60 Songs That Explain the '90s - A Tribe Called Quest—“Scenario”

Episode Date: April 14, 2021

Rob explores A Tribe Called Quest’s “Scenario” by discussing the chemistry at the center of the group’s excellence and where the song ranks among the best posse cuts in rap history. This episode was originally produced as a Music and Talk show available exclusively on Spotify. Find the full song on Spotify or wherever you get your music. Host: Rob Harvilla Guest: Shea Serrano Producers: Isaac Lee and Justin Sayles Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're listening to a music and talk episode where full songs and talk segments play together only on Spotify. Best of all, you can create your own music and talk show for free with Anchor Spotify's podcasting platform. Get started at anchor.fm slash music and talk. That's A-N-C-H-O-R dot FM slash M-U-S-I-I-C-A-N-D-T-A-L-K. A lot of spelling there, but just do it. The professional thing to do.

the mature thing to do, would be to mention my personal favorite, a tribe called Quest lyrics as an aside, a brief and apologetic aside, somewhere deep within a sophisticated and perceptive and poetic exploration of the larger a tribe called Quest Uvra. But no, no, no, I'm going to tell you right off the rip that to this day, as a grown-ass man with a steady job and a mortgage who declares multiple dependence on his taxes, nonetheless, whenever I even hear the words, a tribe called Quest, a gigantic, dopey, 13-year-old boy grin blooms across my face because thanks to Malik Taylor, aka the late great fife dog, the words that just popped into my head, without fail, are as follows.

Bust off on your couch, now you got Siemens Furniture. Bust off on your couch, now you got Siemens Furniture. Bust off on your couch. Now you got Seaman Furniture. I want you to imagine that you are the CEO of Siemens Furniture. Let me spell that for you. S-E-A-M-A-N-A-N-A-N-A-S Furniture. Founded by Julius Seaman is a single Brooklyn Furniture Store in 1933, but by 1989, led by Julius's son, Morton, Seaman. It's the publicly traded second largest furniture retailer in America with 31 stores spread between New York, Philadelphia, and Connecticut and an annual revenue of 275 million. Official slogan,

for the price that's always right, now it's 1993, and you are CEO of this company, Siemens Furniture. Morton resigned, a recession hit, you filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, but things are looking up, and you're sitting at your enormous desk at Siemens Furniture H.Q in Woodbury, Long Island,

eating lunch, eating a grinder, I believe is in the term, in Long Island. what do CEOs eat for lunch, turkey and cheese, light mayo, and somebody bursts into your office holding a giant boombox and is like, have you heard this new, a tribe called Quest record? And you're like, who's that? And they're like, a sophisticated and poetic rap group from St. Albans, Queens. And you're like, I was being sarcastic. Everyone knows who a tribe called Questar.

And I already know what you're going to play for me. Are you really going to play it again? And the boombox guy is like, yeah, I'm playing it again. And then he does. Let me hit it from the back girl. I walk out to hernia. How do you come back from this if you're Siemens Furniture? How do you stop talking about this if you're me?

It's not just me. These lines are addressed at some length in the 2011 documentary Beats, Rhymes, and Life, the travels of a tribe called Quest, directed by Michael Rappapur, The Beastie Boys Marvel at the Siemens Furniture line. Two of them. Ad Rock just makes a sort of yich face. He's too classy, I guess. The chemistry between the Beasts.

Beastie boys. Always, always. Bob Power, crucial figure, a sound engineer on the first four tribe albums, calls it his favorite line. Chris Lighty, the famed music executive and tribes' former manager, provides crucial context. He calls Siemens Furniture, the furniture that fell apart immediately, but it looked hot. It looked hot. It was like IKEA for Billy Joel fans, is my overall impression. This is important. Everyone loves that line, okay? Not everyone. One in college, I played that song. Electric Relaxation off a tribe called Quest's third album, 1993's

Midnight Marauders. I played it for a girl I was dating. Beautiful song. Jazzy, sophisticated, poetic, incredible song. Anyway, I played it for her and I was like, bust off. It's the couch. There's a real company called Siemens Furniture is Long Island. It's hilarious, right?

And she was like, no. I apologize. For all to talk about a tribe called Quest is conscious and sleek. and streetwise and book smart and cerebral and jazzy and abstract, as canonized, as deified as these guys are now, as golden era standard bearers, as possibly the single greatest group in rap history,

it was important, it was necessary, that they also have lines that stupid. The wise 23-year-old man cannot exist without the dopey 13-year-old boy. The high-brow cannot exist without the low-brow. The abstract cannot exist without the unpleasantly concrete. There is no bugging out if you are not also occasionally busting off. There is no Q-tip without Fife Dog, nor the inverse. A tribe called Quest consisted of Q-Tip, the late Great Fife Dog, their good friend and

intermittent fellow rapper Jerobe, and co-producing alongside Q-tip, Ali Shahid Muhammad. But Fife Dog was my favorite. He was everybody's favorite, I assume, when you say the words a tribe called Quest to me, after I'm done chortling over Siemens' furniture for the 200,000th time, I move on to my second favorite tribe line, also Fife, which is arguably stupider and definitely less clever. That's telling me I can't tear it up. Go get yourself some toilet paper because your lyrics is butt.

Hilarious. Objectively stupid. Very necessary. That's from show business from a tribe called Quest's second and best album, 1991's The Low End Theory, Low End because Bates. low end because, as Q-Tip once further explained to Arsenio Hall, young black men are so low on the totem pole of society. And finally, as Q-Tit didn't have to explain to Arsenio or really to anybody,

low-end because of butts. High-brow, low-brow. It's about balance. It's about chemistry. It's about harmony. My name is Rob Harvilla. This is 60 songs that explain the 90s. This week we're talking about rapping with your friends.

