Q-Tip Made Most Of “People’s Instinctive Travels” On Pause-Tapes When He Was 16
The recent resurgence of A Tribe Called Quest was one of the great unexpected surprises of 2016. After losing Phife Dawg in March, the group released their Billboard chart-topping We Got It from Here… Thank You 4 Your Service and left many fans misty-eyed with an emotional, post-election SNL performance. For those that missed it, watch it now. Q-Tip’s facial expression as he held a microphone up to a mural of Phife during “We the People” will remain etched in the mind of Tribe fans forever.
After nearly 20 years away from the game, an SNL gig and no. 1 Billboard spot are a testament to the lasting impression Tribe left on the world. With six albums to their credit, the group inspired countless DJs, rappers, and producers with their inimitable sound. And it all started with some innocent DIY experimentation from a young Q-Tip.
Tribe’s origins go back more than 30 years, when a 12-year-old Q-Tip started making pause-tapes in 1982. Using dual cassette decks, Tip would make beats by playing and recording a sample from another tape or record and pausing the tape when the sample had finished a rotation. He would then rewind to the beginning of the sample and un-pause the tape, starting the process again and extending the sampled loop for several minutes.
“I must be, like, on some other shit, if I could sit here for hours and hours and do this with these records and get these little pieces and just continually loop it like that.”- Q-Tip
For Q-Tip, this primitive method of beatmaking was born from necessity. “We didn’t have any setups, we didn’t have any track machines. We didn’t have any of that stuff, so what we usually had was some janky-ass stereo system that you moms and your grandmother had,” Tip told Jeff “Chairman” Mao in a Red Bull Music Academy interview.
Fortunate to grow up in a house with a cassette deck equipped for dubbing, the ideas for Tip’s earliest productions were sparked by his father’s extensive vinyl collection. His father’s enormous jazz collection was of particular interest and provided the building blocks for future Tribe instrumentals.
Tip’s willingness to sit and work through such an intense process at a young age was a labor of love. It took endless repetition and practice to get the music right. “You have to keep going back probably, say, like a hundred times, if you want like a bar or something,” Tip explained.
Tip’s constant desire to practice and work at it until he achieved the desired sound let him know he might be on to something. “I must be, like, on some other shit, if I could sit here for hours and hours and do this with these records and get these little pieces and just continually loop it like that,” Tip remembered thinking at the time in his interview with Mao.
“I did a lot of People’s Instinctive Travels already on pause-tapes before we started recording when I was in the 10th grade at 16-years-old.”- Q-Tip
Like other pause-tape aficionados who went on to become respected producers, Tip realized that his cassette creations could only take him so far. Luckily for Tip, his eventual connection with Ali Shaheed Muhammad gave him access to Muhammad’s uncle’s four-track machine. “When I first got over there, probably like ’85, I was 15. And the first two records I brought over there was this record called ‘Ripe’ and ‘Bonita Applebum’…So that’s how I first started doing, like, formal joints and that’s what I was working on,” Tip told Mao.
Although Tip was transitioning from bedroom producer to major-label producer, much of Tribe’s iconic debut People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm came from pause-tapes. The final product likely benefited from significant post-production polish and studio work, but the skeletal versions of many tracks were crafted with a cassette deck. “I did a lot of People’s Instinctive Travels already on pause-tapes before we started recording when I was in the 10th grade at 16-years-old,” Tip told Vibe in a 2012 interview. “Actually, I did ‘Bonita Applebum’ when I was 15. I had a different couple of versions of that song and then I flipped it to another version when I turned 18.”
Armed with a cassette deck, his father’s records, and his imagination, Q-Tip produced the first album to receive a 5-Mic review from The Source. Though the magazine praised the albums “sophisticated production invoking a jazz flavor”, they likely had no idea such sophisticated production could start with a tape deck.
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