Q-Tip

Q-Tip is a celebrated American rapper, producer and actor, who became popular as a member of A Tribe Called Quest. He was born Jonathan Davies in New York on 10 April 1970. Q-Tip changed his name to Kamaal Fareed after converting to Islam in the mid nineties. Along with Malik Taylor, a childhood friend, he formed the legendary hip hop band A Tribe Called Quest with Ali Shaheed Muhammad as the third member. The young rappers got spotlighted on the classic album Straight out of the Jungle (1988) by Jungle Brother. They made their demos at Geffen Records, but Jive Records was the studio they chose to release their long players. The first album by A Tribe Called Quest, People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm (1990), was a sensation for everybody into hip hop and became a must-have thank to such timeless tracks like Bonita Applebum, I Left My Wallet in El Segundo, and Can I Kick Still, it was just a foreword before the smashing release of The Low End Theory (1991). This album would have a great impact on the whole rap music and became a prototype for the new jazz rap genre due to utilization of jazz motives in its songs. This studio work featured the all time hits Scenario, Check the Rhime, and Jazz (We've Got).

The tremendous success of the A Tribe Called Quest second album created a mass illusion that Q-Tip and Co. had no more space to grow, which appeared a wrong opinion. According to many experts, the third studio work, Midnight Marauders (1993), overcame its predecessor. In revealed more music solutions and featured a more mature material, while Q-Tip managed to demonstrate the real scale of his lyrics writing talent ignoring the simple and common patterns of versification. Just like before, A Tribe Called Quest applied samples of old songs while doing their own stuff which resulted in the classical compositions Award Tour, Electric Relaxation, and Oh My God. The third album by Q-Tip and his partners remained of the highest selling albums of the nineties. After releasing three extremely popular and critically acclaimed albums, A Tribe Called Quest were expected to fail following their own standards, and so they did. The huge army of the group’s supporters expected another product of the same quality, but it never came. The subsequent effort, Beats, Rhymes and Life (1996), was far from the models of the first three works despite the good performance of 1nce Again, and Stressed Out. Its release was shortly followed by rumors about a conflict between Q-Tip and Malik. They were confirmed by the band’s announcement of producing the fifth and the last album, The Love Movement (1998). Undoubtedly, it was the worst LP in the band’s discography.

After the collapse of the group, Q-Tip started his solo career by releasing Amplified (1999). It featured a too commercial and melodious type of music for the loyal fans of the rapper’s former band. As a result, they accepted it as an act of sellout. Immediately, Q-Tip made an effort to make up for this failure and prepared another album, Kamaal the Abstract. However, it never had a chance to be released. After that, the singer took a long intermission. Q-Tip reactivated with the 2006 reunion of A Tribe Called Quest in its original lineup. In 2008, he released a solo album called The Renaissance. Nevertheless, the album Kamaal the Abstract, which had not been issued before, appeared in 2009.