And how rapping with your friends makes you happier and angrier. and smarter and dumber and like 50,000 times better. We're talking about scenario. Scenario is the last song on the low-end theory. All-time album closer, all-time posse cut. I sound ridiculous, saying the words posse cut, don't I? Ridiculous. The perils of the audio format.

What are you going to do? So the classic rap video formulation, where there's the rapper rapping in the center of the frame, and then a huge. huge, raucous crowd enveloping the rapper, spilling out of the edges of the frame, nodding along, ad-libbing, waving their hands around, shoving one another, handling any call and response action,

waiting for his or her turn to wrap, whatever. In these situations, I tend to blur out the rapper and scan the faces of this entourage, whether it's their collective joy or their collective menace. I want a sense of the whole. I want to drink in their camaraderie. That collective energy is a tangible, infectious thing. Furthermore, for the best groups, not necessarily the best rappers, the best groups, that collective energy is audible.

You can see clearly right in front of you the classic rap video dog pile even when you're not watching the video, even when it's just the song itself blasting out of a boombox. That dog pile is audible, whether it consists of 50 people or three people. Run DMC had this collective aura immediately. Same with the Wu-Tang clan. Same with Salton Peppa while we're hanging around Queens. A tribe called Quest had this collective aura, perfected this aura. You knew instantly who these guys were and what they were about and what they meant to one another. How crazy they drove each other, yes, but how much they needed each other and how badly you needed to hear them together.

You knew all that really from the title of Tribe's first album, 1990s People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm. Okay, so these dudes are a little mystical. a little flamboyant, the Deshikis, the Kente cloth, the Zulu beads, the early style Black Thought from the roots summarized as questionable type shit. Also audible, Black Thought also said the roots wouldn't have been the roots without tribe. And you can hear that, clearly, too, even if all you ever hear is push it along. Track number one on album number one. To this day, it hits like the first day of spring. It hits like taking off your socks after wearing them for

72 hours straight. It hits like that singular moment when you finally truly get Miles Davis's bitches brew. On first contact, if this hit right, instantly, you loved these guys, in part because it was so clear how much they loved each other. This is what I want from a tribe called Quest song. Any album, any era, this sense of friends rapping or chanting or just goofing around together. People's Instinctive Travels is an especially Q-Tip-heavy album. Tribe overall is a Q-Tip-heavy group. He's the leader, the nasal, brash, seductively scholarly leader. He's the focal point. More the leader than the focal point. My favorite thing about Q-Tip's voice is how it magnifies and is magnified by other voices.

Best song on People's Instinctive Travels is Benita Applebum. This is Canon. Benita Applebum, is a love song. It's about butts. It's a love song about butts. One butt in particular, I suppose. My guest this week, I'll be talking to him later, is Shea Serrano. Shea once wrote a best-selling book rap rap rap music in which he called Benita Applebum the best rap love song that's ever been. Do not hit the skip 15 seconds forward button until this show gets to the Shea Serrano part. Be nice. Anyway, Bonita features my third favorite line from a tribe called Quest song. satisfaction, I have the right tactics. And if you need them, I got crazy prophylactics. It's my third favorite line because of the woe, because of the other guys. I want to live in that

woe. I want to cultivate in my personal life a group of friends who together constitute, in our own modest way, that woe. It's aspirational. There's an argument that tribe get better, the sillier they get, because the sillier they get, the more vivid their chemistry gets. I don't think ham and eggs is anybody's favorite tribe song. Stupendous Funkadelic sample, though. But ham and eggs is nonetheless a virtuoso performance in the art of enjoying one another's company. And this above all is what you really want. You want Q-Tip's voice and then Fife's voice.

You want Q-Tip asking a question and Fife answering. and then Fife asking a question, and then Q-Tip answering. Q-Tip and Fife first met when they were around two years old. Saw each other at Little League, saw each other at church. Fife first suggested that Q-Tip should try rhyming when they were both around nine years old. You cannot manufacture a bond this pure, a platonic intimacy, this absolute.

People's instinctive travels, of course, also has the song, Can I Kick It on it? Can I Kick It has the Lou Reed sample, the dueling bass lines. It has some iconic individual rapping, rapping so specific to the guy rapping, Q-Tip rapping, wipe your feet really good on the rhythm rug, Fife Dog rapping,

Mr. Dinkins, would you please be my mayor? But on the other hand, no one disputes that this actually is the best part of the song. We want to hear Q-Tip's voice, and then we want to hear Fife's voice. That's what we want. That's all we need. Can I kick it?

Can I kick it? Fife Dog, you might be aware of this. Fife Dog was a sports fanatic. A partial list of sports team logos I have personally seen on hats worn by Fife Dogg. Knicks, Yankees, Indians, Orioles, Phillies, Louisville Cardinals, Dodgers, Georgia Tech, yellow jackets, tigers, pirates, penguins, North Carolina, Tarhills, Warriors, Jets, Patriots, Ravens, Stanford Cardinals, Reds, Brewers, Marlins, Celtics. I got tired of scrolling.

You get the point. Stiles upon styles upon styles is what he has. The five-foot assassin with a roughneck business. He's got more game than Parker Brothers. How else did he put it once? The height of Mugsy Boggs, complexion of a hockey puck. So in his honor, how do we summarize the Q-Tip-Fyf dynamic? To whom do we compare it?

