Tongues

orbit (including Jungle Brothers) with the option it acquired after buying

Tommy Boy and incorporating it as an imprint of the larger label.

De La Soul turned out to be a pretty good investment for Silverman; 3 Feet

High And Rising was a critical and commercial hit, eventually going platinum.

All of which happened, in large part, on the back of one of the least

interesting tracks on the album, “Me Myself And I.” That track heavily

sampled Funkadelic’s “(Not Just) Knee Deep” and Ohio Players’ “Funky

Worm”—the sampling equivalent of covering The Beatles. For years after the

release of 3 Feet High, “Me Myself And I” was the only song most fans wanted

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to hear at De La shows, an albatross that was still putting cash in the group

members’ pockets. Their reaction against the success of “Me Myself And I”

was a signal of the different directions each of the Native Tongues members

would take as they matured and achieved success.

De La Soul and Jungle Brothers profoundly influenced A Tribe Called Quest,

the nascent musical project of Queens high school students Q-Tip (né

Jonathan Davis, now Kamaal Ibn John Fareed), Phife Dawg, and alias-less Ali

Shaheed Muhammad and Jarobi White. Q-Tip and Phife were friends from

early childhood, while Q-Tip and Ali attended the same high school as Jungle

Brothers. That environment proved crucial to the eventual sound of A Tribe

Called Quest—while Phife and Ali worked on their battle-rapping and DJing,

respectively, Q-Tip hung out in the studio with Jungle Brothers and

contributed to the recording sessions for 3 Feet High And Rising. Before long,

Tribe recorded its own debut, People’s Instinctive Travels And The Paths Of

Rhythm, one of the most playful (and weirdest) Native Tongues releases.

People’s Instinctive Travels isn’t the most cohesive record, and it’s the closest of

Tribe’s three classic albums to being a Q-Tip solo record (Phife only has a

couple of verses, while Jarobi is limited to behind-the-scenes contributions),

but it has remarkable depth for an album by four kids. Tracks range from

being socially conscious without being lame (“Description Of A Fool”) to one

of the only novelty tracks to truly transcend the form, “I Left My Wallet In El

Segundo.” But the dual standouts on People’s Instinctive Travels hit both nerve

centers of carefree youth: casual swagger on the Lou Reed-sampling “Can I

Kick It?” and undeniable, hormone-fueled lust blurred with a tinge of

romanticism on “Bonita Applebum.”

[pagebreak]

Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Q-Tip’s production was also a huge move in

introducing the world to jazz rap. There had been isolated jazz-influenced

cuts before (such as Stetsasonic’s “Talkin’ All That Jazz”), but People’s

Instinctive Travels’ various jazzy tracks—like “Luck Of Lucien” (a slick homage

to French rapper and Native Tongues collaborator Lucien Revolucien) and

“Youthful Expression”—created a sonic landscape where sampling jazz organ

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was as natural as heavy snares. People’s Instinctive Travels sounds a bit like a

creative combination of the De La and Jungle Brothers sounds: Q-Tip was not

only lucky to have spent time learning from Jungle Brothers, De La, and

Prince Paul in the studio, but he also got priceless recording lessons from

famed Queens producer Large Professor and from producer/prominent Zulu

Skeff Anselm, who was dating Q-Tip’s sister at the time.

Those three albums display idealistic teenagers fooling around and making

thoughtful, innovative music as if by accident—in Brian Coleman’s hip-hop

oral history Check The Technique, Phife compares the original Native Tongues

recording sessions to sleepovers. The almost haphazard nature of the

production extends to the origin of the Native Tongues name itself: According

to Michael Rapaport’s excellent documentary, Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels

Of A Tribe Called Quest, Q-Tip was at Afrika Baby Bam’s house playing around

on the turntables with Coming Together, a record by Motown-offshoot funk

group New Birth. One track on the album, “African Cry,” prominently

features the lyric “Took away our native tongues,” which became, after being

cut repeatedly as a joke and then in earnest, the name of a collective where all

the members seemed to be speaking the same language. Native Tongues was

born.

Intermediate Work

As the Native Tongues sound spread, other artists were sucked into its orbit.

