Ten years ago today, on November 11, 2016, A Tribe Called Quest released We Got It from Here… Thank You 4 Your Service on Epic Records. It was their sixth album, their first in 18 years, and their last. It was also one of the final recorded appearances of Malik “Phife Dawg” Taylor, who died eight months before it came out.
Most reunion albums sound like a victory lap. This one sounded like a group that still had something to say, and a group saying goodbye at the same time. A decade later, it holds up as one of the best final chapters any rap group has ever written.
The Comeback Nobody Saw Coming
After 1998’s The Love Movement, Tribe split up over tensions between the members. For years they said no new music was being made or even planned. They did play a handful of reunion shows, including dates on Kanye West’s Yeezus Tour in 2013, but a new album was not on the table.
That changed on November 13, 2015, when Q-Tip, Phife, Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Jarobi White performed on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. According to the album’s documented history, the energy from that performance pushed the group to set their differences aside and start recording in secret.
Inside the AbLab
The album was cut over roughly a year, from November 2015 to October 2016, at the AbLab, Q-Tip’s home studio in New Jersey. The name comes from “Abstract,” one of Tip’s aliases. The room was built out with analog gear, including preamps used on records by Jimi Hendrix, Blondie and the Ramones, plus a tape machine that once belonged to Frank Zappa.
Phife was receiving dialysis three times a week for diabetes while the album was being made. He flew in to New Jersey, stayed at a hotel near Tip’s house and recorded in the evenings. He and Tip spent about four months working side by side. Q-Tip later said they wanted to stay true to Tribe’s sound without being boxed in by it: “We knew we had to keep the thread but also push it forward.”
On March 22, 2016, Phife died at home from complications of diabetes. Q-Tip finished the album. The title was Phife’s idea, and even though the rest of the group didn’t fully know what he meant by it, they kept it.
The Credits
Q-Tip produced every track, with longtime engineer Blair Wells credited as co-producer. DJ Scratch handled scratches, and Vlado Meller mastered it. Ali Shaheed Muhammad couldn’t co-produce because he was busy scoring the Luke Cage soundtrack with Adrian Younge at the time.
The guest list reads like a family reunion across generations:
- Busta Rhymes and Consequence, Tribe’s most frequent collaborators, show up across the album.
- André 3000 trades verses with Tip on “Kids…”
- Kendrick Lamar joins Phife on “Conrad Tokyo.”
- Kanye West and Talib Kweli appear on “The Killing Season.”
- Anderson .Paak sings on “Movin Backwards.”
- Jack White plays guitar and sings, and Elton John plays piano and sings on “Solid Wall of Sound.”
- Marsha Ambrosius and Yebba add vocals to “Melatonin.”
The samples are just as wide-ranging. “We the People….” flips Black Sabbath, “Solid Wall of Sound” pulls from Elton John’s “Bennie and the Jets,” “Dis Generation” borrows from Musical Youth’s “Pass the Dutchie,” and “Lost Somebody” samples the German band Can. The whole thing runs 16 tracks and just over an hour.
Saturday Night Live and a No. 1 Debut
The album dropped three days after the 2016 presidential election, and the timing shaped how people heard it. The next night, November 12, Tribe performed “We the People….” and “The Space Program” as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live. “We the People….” was released as the first single on November 17, followed by “Dis Generation” on February 10, 2017.
The numbers backed up the moment. The album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with 135,000 equivalent album units, 112,000 of them traditional album sales, as Rolling Stone reported. It was Tribe’s second No. 1, following 1996’s Beats, Rhymes and Life, and the gap of more than 20 years set the record for the longest stretch between No. 1 albums for a hip-hop act, per The FADER.
Here’s how it charted and certified:
- Billboard 200: No. 1
- Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums: No. 1
- Canada: No. 3
- UK R&B Albums: No. 1 (No. 24 on the main UK chart)
- RIAA: Gold, certified May 22, 2017, which gave every Tribe studio album an RIAA certification
- BPI (UK): Silver
The Critics Agreed
The album earned a 91 on Metacritic, making it the best-reviewed hip-hop album of 2016 on the site. Pitchfork gave it a 9.0. On year-end lists, Complex ranked it third, Billboard fourth and Pitchfork seventh. Later, Pitchfork placed it at No. 44 on its list of the 200 best albums of the 2010s, and veteran critic Robert Christgau named it the tenth best album of the decade.
Why It Still Matters
Rap had never seen anything quite like it: a legendary group coming back after nearly two decades and making an album that stood next to The Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders instead of trading on them. Tribe didn’t chase the sound of 2016. They brought in the artists they had influenced, like Kendrick, André and Kanye, and made room for them inside their world.
It also gave Phife the send-off he deserved. His verses are all over the record, sharp and funny and fully himself, and the album turned into a tribute while it was still being made. For a generation that grew up on Tribe, it closed the circle. For younger fans, it was a front door into one of hip-hop’s most important catalogs.
Ten years later, the lesson still lands: legacy acts don’t have to fade out. They can finish strong.
Where to Stream It
We Got It from Here… Thank You 4 Your Service is available on major streaming platforms, including Apple Music and Deezer. Run it back today, front to back, the way it was meant to be heard.
Sources
- Wikipedia: We Got It from Here… Thank You 4 Your Service
- Rolling Stone: A Tribe Called Quest Score First Number One in 20 Years
- The FADER: A Tribe Called Quest Earn Their First No. 1 Album in 20 Years
- PopMatters review
Featured image: Andrea Cipriani/Unsplash