What is the sports equivalent? Your knee-jerk reaction might be Jordan Pippen, but that is overstating the disparity between them. Try Carl Malone, John Stockton. The height disparity, the two-man assist machine, the pick-and-roll, the jazz. Hanif Abdur Keeb, the poet and author and friend of this show, wrote a great book about Tribe and likens them to Patrick Ewing and John Stockton. You can trust him.

Also, and this is interesting, sometimes Q-Tip and Fife don't get along at all, or don't mesh at all. And this straining of that bond only strengthens our fascination with that bond. Here are the fellas introducing themselves, essentially to America, on MTV News, in 1990. Hi, I'm Q-Tip. I'm an Ares. I'm a sick puppy. And I'm twice. And I rhyme along with him. That's basically it. And we are... A tribe called Quest. Nailed it. Fantastic. It's sweeter when you got to work at it.

The disharmony only makes those moments of... perfect harmony sweeter. The low-end theory, released in 1991, is an album-length moment of perfect harmony. Between jazz and hip-hop, between soft and hard, between ferociously smart and blissfully stupid, between defiantly underground and spectacularly commercial, between conscious and unconscious, between Q-Tip and Fife Dog. Check the rhyme, on its own, is as perfect as perfect harmony gets. I'm guessing I'm a time tip your own point five All the time tip

You're on point five All a time tip I'm guessing I don't really need To explain to you that this Right here is the all-time greatest exchange between two rappers on a rap song in rap history I try to keep the hyperbole

to a minimum around here But yes Just this Not their individual verses Not their other moments of interaction On this song I received the message And you will play the sender

Nothing else. Just these eight words in combination. Just this question and this answer. Tip asks and Fife answers. And then later, Fife asks and tip answers. All time greatest exchange between two rappers on a rap song and rap history. I'm guessing I don't really need to sell you on this. You want to know a secret, though?

Show Business is still my favorite song on the low-end theory. The Your lyrics is but one. You know the other great fife line on show business? I feel terrible making novels when they know they can't hack it because they lyrics display like eight-ball jackets. I feel terrible even imagining this, but you know for a fact that somewhere in the 90s, there was at least one poor guy standing in a room full of his boys hearing show business for the first time while wearing an eight-ball jacket. And the guy hears that line and just deflates.

It's like, oh, like picture of Millhouse, right? Like, Bart, check out my new jacket. Then the song plays and Nelson pops out of the bushes. All right. Show business is a posse cut. Sorry. Sorry. Featuring Diamond D from the digging in the crates crew

and also Lord Jamar and Sadat X from Brand Nubian. It's five people rapping. And you can so vividly imagine like 100 people surrounding them. The rap video dog pile. There's an exuberance, an exuberant togetherness. It makes you feel like part of the team. Brand newbie in were an extra scholarly trio from nearby New Rochelle, New York, who were outlying members of the Native Tongues Collective,

a sprawling rap crew that most prominently included the Jungle Brothers, De La Sol, and a tribe called Quest. I love De LaSoul, Trio from Long Island, and they need no introduction. Let's get De LaSoul's records on streaming already. Yeah, I'll do episodes on Me, Myself, and I, and Millie pulled a pistol on Santa. Let's get this done. What unified all these groups musically there in the late 80s and early 90s was,

okay, a certain eccentricity, a whimsy, or at least a lightheartedness that was often misread as softness, a loopy sense of humor, a flamboyant fashion sense, a freewheeling, deep thinking, almost hippieish quality. Everybody very much did their own thing. Doing your own thing was the whole point. But there was solid and fertile common ground. These people all looked like they belonged together. They sounded like they belonged together. The Jungle Brothers, another great New York City trio,

founded the Native Tongues Collective in the late 80s, and their 1989 song, Doing Our Own Dang, made for a fabulous mission statement. It featured De La Sol and Moni Love and Q-Tip, and, on the hook, a young Queen Latifah, who reminded you, if you needed reminding of the whole point. But what strikes me now about Native Tongues is that with some exceptions,

Queen Latifah, Moni Love, Shi'ali, most of the groups in this larger group were groups, were duos like black sheep, or more commonly trios, like De La Sol, or a tribe called Quest,

once Jerobi left, initially around the time of the low-end theory. Internal camaraderie was a crucial element. Each group's specific flavor of camaraderie fed into the larger native tongues camaraderie. Wrap with your friends. You bring your friends,

and you make more friends, and together with your old friends and your new friends, you make new songs as killer as scenario. And scenario, from the jump, makes you feel like part of a SWAT team. How much better is a rap song when the first few lines of the song are super memorable? Let's say 8,000% better.

Shout out Fife Dog. Shout out Bo Jackson. In this scenario video when Fife is rapping these lines, there are three fife dogs, one holding a football, one holding a baseball bat, and one with his hands-free wearing a Georgia Tech yellow jackets hat. He maybe should have gone with Auburn University in honor of Bo, but what are you going to do? So scenario, and this is the second to last time I'll say these words, is a posse cut featuring yet another Long Island rap group called Leaders of the New School,

which included Cut Monitor Milo, D, Dinko D, Charlie Brown, and most notably, Buster Rimes. leaders of the new school were extra light-hearted and exuberant. Their first album, 1991's Future Without a Past, sounds like a food fight that lasts for an hour and six minutes. The second to last song is called My Dingling, not a Chuck Berry cover and barely a metaphor. A brain is full, but a skull is empty. You said it. The boing bass note is a nice touch, very subtle. So these are the guys who turn scenario into a food fight.