One of the first and most important of these additions was a pre-film career

Queen Latifah. After Latifah came up as part of the trio Ladies Fresh while

she was still in high school in New Jersey, her first single, “Wrath Of My

Madness,” found its way to Tommy Boy A&R man Dante Ross, landing her a

deal at the label. In 1989, Latifah released her debut album, All Hail The Queen,

which includes production from Prince Paul and KRS-One. All Hail The Queen

is more vocal in its consciousness and in its Afrocentrism than almost any

other Native Tongues release. That’s especially true of its unabashed

feminism, a subject rarely addressed by the boys’ club of Jungle Brothers, De

La, and Tribe. On the Prince Paul-produced “Mama Gave Birth To The Soul

Children,” Queen Latifah plays the knowing mother while De La Soul plays

the soul children. And in “Ladies First,” along with its accompanying music

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video, Latifah’s lyrical activism found an outlet strong enough to sustain

academic examination, as it shouts out several prominent black women and

takes South African apartheid as one of its major themes. But “Ladies First”

isn’t just an exercise in trying to engage with feminism from within hip-hop

—it’s also dope as hell, and holds its own with the other Tongues.

In addition to being a badass political statement about apartheid and

feminism, “Ladies First” introduced Latifah’s protégé Monie Love to

American hip-hop fans. An import from London who contributed verses for

Jungle Brothers and De La Soul, and learned the business touring with Queen

Latifah behind “Ladies First,” Monie Love released her own debut album,

Down To Earth, in late 1990. Down To Earth is much more of a party record than

All Hail The Queen, spawning several charting singles ranging from the

Spinners-sampling exhortation to a woman in an abusive relationship “It’s A

Shame (My Sister)” to “Monie In The Middle,” a song written about Big

Daddy Kane’s refusal to ask her out himself while they were both on tour

with Latifah. It’s hard to imagine Monie Love, a female MC with a British

accent who was more interested in wholesome partying and poetry than

props, being even remotely successful without the founding Native Tongues.

Instead of being focused on poetry and positivity for idealistic reasons, Dres

(Andres Titus) of Black Sheep avoided gangsta rap because he had actually

been in prison for almost a year before spending the better part of a second

year in a halfway house. After that unpleasant experience, Dres vowed not to

glorify the life that had put him there. Once he was released from the halfway

house, Dres ran into Mista Lawnge, an old friend who had started running

with Red Alert and Jungle Brothers. With Dres rapping and Lawnge on the

boards, the pair set out to record A Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing, their debut as

Black Sheep. Both the Black Sheep and A Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing names served

to distance the group slightly from Dres’ criminal background—in a HipHop

DX interview, he recalls spending the entire year before the release of A Wolf

In Sheep’s Clothing with a gun on him and feeling more comfortable around

hustlers than people wearing kente cloths. Musically, A Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing

distinguishes itself from releases by De La and Tribe in a few ways: It

embraces the less wholesome parts of the “party” half of party records in its

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obsession with sex (Q-Tip is featured on a song titled “La Menage”) and the

radio-ready rowdiness of its singles (especially “The Choice Is Yours,” a

ridiculously catchy track now famous mostly for being featured in Kia

commercials). It is also more down-to-earth than any Jungle Brothers or

Tribe release—the big posse cut is called “Pass The 40.” Otherwise A Wolf In

Sheep’s Clothing, a record made in part to prove Black Sheep could hang with

the rest of the Tongues, fits right in with their collected discography,

particularly the gangsta-mocking skit “U Mean I’m Not,” which reportedly

caused the entire Tongues crew to fall over laughing when Dres played it for

them.

In the same way Queen Latifah introduced American audiences to Monie Love

on “Ladies First,” the founding members of Native Tongues often used their

own singles to break in new affiliated artists. None of these introductions was

more successful than A Tribe Called Quest’s classic posse cut “Scenario,”

which prominently featured the group Leaders Of The New School. A group

composed of Long Islanders Charlie Brown, Cut Monitor Milo, Dinco D, and a

young Busta Rhymes (Trevor Smith), Leaders Of The New School was

anointed by Chuck D (who named Busta and Charlie Brown) during a stint

opening for Public Enemy. After Chuck introduced Leaders Of The New School

to Q-Tip, the group collaborated on a few of the sessions for Tribe’s second

album, The Low End Theory, including several alternate versions of “Scenario”

featuring Posdnuos, Jarobi, and even Tribe’s manager at the time, the late

Chris Lighty, who was a protégé of both Red Alert and Russell Simmons. The

crew’s debut, A Future Without A Past, spawned tracks like “Case Of The PTA”

that were far more focused on daily life in high school than the releases from

their fellow teenagers. Though they released two solid albums, Leaders Of

The New School are still remembered most for their verses on “Scenario” and

spawning the often-absurd, sublime career of Busta Rhymes.

