Said Phife at a London concert in 2011, "Lou Reed, instead of saying no altogether, he was like, 'Yeah, nice! Give me the motherfucking money.' Like Smokey in Friday." Phife later told Rolling Stone, "to this day, we haven't seen a dime from that song. While the song boosted their profile, it didn't help their bank accounts nearly as much. "But had a fat ass."Ī Tribe Called Quest rode the smooth Herbie Flowers bass line on Lou Reed's 1972 hit "Walk on the Wild Side" to their biggest U.K. Who was Bonita? "Somebody who was refined," Black Thought says in the doc. "I had never heard nothing like that in my whole life." The song exemplified the group's mellow side and turned Q-Tip into a Golden Era sex symbol. "I was obsessed with it," Pharrell says in the ATCQ documentary Beats, Rhymes and Life. "It was the coolest love song hip-hop has ever offered us." On the 1990 track, Q-Tip blends the sultry guitars of soul-jazz group RAMP's "Daylight" with the vocals and sitar of Rotary Connection's "Memory Band" for a track that thumps hard enough for the guys but nods to the bedroom for the girls. "This is the song that truly birthed the idea of neo-soul," Questlove told Rolling Stone of People's Instinctive's second single. Not bad for a kid barely out of his teens rapping about an exotic-sounding place he learned about from its use as a frequent punch line on Sanford and Son. With a loping beat from the Chamber Brothers' "Funky" setting just the right lazy and comic tone, he precisely describes every aspect of an ill-fated road trip: the four-foot-high sombrero that Pedro wears, the '74 Dodge Dart, the meal of enchiladas and fruit punch, the wallet's contents of props numbers and jimmy hats, how to drive from the Belt Parkway to the Conduit. Though he dubbed himself "The Abstract," Q-Tip had a natural storyteller's gift for concrete lyrical detail from the jump. “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo” (1990).He doesn’t dominate the track, because that’s not what Native Tongues was all about, and in fact, he celebrates his crew rather than himself, ending on a gracious reference to his hosts: “Praise the Lord for the JBs.” But not even the great Monie Love, who boogies into her verse ready for stardom, upstages him here. Instead, he eases in with his first line - a coolly contemplative “A tree is growing” - then gets faster and fancier as he rhymes. Tip doesn’t jump on the beat like a hungry upstart. De La Soul, Monie Love, A Tribe Called Quest, Queen Latifah (1989)īefore Tribe dropped their debut album, every Q-Tip appearance on a Native Tongues track was an event, and his contribution to this partying posse cut was no exception.
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