197: Midnight Marauders, by A Tribe Called Quest

A Tribe Called Quest (USA)
Midnight Marauders (1993)
15 tracks, 54 minutes
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This is an interesting album to compare to Us3’s Hand on the Torch. That album and A Tribe Called Quest’s were both released in the same year, 1993, and they both show different ways of approaching a very similar thing. Because for all intents and purposes, A Tribe Called Quest – and Midnight Marauders – are jazz hip-hop, but their style is approached from the opposite direction: Us3 was created with the intention of using a catalogue of samples from classic jazz to create hip-hop; Tribe just set out to make great hip-hop and use jazz as a tool for that. Back when I wrote about Us3, I called their album ‘semi-successful’ but prescient of the future sound of jazz. Midnight Marauders is a much more successful album.

I think it’s because it was made with so little pretence. Us3’s sound was, almost by definition, contrived, but Tribe’s feels so much more real, organic. Their instrumentals, created in the most part by Q-Tip on production and Ali Shaheed Muhammad as DJ, are top-class and built up from really diverse samples from vintage funk, soul and, yep, jazz, as well as intelligent and subtle beats programming, but importantly, it’s all made with the raps in mind. Here, the raps are the whole point of the record, and why shouldn’t they be? Between Q-Tip and Phife Dawg, the lyrics are insightful, thoughtful and meaningful, emotional but witty, often uplifting but pointed when necessary. The flows are exquisite, and, even though they still have a touch of early hip-hop’s nursery rhymes to them, the rhythms are interesting. The end result is that the music is a perfect fit for the vocals, and the vocals are a perfect fit for the music – an acutely balanced symbiotic relationship that works for the benefit of both.

I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise that an album made for hip-hop fans is a better hip-hop album than one that aims to reach a crossover audience with a specific musical concept. And of course it is. Because for all intents and purposes, A Tribe Called Quest – and Midnight Marauders – are not jazz hip-hop, they’re merely hip-hop that use jazz in its most fruitful way to create their own rightfully legendary sound.