We Got to Get It Together

That it’s been 10 years since A Tribe Called Quest dropped its masterful final album, We got it from Here … Thank You 4 Your service—18 years after its previous outing!—is shock enough. That beloved member Phife Dawg has been gone just as long only adds to the shock. The album wasn’t recorded in mourning, but now, there is no listening without grief. For POW, a continuing beacon of hip-hop coverage and criticism, Matthew Ritchie contends with the album’s impact, and how it remains a testament to loss and love like few others in the rap canon.

As the tenth anniversary of We got it from Here comes and goes, the way in which grief frames the album has become clearer with every listen. Not to say it wasn’t obvious from the fact that it was called the “final Tribe album” by Q-Tip in the months leading up to the record’s release, or the way that he recounted the difficulty he faced with hearing Phife’s voice as they tinkered with it from April to October in that year. But there’s a kindness and care that courses through the album’s construction, a feeling that could only be fueled by mourning the loss of someone that you love. That devotion comes through in the fact that We got it from Here remains as one of the best mainstream rap albums of the 2010s, simultaneously an experimental Tribe record that calls upon their best artistic instincts of sampling and verse structure from the ‘90s. But also in the way it succeeds in presenting a utopic vision for growing old as a rapper, even when the natural course of one’s life decides otherwise. There’s a grace in handling the memory of Phife, and Tribe’s legacy as a whole, that acts as a guiding light for the album’s brilliance; one that’s often been missing across music when dealing with matters of artistic remembrance.