201. A Tribe Called Quest, "Midnight Marauders"

 


Partial list of references in the lyrics of this album:

Rin Tin Tin
Fernando Valenzuela
Vinny Testaverde
Midnight Run
Marion Barry, drug use of
Liz Claiborne (same song as Marion Barry, even)
Home Depot
En Vogue, TLC, and Toni Braxton
Denzel Washington
Laverne and Shirley

I bring this up just to note that the depth and breadth of the lyrics on this album is amazing.  Both Q-Tip and Phife are at the top of their game, maybe even more so than on Low End Theory, although there will certainly be people who disagree with that.  Just a small sample from "Award Tour," maybe my favorite song on the album:

People give your ears so I be sublime
It's enjoyable to know you and your concubines
Niggas, take off your coats, ladies act like gems
Sit down, Indian style, as we recite these hymns
See, lyrically I'm Mario Andretti on the MOMO
Ludicrously speedy, or infectious with the slow-mo
Heard me in the eighties, J.B.'s on "The Promo"
In my never-ending quest to get the paper on the caper

It's fine on paper, but you have to hear Q-Tip really wrapping his voice around the rhymes.  It's such a distinctive style that both he and Phife had that it was immediately copied but never duplicated.

The samples, largely taken from older R&B and soul tracks, are pristine,  Just in "Award Tour" alone, there are seven different samples.  The organ hook is taken from Weldon Irvine's "We Gettin' Down" (1975), slowed down a bit, while the drums come from Sons of Champlin's 1969 "We Can Fly" (and it's such a great drum riff that it's been used by everyone from Snoop to Jill Scott).

And the whole album is just so easy.  I don't mean like easy listening, or easy to make (it was most assuredly not easy to make, taking almost a year), but easy to listen to, in the sense that listening to it is just a pleasurable experience.  The beats are expertly assembled and the lyrical wordplay just washed over you.  There's not a moment where you go "let's listen to something else,"  Just let this play on and on.

So that's 300 albums down!  200 to go.

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? Yes.

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