Leaders Of The New School were also members of The Nation Of Gods And

Earth (also referred to as Five Percenters), an offshoot of the Nation Of Islam

popular in the hip-hop community that found a home with other Tongues

affiliates, most notably Brand Nubian. An old-school crew composed of three

MCs (Grand Puba, Sadat X, and Lord Jamar) and two DJs (DJs Alamo and

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Sincere), Brand Nubian came out of New Rochelle, New York, where the older

Puba had been a part of another group called Masters Of Ceremony before

hooking up with Sadat and Jamar. The first artist signed by Dante Ross after

he left Tommy Boy for Elektra, Brand Nubian released 1990’s One For All, its

only album as a full group before Puba left to pursue a solo career. (He later

returned for 1998’s Foundation, which lacked Sincere.) Like A Wolf In Sheep’s

Clothing, One For All combines serious, political material that might be more

aptly compared to KRS-One than De La Soul with playful, sexual humor and

funky beats on tracks like “Drop The Bomb,” which includes the hippest-ever

description of the politics of poverty. “Slow Down,” the group’s breakout hit,

features rhymes about the desperation of crackheads over an infectious Edie

Brickell sample, effectively capturing Puba as a man Ross describes in Check

The Technique as “caught between the Koran and the street.”

[pagebreak]

As One For All dropped, the founding Native Tongues were preparing to release

their sophomore albums. Jungle Brothers released the excellent Done By The

Forces Of Nature in 1989, which improved on Straight Out The Jungle and

included one of the great Native Tongues collaborations: “Doin’ Our Own

Dang,” which featured De La, Q-Tip, Queen Latifah, and Monie Love. But

1991 saw the release of A Tribe Called Quest’s and De La Soul’s remarkable

sophomore albums, The Low End Theory and De La Soul Is Dead. Down one man

(Jarobi left the group to go to culinary school) and dealing with the health

problems of another (Phife’s diabetes), Tribe came together on an album

that, while still lyrically excellent (“Yo, microphone check, one two, what is

this? / The 5-foot assassin with the roughneck business”), takes the Native

Tongues to a new sonic level. With the help of engineer Bob Power, Q-Tip

explored his fascination with none other than N.W.A. by ramping up the bass

on tracks like “Buggin’ Out” and “Scenario” while simultaneously bringing

the Native Tongues’ affinity for jazz to fruition—going beyond the track

“Jazz (We’ve Got),” jazz bassist Ron Carter plays live on “Verses From The

Abstract.” And De La Soul Is Dead took the raw musical talent of 3 Feet High And

Rising and went darker. While there are still joyous moments—“A Roller

Skating Jam Named ‘Saturdays,’”—there are just as many tracks like “My

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Brother’s A Basehead” and “Millie Pulled A Pistol On Santa” that deal with

crack addiction or child abuse. And De La’s skits, once used for game-show

shenanigans, were now employed to declare the end of the D.A.I.S.Y. Age.

Native Tongues wasn’t dead, but it certainly wasn’t the same.

Advanced Studies

What was arguably the driving force of Native Tongues—teenagers hanging

out and making music—met its logical conclusion in the work of Chi-Ali

Griffith (better known simply as Chi-Ali), who got his first famous verse on

Black Sheep’s posse cut “Pass The 40” and recorded his debut at age 14. That

album, The Fabulous Chi-Ali, was released in 1992 when he was 16. The record,

though nothing to sneeze at lyrically, features solid production and was a

surprising commercial success on the back of tracks like “Age Ain’t Nothin’

But A #” and “Funky Lemonade.” The older Tongues’ influence on the album

was palpable—“Let The Horns Blow” featured Dres, Trugoy, The Beatnuts’

Kool Fashion, and Phife Dawg, and the graffiti on the album cover reads

“Native Son… Native Tongue.” Though Chi-Ali did little musically after his

debut (besides an appearance on Dres’ first solo album), he made headlines in

a much sadder fashion. In 2000, Chi-Ali shot and killed his then-girlfriend’s

brother in the Bronx and evaded arrest for a period of just over a year, during

which he was featured on America’s Most Wanted twice. He then served a

prison term from which he was released in 2012.

