WK: Tribe Pregame Show #1116
Thirty-one tracks for the second Friday of November 2016 — the week that A Tribe Called Quest dropped their first album in eighteen years. The Friday before the album-listening party that the group chat had been scheduling for months, sequenced to set the table for what the night was actually about.
The Tribe comeback was the music event of the year for our specific subset of the friend group. We’d grown up on Native Tongues. The 1990 “People’s Instinctive Travels” album was on heavy rotation in college for half of us. “The Low End Theory” and “Midnight Marauders” were the records we’d defended in arguments about the greatest hip-hop records of all time. Phife had died in March 2016 and the news of his death was the kind of moment where the friend group called each other on the phone instead of texting. When the album-release date got announced in October, the album-listening party was the obvious response.
Anderson .Paak “Come Down” opens because that’s the song that effectively defined the year’s late-rotation rap-and-soul fusion. .Paak’s catalog had been on heavy rotation in the group chat since “Malibu” dropped in January and his work was the contemporary connection to the Native Tongues legacy that Tribe had built.
A Tribe Called Quest “Electric Relaxation” follows. The Q1 catalog had been getting more play through 2016 as we anticipated the comeback, and “Electric Relaxation” specifically is the cut from “Midnight Marauders” that the friend group kept returning to whenever the Tribe conversation came up. The bassline is one of the great hip-hop bass lines and Phife’s verse is the kind of writing that the genre’s contemporary moment has been missing.
Mos Def “Ms. Fat Booty” is the late-’90s underground-rap reach-back. The track is from “Black on Both Sides” in 1999 and the album is one of the great underground-rap records of its decade. The placement is doing the work of acknowledging the broader Native Tongues-adjacent context that Tribe came out of.
The Pharcyde “Runnin’” carries the West-Coast-rap legacy. The 1995 single is the structural counterpart to the East-Coast-rap anchor of the rotation — Tribe and Pharcyde were producing parallel records on opposite coasts in the same era, and the Pharcyde catalog deserves the same rotation honor.
Talib Kweli “Get By” sits mid-rotation. The 2002 single is the post-Black Star Kweli cut that broke him into the broader rap audience, and the track works as the structural bridge between the early-’90s Native Tongues catalog and the contemporary jazz-rap rotation that the friend group had been deep in for years.
A Tribe Called Quest “Bonita Applebum” is the second Tribe-catalog pull. The 1990 cut is from the first album and the placement at the rotation’s halfway point is the deliberate acknowledgment that the pregame is honoring the full catalog rather than the comeback album exclusively. Rakim “Guess Who’s Back” follows as the legacy reach-back into the East-Coast-rap lineage that produced everything else on the tape.
The Beatnuts “Watch Out Now” closes the front block. The 1999 single is the Latin-rap-crossover anchor and the placement at the rotation’s front-half end is sequencing the back half for the more contemporary cuts that lead up to the album drop itself.
Thirty-one tracks. About two hours. The pregame ran exactly that long. The album dropped at midnight Eastern and we played it together over speakerphone — six of us, three time zones, three different living rooms — the way nobody listens to music anymore. “We the People” hit and one of the friends actually cried, which was the moment that confirmed the whole pregame had been worth the trouble. The album-listening-party was a third the rotation’s length. The pregame set the table. That’s what it was for.
The pregame-show variant was the rotation’s once-in-a-decade adjustment for the once-in-a-decade album cycle. The Tribe-comeback edition lives in the friend group’s collective memory as one of the rotation’s most-important moments. The tape itself ran two hours. The album that followed was a third. The whole night was about three and a half hours of unbroken listening — the kind of evening the streaming era usually doesn’t produce.
The album-listening party that followed remains the friend group’s most-referenced shared listening moment. The pregame set the table; the album delivered. The whole night was about three and a half hours of unbroken listening. Nobody on the call hung up early.
