Tuesday, January 6, 2015

"Award Tour" (A Tribe Called Quest)

Midnight Marauders (1993) is one of those rare 90s albums that I can still put on without feeling silly or skipping a single track.  Even the little interstitial "skits" featuring the robotic, Siri-like guide still work for the most part.
If you're cherry-picking, the album contains several bonafide classics ("Oh My God" with Busta Rhymes, "Electric Relaxation," and "We Can Get Down").  My personal favorite, though, is still the lead single, "Award Tour."
Beyond the lyrical acrobatics (and Q-Tip and Phife Dawg spit some extremely clever verses), it was the production on the track that drew my ear years ago.  The backing instrumental is so melodic, so fluid that it's kind of hard to fathom that it's built from at least five different samples—the most prominent one being jazz keyboardist/composer Weldon Irvine's "We Gettin' Down."  It still sounds amazingly fresh 20+ years later.  
That's a testament to the creativity of this crew and the group's not-so-secret-weapon Ali Shaheed Muhammed, whose inventive, tasteful production work with everyone from D'Angelo to the short-lived Lucy Pearl continues to amaze and move me.



No comments:

Post a Comment