With older records like these, it's always worth keeping in mind the context of the times in hip hop. What we would call "the modern era" was launched in '88/'89 by Nation of Millions, Paul's Boutique, and Straight Outta Compton, when production density stepped up its game and lyricism became more upfront and combative, the shift of power from the DJ to the MC having been completed. At the same time, a collective made up of a bunch of Black teenagers in rap groups was forming in southeastern Queens and the 'burbs of Nassau County. Consisting of Jungle Brothers, Queen Latifah, De La Soul, Leaders of the New School, and A Tribe Called Quest, the Native Tongues Collective believed in a reintroduction of African aesthetics to Black art visible in tangential works like Spike Lee's movies and The Arsenio Hall Show.
The year that this record, Midnight Marauders, was released was the first landmark year in a decade that would be full of them for hip-hop since it came out at the same time that Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), Buhloone Mindstate, Reachin' (A New Refutation of Time and Space), and The Chronic all did, while Illmatic, Blunted on Reality, and Ready to Die were all being recorded in the same studios for release in '94. Everybody knew everybody, and the guy with his hand in everyone's cookie jar was Q-Tip, rapper/producer extraordinaire long before it was a glass ceiling to break through.
Tip was a bit of a Renaissance man, a heady and philosophical kind of guy who wanted to know how everything worked, he's the main beatmaker and the rapper with the nasally voice. He grew up in southern Queens with Phife Dawg, a battle rapper by trade who made sports and politics references while subtly injecting technical flourishes like multisyllabic rhymes and flow trickery. Rounding out the group was Ali Shaheed Muhammed as DJ, who Tip met in high school, and morale captain Jarobi, who Phife knew from the neighborhood and only performed on two of their records.
After two groundbreaking records which included the thinner-than-you-remember Low End Theory, the Tribe sat down to record a follow up that's more holistic and concise, the gestalt is helped by the robotic woman voice that functions like a stoned narrator. It's jazzish, as was their pallet, but more cosmic in nature due to the electronic flourishes around their boom-bap samples. Their roles, having been more fluid on past records, were increasingly solidified. Phife was a bigger shit-talker with jokes ("Seimen's furniture") and anxiety than before, while Q-Tip's philosophizing collides with how much of a horndog he really is. So potently in fact that he rebuts his own heroes about their language policing. It bounces, it's both didactic and catchy, it's intelligent while portraying occasional ignorance, it's contemplative in a nourishing way, and it's an artifact of Black art and Black solidarity, everyone's photos on the cover are real people that the group liked on a personal level. My highlights are "Award Tour" because of that DC 20 Aircraft line, and "Electric Relaxation" for sounding like an honest-to-god psychedelic sex song, Tame Impala can't do that shit, neither could Kanye at the height of his powers. 4.3/5
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