Not every morning feels right. Your shoes don’t seem to fit or the breakfast you just spent fifteen minutes cooking falls to the floor. You pour spoiled milk in your coffee, or, in my case, you get a 6AM wake up call from a power-saw. The solution?
Tribe.
The Low End Theory is a watershed album in rap music, and A Tribe Called Quest’s masterpiece. It defined alternative hip-hop as a genre and established a cohesive union of East Coast and West Coast influences.
The album centers largely around the love of music, most notably jazz, and features performances from Ron Carter, one the most influential jazz bassists of all-time and sideman to jazz greats Miles Davis, Freddie Hubbard, Eric Dolphy, and McCoy Tyner. Tribe makes a connection between the birth of be-bop, its transition into the jazz mainstream and the golden age of hip-hop. Both, to Tribe, birthed the abstract: the indescribable, the indefinable, and the mysterious quality of movement in music, capable to move people, bridge gaps, incite and penetrate. Both then moved the abstract into the people’s realm, one of accessibility, cradled in a still-young and marginalized art form. And Tribe is doing just that, right before your eyes like the be-boppers before. You know it the second the needle hits the groove and the bass (dum dum dah, da-dum dah) escorts Q-Tip to the center of your aural focus:
Back in the days when I was a teenager / Before I had status and before I had a pager / You could find the abstract listening to hip hop / My pops used to say, it reminded him of be-bop / I said, well Daddy don’t you know that things go in cycles
And from there it keeps on pushing, sampling from artists like the aforementioned Hubbard and Davis, to other jazz icons like Art Blakely, Lonnie Smith, Grant Green and Cannonball Adderley (not to mention the slew of rock, funk, and soul gods like Hendrix, James Brown, the Ohio Players, and Funkadelic, who also receive the royal treatment). The record functions like a music history course, traveling through time, era after era, cutting and chopping and fusing some of the most recognizable and ground-breaking artists there ever were into one simple and comprehensive thesis on how good music can be when it’s done right.
The Low End Theory hits on all the notes that People’s Instinctive Travels… missed. The experiments all succeed. The mellow, mean sound Tribe achieves on this record, while so lean, spreads like a thick, buttery sauce over themes of sexual abuse, political unrest, mistreatment and violence in hip-hop and blends them all into one solid, consistent statement: a manifesto of things to come, places to start and how to find the groove.
