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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

103. De La Soul, "Three Feet High And Rising"

Image
  Sorry for the service interruption!  Monday I had, like, work stuff to do and yesterday I was picking my wife up at the airport and they lost her bag and we had to file a claim about that and by the time I got home it was well into my Work Hours and you know, I'm just sorry.  (This was tail end of quite a journey for my wife that found her taking off in Ireland and landing in Newark, New Jersey, and then sitting in a plane for almost three hours and then the flight just getting cancelled and then staying in the Courtyard by Marriott in downtown Newark, NJ [not recommended, she says] and then getting on a flight to SFO at 6:30 am and finally getting back here a solid 14 hours later than expected.) Speaking of the greater New York City metropolitan area, a group of kids from Amityville, Long Island, got together in 1988 and started making songs and released this album, one of the best in hip hop or any other genre, in 1989.  De La have been called the "Beatles of hip...
Read more

3. Joni Mitchell, "Blue"

Image
  Do you want the good news or the meh news first?  The good news is that this album is better than the other Joni Mitchell albums we've seen , or at least better for me.  I hated one of them and barely tolerated the other, so I was not expecting to like this, and after three listens yesterday, it was not as bad as I'd feared it would be.  The meh news?  I still don't love Joni Mitchell and I don't particularly like this album. Obviously, since it's the number 3 out of the Top 500 albums ever made, a lot of people feel differently.  Pitchfork called it "possibly the most gutting break-up album ever made," which may be true, who knows, but if it is it's about breaking up with a whole series of dudes, from Graham Nash to James Taylor to some guy named Carey.  (In Pitchfork's estimation, this is the 86th best album of the 1970s, so not exactly in number 3 overall territory). One thing that bugs me is Joni Mitchell's voice, which I find kind of g...
Read more

1. Marvin Gaye, "What’s Going On"

Image
  500 albums later and we're out of albums.  This album was number 6 on the last iteration of the Rolling Stone list and has now moved up to number 1 (displacing Sgt. Pepper , which was the last album to hold that spot).  I think it's a lovely album with maybe three absolutely incredible songs, a fair amount of average-to-good, and some not great songs.  I'm not a voter and will never be a voter but I just don't think this is the best album of all time. In fact, I would be perfectly fine with this list if they just sawed off the top 3 and left the rest as is: 1. Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life 2. Beatles, Abbey Road 3. Nirvana, Nevermind 4. Fleetwood Mac, Rumours And so forth.  But let's take this album on its own merits. The first of the three absolute bangers is the title track, "What's Going On," the scene-setter for the rest of the album, a loose concept album that's told from the point of view of a Vietnam vet returning to a country th...
Read more