Today in Hip-Hop — November 11: A Tribe Called Quest’s We Got It from Here Turns 10, the Final Album Phife Named

November 11, 2016. A Tribe Called Quest released We Got It from Here… Thank You 4 Your Service on Epic. It was their sixth and final album, and it came 18 years after The Love Movement. It turns 10 today, on Veterans Day again, which makes the title hit even harder. Here’s the first jewel. The title was Phife Dawg’s. Q-Tip admitted he didn’t know what it meant. The group kept it anyway because Phife liked it. Phife died in March 2016, eight months before it came out.

The AbLab Sessions

The spark was a November 2015 performance on The Tonight Show. Afterward the group put their differences aside and started recording in secret. They worked for close to a year at the AbLab, Q-Tip’s home studio in New Jersey. The name comes from “Abstract.” Tip built the room with his longtime engineer Blair Wells and filled it with analog gear: preamps that had been on Jimi Hendrix, Blondie and Ramones sessions, plus a tape recorder that once belonged to Frank Zappa.

Phife was on dialysis three times a week for diabetes. He flew in, stayed at a hotel near Tip’s place and recorded in the evenings. His manager said watching the two of them trade lines was “like watching a unicorn.” Ali Shaheed Muhammad couldn’t co-produce because he was scoring Luke Cage with Adrian Younge at the time. Tip finished the record after Phife passed. Production is credited to Q-Tip, with Wells as co-producer. Busta Rhymes and Consequence came back in, and André 3000, Kendrick Lamar, Jack White, Anderson .Paak, Talib Kweli and Elton John all appear on it.

Twenty Years Between No. 1s

The day after release, Tribe played SNL and performed “We the People….” and “The Space Program.” The album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with 135,000 units, 112,000 of them pure sales. That was their first No. 1 since Beats, Rhymes and Life in 1996, the longest gap between chart-toppers for any hip-hop act. It went Gold in May 2017, which means every Tribe studio album now carries an RIAA certification. If you’re walking the whole catalog back, start with our Low End Theory at 35 and the Midnight Marauders anniversary from two days ago.

Wear It

The last album was the goodbye, but Midnight Marauders is the Tribe record most heads still reach for first. We made an A Tribe Called Quest Midnight Marauders tee for the ones who still call Phife the Five-Foot Assassin.

Also Today in Hip-Hop

• 2014: Big Bank Hank of the Sugarhill Gang dies. Sylvia Robinson discovered him rapping Grandmaster Caz’s rhymes at the Englewood, New Jersey pizzeria where he worked. His “Rapper’s Delight” verse has been tied to Caz’s rhyme book ever since.
• 2002: Felt’s A Tribute to Christina Ricci (24 years). Murs and Slug made a whole concept album about the actress for Rhymesayers, and The Grouch produced every beat.
• 2003: The Tupac: Resurrection soundtrack (23 years). Afeni Shakur and Eminem executive produced it. It sold more than 420,000 copies in its first week, and only Jay-Z’s The Black Album kept it out of No. 1.
• 2022: Nas, King’s Disease III (4 years). Hit-Boy handled the boards again. It debuted in the top ten, giving Nas his 16th top-ten album and tying former rival Jay-Z for the most among rappers. It also earned a Best Rap Album Grammy nomination.

Stay creative — The Custom Creative Team

Jon Jones