Coming in after Fife Dog is your friend in mine, Charlie Brown, who among other fine qualities really excels at delivering the word brown. By now, maybe you've noticed that the Who's That is just as important as the brown here. The entourage is just as important as the rapper. The entourage is supporting. The response is just as important as the call. If you're going to make me say the words posse cut, then make the posse count. And scenario does.

Next up, we got Dinko D. Chip shape, plus great, eight's the plate tape. Ace in the space means peace see you later. I couldn't tell you exactly what Dinko D is on about here, but I appreciate his diction and his friend seem to understand. And really, that's all that matters. Next up, we got Q-tip. It's a leader quest mission, and we got the good skill.

Never on the left because my rights my good air. I could give a damn about an ill. Subliminal. Stay away from crime so I ain't no criminal. Another way to summarize the Native Tong's lifestyle is that sometimes members got together and made raucous jams about how they don't do crimes. Q-tip, if you cast him in a certain unflattering light, is a controlling megalomaniacal guy. He's on a leader quest mission after all. But the full tribe catalog proves that he can be accommodating, too. He can play a supporting role.

For example, he can go fourth on a song with five rappers. And historically, I've always found fourth to be the lousiest spot on a five-rapper song, or maybe it's that sometimes fourth is where you stash the song's lousiest rapper. In any event, TEP's real purpose here, quite graciously, I'd say, is simply to tee up Buster Rhymes. Heel up, wheel up, bring it back, come rewind, powerful impact, boom from the cannon, now ragin, trying to reap a mind, just imagine. So leaders in the new school, as it turns out, had a Michael Jordan problem. No offense to Charlie Brown or Dinko D, but the disparity between them and Buster Rhymes was considerable.

In their defense, of course, the disparity between Buster Rimes and anybody is considerable, but at least in terms of how leaders of the new school rappers fair on scenario, this is not a Jordan Pippin Pippin situation. It's Jordan, Stacey King, B.J. Armstrong. It's that situation. Notice, for example, that Busta's boom is somehow louder than everybody else's boom combined. Notice that he nukes scenario on contact. This is a Nicki Minaj on Monster situation.

Or really, Nikki Minaj on Monster was a Buster Rhymes on Scenario situation. Tribe like that, oh my gosh, part so much, they basically turned it into the chorus of a song on Midnight Marauders two years later. If you don't stop me, I'm going to excerpt this whole verse. All right, one more. Give me one more.

Tuckety chocolate chicken. It's about bursed It's in sync It's about butts Rhyme about butts with your friends The rhythm is in sync And the rhymes are on time So leaders of the new school

Made one more album in 1993 And then somewhat infamously Pretty goddamn near broke up on camera On Yo MTV Raps Principally due to rising tensions Surrounding Busta's imminent Blockbuster solo career That's a down

If you're not, Buster Rhymes. Speaking of down endings, I've gone back and forth on how to address a tribe called Quest's Decline, or really even if to address a tribe called Quest's Decline. After Midnight Marauders, their fourth and fifth albums beats Rhymes in Life in 1996 and the Love Movement in 1998 were less successful, less beloved, less exuberant. My inclination is to call them both kind of depressing and leave it at that, pretty much. I don't think the issues, the conflicts here, were terribly exotic. Basically, I'd say money, power, and respect.

To quote another New York City rap trio, that didn't sound really anything like tribe. But another key facet of the Q-tip in Fife Bond is that you can totally tell, you can hear when it's dissolving. Fife himself, talking about the beats, rhymes, and life album, once described it this way. Chemistry was dead.

Shot. The love movement, it's probably just the white cover, but it makes me think of the beat, White Album, not because it's super experimental, but because it's like, these dudes are totally about to break up. The A Tribe Called Quest documentary that came out in 2011 is not a good time for anybody, really. It's not a good look for anybody, for that matter. Your director, Michael Rapopor, here in spring 2021, is embroiled in an online feud with Kevin Durant. Don't get involved. This movie, in large part, follows a reunited tribe as they headline the 2008 Rock the Bells

festival. Tribe is reunited pretty explicitly only to help Fife Dog pay his medical bills. Fife struggled with diabetes for his entire run with Tribe and for the rest of his life. Q-Tip went on to a respectable solo career, but he wasn't the same without Fife, and Fife often was nowhere to be found. Anyway, Tip and Fife spent that whole reunion tour, or anyway, the whole movie about the reunion tour bickering endlessly, not even yelling at each other. They're both basically yelling at third parties on camera in lieu of yelling at each other. other. It's really depressing. I'll tell you my favorite moment in this movie, which looked at another way as one of the saddest moments in this movie. We've basically just watched Fife and Q-Tip nearly come to blows minutes before walking on stage. They might have actually come to blows if they'd been more crime-oriented rappers. Cut to an on-camera interview with Dave and paused the news from De La Sol, and your director, Michael Rapopore, asks this question and receives from Dave this answer. You guys think this is the last short-fold question?

I hope it is. Do you really? Disappointing. This is my favorite moment in this movie because of the reaction from Pazdenoose to that answer. He's clearly shocked, and he sort of shimmies his shoulders, and his head rolls around on his neck, and this huge smile blooms on his face. And you can tell that he can't believe Dave just said that. But then in the next instant, he's so.

so glad Dave just came out and said it. It's like Dave just pulled a sliver out of Paz's thumb. And that's what I love about this moment is you can see a crucial piece of De La Sol's Chemistry so clearly. What makes their interaction so unique and what makes their group so enduring? Answer questions with your friends about your friends breaking up with your other friends. Fife Dog died on March 22nd, 2016, due to complications from diabetes. He was 45.

