Nov. 9, 1993 has become a day that lives as a piece of hip-hop folklore. It’s the release date for two of the decade’s most important and impactful albums: Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers by Wu-Tang Clan, and Midnight Marauders by A Tribe Called Quest. Wu-Tang’s album was a debut, announcing the nine-man collective out of Staten Island as a soon-to-be-movement, while the third album from A Tribe Called Quest was a crucial reintroduction. Tribe was already Tribe, but the jazzy boom bap of Midnight Marauders would have a lasting impact on the group’s legacy—and on Black music of the next 30 years.
A Tribe Called Quest burst onto the scene in 1989 with the single “Description of a Fool,” before dropping their critically acclaimed debut album in 1990, People’s Instinctive Travels and The Paths Of Rhythm. In the subsequent three years, the crew of Q-Tip, Phife Dawg, and Ali Shaheed Muhammad had seen erstwhile fourth member Jarobi White actively depart for culinary school, while their cohorts in the famed Native Tongues collective saw their commercial success begin to dwindle as poppier sounds and gangstafied G-funk came to dominate hip-hop’s mainstream.
But while contemporaries like De La Soul and the Jungle Brothers struggled to sustain their respective audiences, A Tribe Called Quest was riding high. When “Award Tour,” the first single from Midnight Marauders, hit radio and video shows in the fall of 1993, it was clear that A Tribe Called Quest was still pushing into new sonic territory. The goofy humor and misplaced wallets of People’s Instinctive Travels were long gone; this was grown-ass ATCQ. And the album’s jazzy sampling was much more nuanced and organic-sounding than anything that had been done in hip-hop to that point. To be certain, jazz-rap was already fully established before the fall of ’93, but whereas the work of acts like Gang Starr used jazz samples to evoke a spirit and a feel, Tribe seemed possessed of something that felt less like reverential pastiche and more like active kinship with their influences.
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The album represents Tribe fully formed, as the quirky adolescence of People’s Instinctive Travels and the cerebral, lo-fi brilliance of their sophomore masterpiece, 1991’s The Low End Theory, gave way to something that showcases more commercial polish but also emphasizes a more sophisticated sonic sensibility. It’s hard to believe now, but at the time, few casual fans understood that Q-Tip was one of the most seminal producers in hip-hop.
“When I did Tribe… like a lot of people didn’t know that I produced the first three Tribe albums,” Q-Tip said in a 2009 interview. “Because on it, it said ‘produced by A Tribe Called Quest.’ I put that because I didn’t feel like the individual should be greater than the unit. And I was raised to believe that the unit represented strength. It was strength and numbers. So if you moved as a unit that was it. That’s why I wasn’t into ‘produced by Q-Tip,’ I was like let’s just say ‘produced by A Tribe Called Quest’ and we can all benefit from it.”
The production of Q-Tip and the perennially underrated Ali Shaheed Muhammad is in the proverbial pocket throughout Midnight Marauders. From the wordless Minnie Riperton falsetto flip that glides through “Lyrics To Go,” to “Midnight” and its repurposing of George Duke, the sonics of Midnight Marauders are rooted in both immaculate taste and genius application. And the tone of the album would be a pivotal influence on what was about to happen in mainstream Black music throughout the rest of the 1990s and beyond; it served as a jumping-off point for not only jazzy “alt-rap,” but also soul music that followed in its wake.
At the time, the idea of “neo soul” or any other kind of esoteric, boho-styled Black music was still somewhat fringe. The Native Tongues had already begun laying the groundwork in the late 1980s, but by 1993, the rise of Death Row Records suddenly made groups like the jazz-centric Digable Planets seem like an oddball novelty—as opposed to a harbinger of things to come. But A Tribe Called Quest’s metamorphosis from dashiki-wearing oddballs to jazz-rap auteurs helped make such a presentation “cool” to those who turned their proverbial noses up at any hint of rap game pretentiousness.
As a result, the groovy textures of Midnight Marauders became key to the development of a new wave of urban music. By the early 2000s, artists like Maxwell, Angie Stone, and Raphael Saadiq had turned neo soul into a thriving movement. The connections to Tribe may not have been out front, but they were always there. “Raphael [Saadiq] and I have been friends a long time,” Ali Shaheed told NPR in 2015. “And that relationship began when [Saadiq’s band] Tony! Toni! Toné! asked A Tribe Called Quest to remix something off of [their] Revival album.” That friendship would prove to be crucial, as Saadiq became one of neo soul’s foremost talents as a solo artist, and Ali and Saadiq would later join forces in the 2000s supergroup Lucy Pearl. It was Saadiq who first played Ali a demo by a new artist named D’Angelo.
The vibey sound of artists like D’Angelo and Erykah Badu was marketed as neo soul, which was a contrived way of describing a generation of singer-songwriters who seemed to be the musical children of Stevie Wonder and Roy Ayers—by way of a serious Midnight Marauders fixation. One can hear echoes of Tribe in classic albums like D’Angelo’s Brown Sugar and projects from The Roots, while the group Slum Village was lazily described as “the next Tribe” by music critics who could hear Midnight Marauders energy in their 2000 album Fantastic, Vol. 2. Meanwhile, the best works from acts as disparate as Little Brother and Van Hunt also bear traces of what Q-Tip and company delivered on Midnight Marauders.
And, perhaps most obviously, an entire generation of hip-hop artists in the late 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s owe a huge debt to Midnight Marauders. Not only did Q-Tip’s hallmarks inform J Dilla and The Roots, but stars like Lupe Fiasco and ’00s-era Kanye West walked the trail that Tribe blazed in 1993. “I think that if we came out today, we would be good,” Q-Tip told Spin back in 2008. “Because there are strains of what we did doing well today. Kanye, Lupe, are all strains of what we did.”
With their seminal third album, A Tribe Called Quest made it cool to be recherché and “artsy” without losing their ability to connect to the everyman sensibilities that so often define hip-hop. Journalist Van Lathan once posited that N.W.A has had a more lasting impact on hip-hop than A Tribe Called Quest, but when one looks at the full landscape of Black music since ATCQ’s run of classic albums, it’s obvious that Tribe’s footprint is just as vast as that of The World’s Most Dangerous Group. The Black mainstream became more esoteric and abstract in the wake of Tribe’s commercial success—and Midnight Marauders became a touchstone for everyone from J Dilla to Frank Ocean. Nothing was ever the same.
