Ex Post Facto: Albums That Your Sponsor Listened to While Growing Up in Cambridge
By Ji H. Chong
A&F Editor

Often, people's choice of music reflects their moods and general state of well-being. For example, you'll know Joe Aguerrebere '03 is feeling real blue if you hear the pleading vocals and melancholy piano melody of Stevie Wonder's "Lately" coming from his room unit. And only God and my stuffed panda bear, Pandy, know how many gallons of tears I've cried over the years in bed while listening to Extreme's "More Than Words."

So what does it mean when you listen to A Tribe Called Quest's sophomore release, The Low End Theory? It means you're feeling good and you're cool. Real cool. And if you can recognize all the hip hop figures Q-Tip name-checks in "Verses from the Abstract," then you know what? You are in the house.

I can still clearly remember the first time I listened to The Low End Theory, back in the days when I was a teenager. I was just an innocent, naive 16 year-old and my sponsor, one Luc Schuster '02, was playing it in his room in Mudd-Blaisdell, Muddside, first floor, backhall! I was getting to know Luc and a few of my fellow sponsor groupmates to the musical stylings of Q-Tip, Phife Dawg, and Ali Shaheed Muhammad.

When I told Luc that the music sounded like some great new hip hop "posse," he laughed a loud guffaw and eased back in his desk chair to get more comfortable before telling me and the others about the first time he heard The Low End Theory. "I remember when Tribe was first promoting it," he told me. "One day they drove through my neighborhood with a sound system hooked up on a pick up truck. Everybody came out onto the street and started dancing and chillin' out. Good times, man. Good times."

On that fateful night, over mixed drinks that would warrant a $100 fine per person under the new alcohol policy, my new sponsor group friends and I bonded 4-Life through conversation and appreciation of Phife's clever lines, "The five foot assassin with the ruffneck business / I float like gravity, never had a cavity / Got more rhymes than the Winans got family," and Q-Tip a.k.a. the Abstract's freeform delivery, "Do I have the formula to save the world? / Or was it just because I used to swipe the women and all the girls? / I'm the type of brother with the crazy extended hand, kid / Dissed by all my brothers, I was all up what my man did."

Depending on how much stock you put in what the people at allmusic.com have to say, you might convince yourself that this is one of, if not the very best, hip hop albums of all time. I'm not one myself to use superlatives like "best," "never," or "ever," but I do know that to inspire me to write this review I listened to the entire album repeatedly for a day. Now, I've been known to replay specific favorite songs such as Heatwave's "Always and Forever" or 4 PM's "Sukiyaki" three or four or maybe even five times in a row, but I never ever put a whole album on repeat, unless it's just one of the very best.

On an album that's just one long highlight in and of itself, picking favorite tracks is like picking favorite children. It's hard to admit it out loud but deep down, come on, the answer is pretty clear and always has been.

Although Q-Tip is often considered the "star" of A Tribe Called Quest and had more success as a solo MC than Phife after the group disbanded in 1998, I tend to enjoy Phife's more topical raps in Low End Theory. Maybe it's because I think I have something in common with the "five-foot assassin" who, as we learn in track seven, "Vibes and Stuff," "weigh[s] a buck-fifty, 36 waist" and also, "Party animal I was, but now I chill at home / All I do is write rhymes, eat, drink, shit and bone."

Of course, Q-Tip undeniably stands out on two tracks that are all his own, "Verses from the Abstract," and "What?" "What are laws if they ain't fair and equal? / What's Clark Kent without a telephone booth? / What is a liquor if it ain't 80 proof? / What are the youth if they ain't rebellin? / What's Ralph Cramden, if he ain't yellin / at Ed Norton, what is coke snortin?"

And what is this article without this question posing as a hastily written conclusion?