He'd been working with a tribe called Quest on one more album called We Got It From Here. Thank you for your service. It's great. It's them. It's them together. A tribe called Quest were the musical guests on Saturday Night Live on November 12th, 2016. The day after the record came out and a few days after Trump was elected, Dave Chappelle was the host. Nobody knew what to say or what to do.

Just total chaos and confusion. This was the show that started with Kay McKinnon as Hillary Clinton playing Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, which, to be honest with you, I've always found endearing this moment, just how incoherent it is, how helpless and aimless it is. Nobody knew what to do, but a tribe called Quest knew what to do. So we watched Q-Tip, a resurgent Jerobe, and Ali Shahid Muhammad, up on stage, enjoying each other's company. And when it's time for Fife's verse, it booms out of the sound system as a giant,

Fife Dog banner, a giant folk art painting of Fife Dog unfurls from the ceiling. Flanked by Tip and Jerobi, they're solemn and mournful, but also, and you can still sense this, they're exuberant. At one point, Q-Tips holds his mic up to Fife's mouth in the painting, as you can hear Fife's voice. You can tell, that's all Tip ever wanted. He's rapping with his friend. Holy crap, my guest today is Shea Serrano, Ringer, staff writer, and podcast. in New York Times bestselling author,

the DeKembe Matumbo of Blocking Dudes on Twitter. Shea, welcome. Thank you so much for being here. It is a great honor. What up, baby? Let's do this. Let's do this. We're doing it.

Shea is scenario the best posse cut in rap history. I think you have to say yes. I've been spending a lot of time you and I were messaging about this exact thing. I have been going through trying to put my list. list in order. And I keep ending up with scenario at the top. I think there are just too many

historical markers that can be sort of planted with this song that you have to account for. You know, like I don't think that this is necessarily a better song than make them say on. I love that song. You know what I'm saying? Just from a turn this song on and have a good time standpoint, I prefer that song to scenario. But I think scenario is more. important. It's probably a little more exciting when you get to the bust of verse. There are just too many other variables that you have to account for when you're talking about this song. I think it has to be number one. Is it number one on your list? It's number two. To start with, like, what are the important, what are the variables? What makes scenario so

important? Well, you have, number one, this is off of a tribe called quest, the low-end theory, which today is seen as this obviously a masterpiece album, but also one that a thing happens in rap every so often where new album shows up and it's like, oh, rap is this now? You know, it introduces another section of it. Like in 87, I believe it was when paid and full showed up. I'm like, oh, this is, rap got bigger. And then straight out of Compton, rap got bigger.

And then the chronic rap got bigger. when the low-in theory showed up, it was like, oh, shit, this is a new thing. And a bunch of cool stuff is going to come from this. So you have that, first of all. This allows you to talk about the formation or creation, the impact of the Native Tongues collective, which was there to sort of balance out what was happening with NWA. Usually when you have a big thing happen in music or in anything, something way on the opposite end of the spectrum will pop up.

And then that will start, you know, it'll act as a counterbalance. So you had that. You have, of course, Buster Rhymes. This is like his arrival. Yeah. He's like, this guy's going to be a star. Clearly, everybody recognized it immediately. You have, they performed this song on the Arsenio Hall show.

Yeah. And it was just fucking a mammoth, monstrous moment. A very, like a very sort of contemporary comparison to draw. There is when Odd Future showed up and they performed on the, was his, on, um, Jimmy Fallon, yeah. Yeah. And everybody on the internet lost their fucking mind for that moment.

This was like that happening 20, 30 years before Bust is on there, taking his hat off, turning it inside out while they're holding the my quality trap. There's this great shot in it. There's a great shot in that clip of Arsenio Hall on the side watching them do it. And he has the best smile on his face because he knows he knows he's looking at something special happened. He knows his show would never be the same. He knows rap whenever would be the same. He knows Buster Rhyams' career wouldn't ever be the same.

Just a bunch of stuff like that in here. When you listen back to Tribe albums, it's amazing how often they shout out Arsenio. It's like a half dozen to a dozen Arsenio shoutouts over those first three records alone. I just talked to myself into it. This is my number one pick now. Yeah, for sure. For certain. I just talk myself into it.

Okay. Why don't you give us your top five now then, just so we have a good framework for this? What are your top five posse cut shit? Let's volley it back and forth because I don't want to do all of mine. You go first because you have my number one picker ready. Okay. All right.

Number five is Mr. Motherfucking Exquire, the last huzzah. It's got Despot. It's got Desmond. It's got Desmond. Are you familiar with this one? I'm familiar with this one. I was not expecting you to say

this collection of names. And as you said it, as you said it, I said, I fucking should have known Rob was going to say something like this for his fifth pick. But go ahead. Please. I'm going to take that as a compliment. But no, I rewatched the video for this this morning. And it solidified it for me. I don't think there's any rap song or any song period that exemplifies 2011 for me like this song does. It's the year my oldest son was born. And thus the year I became in actuality, a dad, you know, and not just the dad and all but name that I had been for the prior 10 years. But just as my final passage into adulthood, this was the soundtrack.

This song was the soundtrack. And it's just a fascinating collection of just Blase voices. Okay. All right. Let me say that's a terrible pick. But, you know, do you. Do what you do, Rob. Do what you do.

