Just minutes into A Tribe Called Quest’s headlining Pitchfork set Saturday night, when Phife Dawg‘s vocals streamed out of the speakers during what would’ve been his first big turn, the jumbotron right of the stage showed a crane shot of an empty space and unattended mike stand in front of Ali Shaheed Muhammad’s DJ setup. Phife Dawg, born Malik Taylor, died on March 22, 2016, a few months after he and rapper-producer Q-Tip got the group back together to play The Tonight Show in November 2015—a performance that convinced them they were meant to make music again. Tribe’s first album since 1998’s The Love Movement, titled We Got It From Here . . . Thank You 4 Your Service, came out November 11, almost a year after they reunited. Since Phife’s death they’ve reconvened only twice in public, with Pitchfork making three—in November they did two songs on Saturday Night Live, and in February they played a medley at the Grammys. Saturday’s set was Tribe’s first full show without Phife, and it succeeded because the group approached their past and present with clear eyes.
Q-Tip seemed driven by a desire to do right by Phife. When I listened through Tribe’s discography in the days before Pitchfork, I was struck by a brief moment on “Mr. Muhammad,” off the group’s 1990 debut, People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm. Just before a pitched-down sample of the vocal harmonies from Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Brazilian Rhyme” bubbles up in the mix, Q-Tip raps, “Muhammad push the button / Sample sing the score.” Tribe’s music recognizes the power history has over us—that we couldn’t get to where we are without knowing where we started. And the group’s approach to sampling gives the source material room to breathe—Q-Tip’s line, which Phife repeats later in the song, suggests as much—while allowing Tribe to create something new.
