A Tribe Called Quest

With their lush production, inventive rhymes, and quirky personalities, A Tribe Called Quest rewrote the rules for hip-hop with their legendary run in the 1990s—and created a template that artists have followed decades later.

Queens-bred childhood friends Q-Tip, Phife Dawg, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, and Jarobi White formed the group in the late '80s, and later teamed up with Afrocentric acts like Queen Latifah, Jungle Brothers, and De La Soul to create the Native Tongues collective.

A Tribe Called Quest crafted diasporic music that warmly connected different generations of Blackness by merging jazz, soul, and funk samples—from artists like Grover Washington Jr., Stevie Wonder, and Sly & The Family Stone—and righteous rhymes that depicted contemporary life with playful sophistication.