Phife Dawg Talks Tribe Called Quest’s Joyous Past and Uncertain Future

You were 19 when People’s was released. Is it odd to be looking back at the 25^th anniversary?
It’s odd in a good way. I never expected it to be this big. I just thought we were going to be celebs in the hood. Like, honestly, within 25 years, when you go to places like Australia and Japan and Amsterdam and London and Germany and these people know [the songs] word-for-word, it’s crazy. So it’s nothing but a blessing at the end of the day, but I don’t remember a lot. It’s kind of a blur. Being that I was only on four songs on the album, my focus wasn’t completely there yet. I didn’t take things too seriously until Low End Theory. I just remember this being the album where, “Okay, Tribe made a dent, so the next album, we’ve got to kick the door off the hinges.”

Record labels bashed the group’s original, four-track demo. Were you discouraged when it wasn’t as well-received as you hoped?
No, cause that’s when I was runnin’ the streets. [Laughs] Q-Tip would just let me know what was going on and you know how when you’re not there to see things for yourself, you don’t really get the full effect of it? I wasn’t getting that full effect; I just knew we were going to make it one way or the other.

Was there one moment when you said, “This is it. This is what I’m going to do”?
A couple of months before we started workin’ on Low End, I just happened to run into Q-Tip on the train leaving from Queens going into Manhattan. He was like, “Yo, I’m about to start recording this next album. I want you on a couple of songs, but you have to take it serious, blah, blah, blah.” So I was like, “Aiight, I feel you” and I took that into consideration along with the last couple of shows we did for that first album. I saw how fruitful things could get and I said, “Okay, I made up my mind that this is what I want to do.” I wanted to take care of my family, so it was all systems go, for real. 

Jarobi said, “I don’t think we were chasing other rappers. We were chasing guys like Prince, Marvin Gaye and Earth, Wind & Fire.” Is that an accurate representation of the album?
I definitely agree with Jarobi on that, especially when it comes to longevity. We wanted the longevity of Earth, Wind & Fire and Prince and people of that nature. We didn’t want to be two-hit and three-hit wonders. We didn’t want the big, big singles that we were known for. We wanted to be known for full-length albums. When you say, “A Tribe Called Quest,” we wanted people to say, “That whole opus was crazy.” There were certain artists who just came and went because they were known for a particular song and nobody paid anything else any mind. We didn’t want to come into the game like that.