I'm setting you up to succeed, Shane. Let me ask you a question before we move on. Is international play? player's anthem, a posse cut. I've been thinking about this since you and I started talking that we were going to record this episode. And I wanted to ask you, because it would seem to check off the boxes necessary. You have four different people wrapping on there.

It's not only a combination of two different acts, UGK and Outcast, but also Three Six Mafia produced the song. The remix. Yeah. So we have, it feels like it should be that. But in my head, I have never thought International Players Anthem, Posse Cut. It's like a whole different thing. I had this exact conversation with my editor and producer, Justin Sales, like an hour ago.

And it is my number one. We're screwing up this whole order. But the international player's anthem is my number one. But I understand the argument that it doesn't feel like a posse cut in the classic sense. And I don't know if I can articulate why. If it's because it's two duos primarily, what you want from a posse cut is like four different rappers. rapping in four different styles, and international players' anthem is a little more cohesive. I don't know what it is, but it doesn't feel like a posse cut in the classic sense,

but I still feel strongly that it is the best posse cuts. And I feel both of those opinions equally strongly. Okay. All right. Well, I'm going to say it's not a posse cut. Okay. So it's out of there. So you're 0 for 2 so far. Feel free to just disagree with everything I say.

I say. That's very kind of you. All right. So then that one's out. Okay. I think that means we also have to get rid of this song, Ain't No Fun, Snoop, Nate Dog, Corrupt, and Warren G. Because they feel, they kind of feel like one big group.

This is the same reason I didn't include Make Them Say Ah, Master P, Feen, Seukta Shakra, Me, X, Mystical. It was like, it felt like one big collection of people who were already moving together. Maybe that's why International Players' Anthem does it feel like a posy cup? because it felt like those three groups, all Southern rap groups, all like legendary archetypal southern rap group. It just felt like they had all been together for so long. They were all part of the same thing. Stranded on death row is a favorite of mine,

but I think for the same reason, yeah. It's a little too cohesive, I see. Do you remember the song we're all in the same gang, the West Coast All-Stars? I think that's like a really good example of what a posse cut is or should be just like a bunch of people altogether, having, they weren't necessarily having fun, but it felt like, it felt like fun to watch. Like when you're a kid, I remember watching this video when I was a kid and be like,

oh my God, that was MC Hammer and Easy E. Like, what was it? I had no idea like how to comprehend that. Anyway, none of those songs made my list. Here's my number five pick, 2006, the Touch It Remix. Buster Rhymes. Missy, Lloyd Banks, Pappoose. Man, Pappoose.

D-M-X. D-M-X. I think we're going to find here that Buster Rhy-Rimes is the king of posse-cuts. I was going to say you seem to have a Busta fixation. There's no man better on a posse-cut than Buster Rhyms. Because you hinted at this a second ago. You have to have certain pieces on it for it to feel like an event. And one of those pieces is you need the big, loud voice.

the person just going absolutely fucking bonkers. And this one has a really cool narrative device in it where each rapper starts out kind of quiet and slow and then halfway through their verse, Busta comes in, and he says, turn it up! And then the song explodes and the rapper explodes. And it's just by the second time they do it and you realize everybody who comes is going to do it,

you start looking forward to it. It's a great, great time. This is my number five pick, your turn. Okay. Is there something to be said for it? Like Busta blows everybody else? away usually in these situations. Is he almost too overpowering? Like he's the best part of scenario by far. Is he so great that he diminishes the other rappers around him on these tracks?

No, no. There's like saying it's bad to have LeBron on your team. It's never bad. You need that character. All right. Give me one of yours. Okay. Number four for me is the Loonies. I got five on it. At a way. Redeem yourself, Rao Barvilla. Redeem yourself. Oh, thank goodness. Finally. Finally, some affirmation from Shea Serrano. It's all I've ever wanted, Shea. I just talked about this song at enormous length. I listened to the episode. If somebody who lived in the Bay Area for a cup of coffee,

anything with E40, E40 is like the West Coast Buster Rhymes, you know, speaking very broadly, but it's just overpowering in the best way. You know, and there's, I think I said in the episode, but I don't read YouTube comments as a rule, but like somebody said, like, this is six or seven, different guys rapping on the same track who are all from the same general area who don't sound like each other at all. They are all such distinct and rich personalities. And you just don't get that

very often and you get it all over. I got five on it. Yeah, that's a really good point. It's very helpful on your posse cut. If you have a bunch of people who are at different points in their career, especially, like when E40 shows up on that, you're like, oh, that's E40. Like everybody get in line behind you. You know what I'm saying? You have to have something like that. And there also has to be at least one person in there where you're like, if you're not super into rap, you're like, who is this person? I've never, I've never heard this name before. And then they do a very cool thing. Anyway, all right, that's a good, let me get my fourth one. Here we go. Here we go. My fourth pick, 1997. My guy bust is in it again. Oh, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. He's

not in this one. He's not in this one. I'm just kidding. Okay. Mace, DMX, Diddy, Stiles P chic Jada, black rock Give me 24 hours to live It's a fucking high school essay prompt You have 24 hours to live You have 24 hours to live What would you do?

And the great thing about this To your point about the different sounds Or different personalities Is each person on here The thing that they talk about doing In their verse fits them exactly perfect Some of them are silly Some of them are like serious

DMX is fucking heartbreaking in his. His is all just terror and pain. Mace is the opposite of that. This is a great, great song. It's really fun. The video is outstanding. I feel like the video component of each of these has to be included.

