Cover Classics takes a closer look at all-cover albums of the past, their genesis, and their legacy.
Not many people have covered A Tribe Called Quest. That’s not entirely surprising. You see that a lot in hip-hop—a genre where the coin of the realm is the remixes and sample more than the cover—and especially so in lyrically and musically dense acts like Tribe, without big crossover hits and giant pop hooks. The Tribe entries in the various cover-song database look pretty barren.
But the few artists that do cover Tribe go deep. There have been two full-length Tribe tribute albums, and both are excellent. True to the sampling spirit of the original group, they take the source material as fodder to build on, veering far afield from the originals in some cases.
The first came out in 2013 as a duo project by a rapper and a producer from Mozambique. On The Heroes – Tribute To A Tribe…, Simba (the rapper) and Milton Gulli (the producer) expand on a handful of Tribe classics: “Bonita Applebum,” “Can I Kick It,” etc. Some of the tracks are barely recognizable musically (and one of them, “African Tour,” is in fact an original, albeit a Tribe-inspired one).
Gulli takes big production swings, in many cases dropping the most recognizable elements of the original songs, bringing in samba on “Can I Kick It” and a choir on “God Lives Through.” There’s an even more obvious difference you can hear in that music video: Simba, though his voice channels Phife Dawg’s, doesn’t just rap in English. He also spits in Portuguese and indigenous Mozambican tongues. Ditto the various guest vocalists. Unless you too live in Mozambique, you’re unlikely to understand too many of the words. But the music still moves.
“It’s not exactly versions of Tribe Called Quest,” Gulli says in a promo video. “To me they feel almost like new songs.”
The other Tribe tribute album, equally excellent and sticking at least a little closer to the source material, came out from the Oakland covers collective UnderCover. Though seemingly defunct now, they used to periodically put on shows where local artists across pop, soul, folk, hip-hop, and beyond would reinterpret a classic album track-by-track. Sometimes they’d turn these into studio recordings, as they did for their remake of Tribe’s 1993 cult classic Midnight Marauders.
The credits list on this one is deep. Dozens of artists came together, with every track a new array of (often jazz-inflected) musicians and a featured rapper or two. Lateef the Truthspeaker and the late Gift of Gab are among the better-known names here, but mostly this is a feast for lovers of underground hip-hop. Even if you don’t know any the musicians—hell, even if you don’t know the Tribe album they’re tributing—the performances and production draws you in.