Weekend Kickoff Nov 2016
Thirty-one tracks for the second Friday of November 2016 — the week of the Tribe comeback. Same friend group, same standing tradition, but the November edition got rebuilt around the Tribe-comeback moment instead of the standard cross-genre survey.
The context is essential. Phife had died in March and the news of the comeback album was the kind of moment that the friend group spent the rest of the year anticipating. The release was scheduled for November 11. The week leading up was the week the rotation got specifically obsessed with the Tribe catalog and the broader Native Tongues legacy. The standard November edition would have been the cross-fall survey; the actual November edition is the deep-listen into the catalog that produced the comeback.
Tribe anchor the rotation. The placement of “Electric Relaxation” in the front quarter is doing the work that the cut has been doing in the friend group’s rotation for years — bassline as structural anchor, Phife’s verse as the moment everyone in the kitchen stops what they’re doing. “Bonita Applebum” sits later in the rotation as the catalog reach-back into the 1990 first-album material.
Anderson .Paak “Come Down” opens because the contemporary rap-and-soul fusion is the closest thing the year had produced to a Native Tongues-tradition update. .Paak’s catalog had been on heavy rotation in the group chat all year and “Come Down” was the cut that effectively defined the year’s late-rotation aesthetic.
Mos Def “Ms. Fat Booty” sits in the front quarter as the underground-rap legacy anchor. The 1999 single is from “Black on Both Sides,” one of the great underground-rap records of its decade. The placement is honoring the broader rap-canon context that Tribe came out of and that the friend group’s collective listening had been deep in for years.
The Pharcyde “Runnin’” carries the West-Coast-rap legacy. The 1995 single is the structural counterpart to the East-Coast Tribe catalog — parallel records on opposite coasts in the same era, both deserving the same rotation honor. Talib Kweli “Get By” is the early-’00s underground-rap-into-broader-audience pull, the cut that bridges the Native Tongues-adjacent catalog and the contemporary jazz-rap rotation.
Rakim “Guess Who’s Back” is the East-Coast-rap-lineage anchor. The genre’s foundational figure and the cut that the rotation needs as the structural bridge to the longer hip-hop history that Tribe came out of. The Beatnuts “Watch Out Now” closes the front block with the late-’90s Latin-rap-crossover pull.
The back half is the contemporary pull-ahead — cuts from .Paak’s catalog, contemporary jazz-rap from the deeper-rotation working-DJ practice, the few rap-radio singles from late 2016 that fit the tape’s overall aesthetic. The placement of the November cuts at the back half is doing the work of sequencing the rotation toward the present without losing the catalog-deep front-half commitment.
Thirty-one tracks. About two hours. Built for the week that the rotation specifically needed to honor the comeback. The Tribe-comeback adjustment was the once-in-a-decade move the rotation had to make for the once-in-a-decade album cycle. We listened to the new album together at midnight on November 11. “We the People” hit and the group chat blew up. “Solid Wall of Sound” was the cut nobody had quite expected and that became the one we kept replaying through November and into December.
The friend in the group chat who’d been listening to the Tribe catalog since middle school texted me on the morning after the playback to say it was the most important week of music since the year his dad died. He’s not a sentimental person. The metric I use is whether the rotation can produce that kind of response, and the November 2016 edition is one of the few that has. The album dropped on a Friday. The Kickoff ran the same night. The album-listening party was scheduled for the following week. All of those moments connected in a way that the friend group still references.
The Tribe-comeback week was the moment the standing rotation produced its most-referenced edition. The friend group still texts about it. The album-listening party that ran the following week was the year’s most-important music event for our specific subset, and the November Kickoff was the setup that made the album-listening party land the way it did.
