Midnight Marauders

#3 – Midnight Marauders by A Tribe Called Quest

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Thanks to Kiran Sthankiya for this one! Kiran is a close friend of my brother-in-law and a guy who’s very well plugged-in to the rap and hip hop scene, being a performer and producer himself. 

This is the first band that someone’s given me for this project that I’ve heard before. But, the only song I’d heard is Can I Kick It? I remember really liking that song back in early 90s but I never sought out the album or the band, so I didn’t really know what to expect. I also only really remembered the chorus of that song and the fact that it sampled Walk on the Wild Side. And I don’t even listen to Lou Reed! Anyway, I feel like I’m getting off topic here! 

When I put the call out for albums to listen to this year, I was really hoping that I’d be pushed into this world as it’s an area of music that I’m woefully ignorant of. And I know that I still probably won’t like a lot of it, but I feel pretty confident that there’s plenty out there that I will. 

So onto this week’s album, Midnight Marauders by A Tribe Called Quest. Before I go any further, my spidey senses screamed at me “Kev, I bet this is a pretty important album in this genre” so I did a little digging and found out that this is considered a canonical album in hip hop, particularly within the jazz-rap and East Coast traditions. I did the digging after listening to the album – which I’ve done with all three albums so far. I want to listen to the music without any context to see if it stands on its own. It was at this point that I learned that jazz-rap is a thing and once I saw that phrase, it made immediate sense. This brings my onto my first observation; I love the instrumentation on this album and I’m assuming this is either all samples, or reproductions of jazz and soul hooks. The horns, piano, and basslines are all warm and a million miles away from pentatonic! I didn’t know that this approach was a thing in rap and hip hop so it was a really welcome texture that brought me in pretty immediately. And, full disclosure, I don’t listen to Jazz – and perhaps I should give that a try – so I’m not saying that I was immediately wowed by familiar lines and refrains. But the warmth and interesting complexity to the music was just as compelling as the equally warm and interesting vocals and the fantastic beats that underpin the entire album. As a drum nerd, I have to call out the snare sounds they use on this album. Every single one is absolutely fantastic and even though they use different sounds on each song, they never sound unorganized or random. You’re left with the sense that people putting these songs together are extremely musically articulate and precise in their choices. Nothing is drenched in too much reverb, nothing is mixed at a distracting level – and the tempo and organization of the percussion is always immaculate. Single beats are dropped here and there to push and pull the songs in the right places and vocal, scratching, or other sounds are used as ancillary percussion in really interesting ways. As I say, maybe these guys were doing what lots of other artists were doing and I’m just unfamiliar with it, but man, this is a very, very well-produced album. 

Onto the vocals and the lyrics. This is often when rap loses me; I said whilst reviewing the Wu Tang album that I do get a little fatigued with the insistence on stating and restating how good you are at rapping and MCing. It does tend to wear thing after a while. These guys though pepper that through other ideas and sometimes multiple connected ideas within a single song. So you do have self-referential phrases, but they’re written in a much less aggressive, arrogant style than I head on Wu Tang or a lot of the other rap I’ve been exposed to. It feels a lot more self-aware and tongue-in-cheek rather than being a narcissistic preoccupation; playful almost. And that leads me to the main reason this was a real breath of fresh air to me in this genre; there’s a lightness of touch, a deftness to the lyrical content here that I can sit inside and enjoy very easily. The Tribe moves from social consciousness to good time girls to self-deprecating. We get brilliant lines like “The Five-Foot Assassin knockin fleas off his collar” and “When’s the last time you heard a funky diabetic?” alongside “Socially I’m not a name, black and white got game” and “steady eatin booty M.C’s like cheese Grits”. There’s diversity and sleight of lyrical hand all over this album. It never sits in one spot too long, so I never started to tune out the lyrics – I found myself really listening to them and enjoying them. 

The last part is the flow. I really, really like listening to Q-Tip. Yes, it may be quite a silly name but his delivery feels less like a sermon and more like a conversation. It’s like he’s bringing you in on the joke and getting you relaxed so he can tell you what’s on his mind rather than confronting you with bravado. As with the lyrics, his delivery doesn’t always sit in one place either. In The Chase Part II, which is my favourite song from the album at this point, he almost adds a little James Hetfield-easque tag to the ends of the lines “Movin with the grace, here we go, let’s begin, Makin people jump out their goddamn skin, Lyrically, we bite like we Rin Tin Tin” and it’s all done with that easy humour that makes it feel real. That authenticity to the delivery shines through both of the main performers, Q-Tip and Phife Dawg. When they play with syllables or bend vowels into different shapes, it never sounds contrived (like all the Nashville drawling idiots from Iowa or Colorado….), it just sounds exactly like the way I imagine they speak. 

Overall, the balance between the really interesting samples that are incorporated into the songs, the fantastic beats that drive them, and the fun, sometimes philosophical lyrics that are crooned over top is absolutely perfect for me. I really, really enjoyed this album. I’ll be digging into the band (is it a band or a collaborative?) more without question and I’ll almost certainly be picking this one up on vinyl because it fills a gap for me that nothing else I listen to does! If this type of musical, melodic rap is a significant subgenre, I think it’s the one that’s going to draw me in! 

It’s cool that two of the first three albums the wheel has given me are rap/hip hop albums. I enjoyed the Wu Tang Clan as a one time listen, but I think A Tribe Called Quest could become a band I dig into fairly heavily. 

I spun my album selection wheel again once I’d listened to this and next week’s album is going to be Angel in Realtime by Gang of Youths, as recommended by Michael Washburn.