This is maybe the best or most exciting one to watch, especially if you were 15, 16 years old and you sit down in front of your TV, and you're like, this is the best thing I've ever seen. In my life. Who am I going to? to model my life after from this group of people. Yeah, pick one of these. Yeah, yeah. Which path do I follow? Absolutely. All right. Number three, I'm going to say Kanye West's mercy.

Lambeckinian mercy. Your chick she's so thirsty. I'm in that two C limbo with your girl, she's trying to jerk. With Big Sean, push a T, two chains. I understand the argument for monster, for example, but like the badness of Jay-Z. I think detracts from the greatness of Nikki Minaj in that case. But it's just, okay, okay. Man, what am I? One for four?

This is terrible. This is terrible, Shea. But Mercy is the one that stays with me. Two chains makes me laugh every time. The line delivery of money tall like Jordan for some reason. He sounds so mad. It's just fantastic.

I am going with Mercy at number three. and I accept your rebuke. No, that's not a bad pick. That's a fun one. That's a good, unexpected pick to have on here. Everybody was probably expecting Monster to be on there. Neither one of us have it on there, which is fine. The Two Chains verse, I always remember Combat Jack,

rest in peace, combat Jack. He had this great line about the timing of the little ad lib that Chains does right before he comes in on his verse. It was absolutely perfect. and after I read him right that, every time I hear that song is the first thing I think of and I get excited to hear his little piece

come in before he starts. It's great. All right, this is my number three. Okay. I got to have it. We talked about the king of the posse cuts. We have to have the queen in here.

The queen of the posse cuts. 1997, Little Kim, Missy, the brat, left eye, Angie Martinez. Give me Not Tonight. I think Not Tonight checks off every single box that we need.

It has a great. video. It has the four artists, excuse me, five artists who are all doing different things. They're all at different points of their career. Little Kim gets to be the big showstopper. She starts out everything. Missy is playing ringleader and this great, great, great, great role. The video, we get cameos from Mary J. Blige, Total, Queen Latifah, Maya Campbell, SWE, Escape. It's a party event. It's a celebration. I think that that's a cornerstone of these posse cuts is it need to feel like We're all celebrating our talents. We're all competing a little bit against each other,

but the stakes aren't super serious. It's just more for fun. I love this song. And Little Kim, she's in this one. She's in The All About the Benjamin's remix. She shuts that shit all the way down. Lady Marmalade. She's in this one too.

Like, you got to have it. You got to have Lady Marmalade. Give me it on tonight. You're right about the video components. The visual aspect is very important. You know, there's nothing better than watching these people enjoy themselves. I got to go back and watch these videos for sure, and that will probably scramble my list. Number two for me is scenario.

I will use this spot to shout out the symphony, Marley Marl. I think it's important to say just as a historical, yeah. Yeah. As a historical marker, you know, as you say, changing the sound of rap overnight a little bit. You know, I think that qualifies in the same vein. That's good. All right, number two, 1994, the remix. Give me Craig Mac, give me Biggie.

Give me Busta again. Man, he's all over the place. Flavor in your ear remix. Flavor in your ear, yes. Oh, man, so good. So, so good. Biggie, every one of these songs will have at least one verse where the first time you heard it, you were just like, oh, fuck.

Oh, shit. Let me hear that again. Immediately, I want to hear that again. And Biggie's verse, he's the first one on here, when he comes on and he does what Biggie does on the song and you realize, oh shit, like this is no longer a Craig Mac song. That iconic warmth noise, it no longer belongs to Craig Mac. This is now Biggie's noise.

Just a great, great moment. He took a noise. He took a noise from another person. And then, yeah, my number one, give me scenario. Yeah, okay. And for me, number one, international players anthem, for sure. Not bad. Not bad. I won that one. I won that one pretty convincingly. Isaac, play me some celebratory horns or something.

I had a lot more questions for you, but I'm scared to ask them now. Let's go. No. We've already talked for 20 minutes. Let's do it. Listen, I was so excited when you message me. I've been very vocally a big fan of Rob Harvilla on the internet for a long time. I was so excited to come on the show. I listened to the show all the time. I was heartbroken. You didn't invite me on several episodes. Well, I apologize. I was excited. I got a lot of information. Ask me some more questions.

Yeah, we did talk about doing several songs. And the last one we talked about was Busta, was put your hands where my eyes could see. And I wanted to ask, like, does Busta's career overall make good on the promise of scenario or as great as his solo stuff has been? Like, is there an argument that scenario is still his peak? No, no, no, no.

It made good on it. when he showed up in the mid to late 90s and he has the run where he's putting out these gigantic music videos, right when MTV was taken over. Hype Williams, yeah. He's doing these things that we take for granted now. I don't know if you remember when like he does a video and he's dressed as Shona from The Last Dragon. And when he did that, it was just like, it was like world like world melting. Oh my God. I know what movie that is.

You know, he's doing different movies and it's coming to America. or lethal weapon or whatever. Like, it was just so much fun watching him, watching Splifts or watching the group do their thing. Flip mode is great. Like, that period was his best. The Janet Jackson video, are you serious?

Are you serious, Rob Harvey-Ler. Buster Rhymes is a genius. Buster Rhymes is a legitimate, bona fide genius. And we should appreciate him as much as possible. And we do. We've settled that. Obviously, you are the author of the best-selling book, The Rap, Your Book,

and in that book, you called Bonita Applebum by a tribe called Quest, the best rap love song that's ever been. The book's five years or so old now, so I wanted to make sure it was still the best rap love song. If, like, Jay Cole has released a better one since then, I'm just, I just want to update. Is Benita Applebum still on top? It's still on top.