The Fabulous Chi-Ali was successful in large part because it was almost

entirely produced by Native Tongues affiliates The Beatnuts. The only Latino

members of the collective, producers JuJu and Psycho Les, then calling

themselves Beat Kings, were introduced by Afrika Bambaataa to Jungle

Brothers, who dubbed them “nuts” for their clownish personas and for

carrying so many records to every show. After starting their musical

relationship with Native Tongues producing “Pups Lickin’ Bone” on Monie

Love’s Down To Earth and most of The Fabulous Chi-Ali, The Beatnuts released

their own debut, Intoxicated Demons, in 1993, showcasing the slimy jazz and

funk of the then-trio (including rapper Kool Fashion). Intoxicated Demons took

the Native Tongues sound and lyrically amped up both the comedy and the

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hedonism with lyrics like “Now, I’m on a rampage, prepare for the slaughter

/ Lyrical monster busting nuts in your daughter” on the Brand Nubian-

sampling single “Reign Of The Tec.”

By 1993, Native Tongues seemed to be drifting apart, as the founding

members each released an album representing different attitudes toward the

collective. Jungle Brothers’ J Beez Wit The Remedy ran into significant troubles

with Warner Bros. before its final, substantially watered-down version. De La

Soul’s Buhloone Mindstate, though a slightly more conventional Tongues

album, features little collaboration from a group that had already declared

their early sound dead. And A Tribe Called Quest’s Midnight Marauders,

arguably the best album by a member of the collective, concludes with a

series of wistful tracks that appear to be summing up the end of something

special. Q-Tip has openly stated that The Low End Theory “really broke us out

of the Native Tongues stereotype.” On Buhloone Mindstate’s “In The Woods,”

Posdnuos pronounces, “That native shit is dead.”

But a slightly younger generation took up the Native Tongues mantle heading

into the new millennium. The crew inspired similarly minded artists across

the country, including Chicago native Lonnie Rashid Lynn, a.k.a. Common.

Though he’d been making music since the late ’80s, Common’s hip-hop

ambitions didn’t fully take off until a trip to New York introduced him to

Brand Nubian and Leaders Of The New School. His 1992 debut as Common

Sense, Can I Borrow A Dollar?, was a scattered collection of demo tracks, but

for the next album, Common and producer No I.D. (Dion Wilson) tried to, in

Common’s words, make “some cold-blooded shit that can get played with A

Tribe Called Quest.” The 1994 album Resurrection succeeded on all fronts. The

album was a leap forward musically, especially the classic “I Used To Love

H.E.R,” which uses a woman enraptured by the siren song of materialism as a

metaphor for gangsta rap’s thoughtless domination of hip-hop. Common was

only loosely associated with Native Tongues at the time, but closely affiliated

with their themes and positive energy. And Native Tongues became the

template for the Soulquarians, the early-’00s loose collective Common

belonged to, along with Questlove, Erykah Badu, and others.

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Though Common has had the most continued success of the late Native

Tongues, another artist from the Midwest with a crucial role in the

Soulquarians has had a substantial effect on contemporary music and greater

success in growing and evolving the Native Tongues sound. Born into a

musical family in Detroit, J Dilla came up with rappers Baatin and T3 as part

of the Detroit group Slum Village. The group’s first, unofficial record Fan-

Tas-Tic, Vol. 1 caught the attention of Q-Tip, who brought Dilla in to

collaborate with him and Ali Shaheed Muhammad as the trio The Ummah. As

part of The Ummah, Dilla was largely responsible for the sound of the last

two A Tribe Called Quest albums, and later produced much of Q-Tip’s solo

material before achieving a cult-like status all on his own after his death in

2006.

Back in New York, De La Soul’s fourth album, 1996’s Stakes Is High (the

group’s first without Prince Paul), a record deeply concerned with the state of

hip-hop (the titular high stakes), introduced a promising young MC going by

the moniker Mos Def . Though Mos Def had planned on releasing his debut

with the guidance of De La Soul, his chemistry with a similarly minded artist

named Talib Kweli led the solo release to be put on hold in favor of a

collaboration under the name Black Star. Perhaps the biggest difference

between that album, 1998’s Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star, and the earlier

Tongues releases is a consistent thoughtfulness that largely eschews feel-

good party tracks: Where 3 Feet High And Rising plays around with Schoolhouse

Rock! samples, Black Star’s “Thieves In The Night” is an homage to Toni

Morrison, and the group’s name is a reference to Marcus Garvey’s Black Star

Line. In many ways, Black Star is a culmination of the original ideals of Native

Tongues in an era when it seemed those values were being ignored by hip-

hop at large—not for nothing does single “Definition” recount and decry the

violent death of multiple MCs in the mid-’90s.