It's still the greatest. It's the smartest, sharpest, most insightful rap-a-love song that we've ever gotten. I love it. I love the dudes in the background the whole time. Yeah. That's my favorite part of it. Yeah, yeah. I have this half memory of a friend of mine going to a ghostface killer release party somewhere in the mid-2000s, and Ghostface was there, and he was either answering questions or just talking.

And he was talking about, if you have a song with five rappers on it, where do you put the worst rapper or the worst verse? And he was like, you put the worst rapper fourth. And everybody laughed. And so I wanted to ask you about ordering posse cuts by verse. Like these are not ranked lists where you start with the worst one and work upward. Like, can we agree that generally you put the best verse last and the second best verse first? Like, what is your preferred strategy or just order of rappers? That sounds pretty right to me.

There is this psychological theory or observation called the primacy recency effect. And it basically, it says any information presented at the beginning or end of a thing is retained better than information presented in the middle. Okay. So in the context of a song like this, yes, you want to start out and end with the two best ones. And if we look back like throughout history, this makes sense. Nas is first on Live at the Barbecue, which we didn't even mention during our list.

It probably should have been in there. Very important. Busta is last on scenario. Biggie is first on flavor in your ear. Nicky is last on Monster. That's clearly what you do. In the case of scenario, they knew going in. Buster was the one.

Like Q-Tip understood he was looking at it. He goes, oh, clearly this is the person who we need to tee up this whole song for him to take over at the end. So yeah, I think you'd do it like that. Same as you would a four-by-four 100 race. Like you start out and you end with the two fastest runners. You put one of the slower ones somewhere in the middle, usually the second spot. maybe the third, who knows. But yeah, that sounds right.

Let's go with that. All right, good, good. In terms of rap groups, has anyone approached the chemistry of a tribe called Quest, specifically the Q-tip, Fife Dog chemistry? Like, what is it about these two guys, the bond between these two guys, that makes them the best, but only together?

Because it feels like they were faded to be together. And that's probably just a thing that, I don't know if that really happened, or if it's just something your brain snaps into place, afterward because you have associated them together for so long. But if you have two people who feel like they're supposed to be together, two people who do different things with their voices, but that still makes sense as like one big piece,

like a Pippin and Jordan situation, there needs to be, like one of the people in the group, if we're talking more than two people, one of the people in the group needs to clearly be the best. Like obviously this person is a star. That's how everybody felt when you were looking at Q-Tip, when you hear a Q-Tip the first time, you go, oh, this is the guy who has it.

And then Fife shows up, especially on the low-end theory. And you're like, wait a second, wait a second. You need that second person who is good enough that we can also argue actually. Actually, if you really think about it, it's the other guy. You know what I'm saying? Sure. You need a J.C. Chazet in there somewhere.

You got to have that. And like if you have all of those pieces together, then it usually works out pretty good. Q-Tip and Fife are just, a beautiful pairing within a tripod quest. They are up, like, we don't see them, obviously, we don't see them as a duo, but they belong up there with, like, with Outcast, with Eric B. and Ron Kemp,

Method Man and Red Man, Black Star, that class of pairings together. That's where Q-Tip and Fife were or are. Yeah. If you're constructing your own ideal rap group with like three or four rappers, like what mix are you looking for? Like a mix of high-pitched voices and lower-pitched voices, like a mix of punchline rappers and more cerebral rappers

like hardcore rappers versus conscious rappers like what's the ideal blend for a group? The ideal blend well first of all you can't you can't like mix subgenres

it doesn't work you can't have one guy making jokes and being like I'm on a roll butter or whatever doing shit like that saying that kind of rap did you just come up with that shade that's amazing I did

and then and then you you can't have like somebody doing that and then another person talking about like, you know, this is what my life was like growing up in this terrible place. Right. And this is the sociological impacts of it. Like, whatever. It doesn't work like that. You got to, they all have to fit the outcast.

They were basically talking about the same stuff just in very different ways. UGK. Talking about the same stuff, very different ways. So they all have to fit, first of all, like ideologically, they all have to be headed in the same direction. Otherwise, the boat won't go where it needs to go. Sure. So we established that first. But then, yeah, you need the big personality.

You need the sort of not necessarily quieter one, but the more reserved one who just sort of shows up when he needs to be loud or she needs to be loud. You need like the surprising one. And then maybe you need the one that is like always undervalued or underappreciated. And you don't think about it until they step away from a while. And you're like, we're missing a piece here. Praz, pros from Fujis. Okay. You can't have the Fujis without prize.

and nobody ever talks about prod. You know what I'm saying? No, I know exactly what you're saying. He is brilliant. He's a genius. He fits in between what Lauren Hill. Go ahead. Like within the context of what the Fugis are doing,

he fits perfectly between what Wyclef and Lauren are doing with their voices and with the things that they're saying, we have to have that. We have to have the thoroughfare between those two. It doesn't work without it. We saw that it doesn't work if he's not there. Like you need a character like that as well. Shay, this has been very educational.

I maintain that the last Caza is the fifth best posse part of all time. But we can agree to disagree. This has been fantastic. Thank you for your counsel. God bless. Let's go. Let's go. Thanks very much to Shea Serrano.

Our producer is Justin Sales and Isaac Lee. And thanks, as always, to you for listening. And now, without further ado, here is a tribe called Quest with Scenario. We'll see you next week. Thank you.