Miscellany

Some of the specifics of the Native Tongues membership have been disputed

over the years—in particular, the status of later affiliates like Common, Mos

Def, and J Dilla. But other artists who were definitely affiliated with the larger

crew haven’t remained as relevant or immediate, even those with notable

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contributions to hip-hop at the time. Trio Fu-Schnickens worked with Tribe

on a debut record that helped introduce kung-fu imagery to hip-hop before

Wu-Tang Clan and oversaw the beginnings of Shaquille O’Neal’s rap career

on novelty single “What’s Up Doc? (Can We Rock),” which has Shaq saying

Bugs Bunny’s catchphrase. Jamaican and Trinidadian trio Da Bush Babees

released two mildly successful albums featuring production from Ali Shaheed

Muhammad, The Ummah, and Posdnous, but the trio is likely most notable

for including several early verses from Mos Def on its album Gravity.

Some artists maintained the musical innovation of the earlier Tongues

records, but lacked the idealism. In particular, Prince Paul’s solo work is

engaging and worth listening to on its own, but can’t quite be pegged as

Native Tongues music—it’s far too broad, and is rarely socially conscious.

Still others advanced political ideology similar to Brand Nubian or Black Star,

but simply weren’t in the same circles—most notably trio KMD, which

featured heavy sampling over intensely political lyrics from idealistic

teenagers, including a young MF Doom still going by Zev Love X. Like KMD

and Doom’s later work, an extraordinary percentage of ’90s and ’00s hip-hop

was strongly influenced by Native Tongues. An account of every single artist

even loosely affiliated with a member of the crew would increase this list

exponentially. It’s enough to recognize that the original Tongues’

fingerprints are all over contemporary hip-hop, from Pharrell to Kanye West

to Kendrick Lamar.

Demerits

The Native Tongues may have presented themselves in opposition to some of

the less savory trends in hip-hop at the time, but they didn’t avoid social

tone-deafness. The worst of these songs thankfully never made it to an

official release. During the sessions for The Low End Theory, Tribe and Brand

Nubian collaborated on “Georgie Porgie,” one of the most unequivocally

homophobic tracks in the history of hip-hop (a genre already prone to bouts

of homophobia). In one of the best decisions ever made by a record label, Jive

refused to release the track; the beat was reused for “Show Business.” The

final track still featured the members of Brand Nubian with the exception of

Grand Puba, who declined to participate in protest. The bigotry of “Georgie

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Porgie,” while perhaps not so surprising from teenagers in the early ’90s

(particularly ones who made the “The Infamous Date Rape” on that same

record), is still shocking from the same group that made the exceedingly

nuanced “Sucka Nigga” and “Description Of A Fool.”

As the founding Native Tongues aged, their musical output became less

immediate. Jungle Brothers have continued to release a string of

unmemorable albums but aren’t currently together. While the final two Tribe

albums—Beats, Rhymes, And Life and The Love Movement—have some solid

tracks and an interesting new sonic direction (they were mostly produced by

Dilla under The Ummah name), they’re also fairly forgettable. After Midnight

Marauders, A Tribe Called Quest didn’t have much more to say. It’s telling that

the best track to appear on The Love Movement was an older bonus remix of

“Scenario.” Meanwhile, De La Soul has stayed together with a minimum of

fuss, releasing mostly decent albums and one phenomenal late-period record

(2004’s The Grind Date). The group has been making the rounds again in

preparation for its eighth album, You’re Welcome.

There’s been consistent clamor for a Native Tongues reunion since the

mid-’90s, with each of the members blaming the others for the delay in

making one happen. The tensions between the founding Native Tongues is

unfortunate, but in some ways is a blessing; it’s hard to imagine a real Native

Tongues reunion going well. The Native Tongues collective was formed, more

than anything else, by like-minded, idealistic youngsters developing intense

friendships based in a love of music. Watching an attempt to translate the

near-magical ties of wide-eyed adolescence to those same people in middle

age? Say no go.