The posthumous album from Tribe Called Quest’s Phife Dawg is a soulful look back in time
The longtime rapper’s final project, Forever, is a nostalgic consideration of his life and legacy—for good and ill
There are requiems for days gone by in a long and tumultuous life, and then there are simply requiems for a life. Released on the sixth anniversary of his death in 2016, Forever—the second solo album from famed A Tribe Called Quest rapper Phife Dawg—is both. Nearly every bar and every beat of the record is suffused with reflection and nostalgia, in ways both moving and not.
Spearheaded by his longtime business partner Dion Liverpool (and musically dominated by his go-to DJ, Rasta Root), the record was in the midst of production when its architect died, the second of two projects Phife (née Malik Izaak Taylor) underway at the time. The other, Tribe’s reunion album We Got It From Here… Thank You 4 Your Service, managed to successfully recapture what was so magical about the group, complete with Phife’s undeniable masterful flow. It also served as a fantastic tribute to the late rapper, and a superb endpoint to his career.
And while Forever has moments from the artist as good as anything he’s done, it also has a lot of posthumous eulogizing and after-the-fact assembly, all riven through with a heavy dose of sentimentality. That’s an understandable impulse from those left behind by the monumentally talented MC—who wouldn’t want to craft the most loving tribute to someone they cared deeply about?—but it also serves at cross-purposes with the art at times. When an entire track is given over to a spoken-word piece from Phife’s mother, ending with audio clips from the rapper as a little boy, criticizing it sounds churlish. It’s clearly affecting for those who knew him, but it’s also not exactly something you’re going to want to hear again.
But there are some great things to hear on this album, for those willing to sit through the occasional schmaltz. That was immediately apparent from the release of lead single “Nutshell Pt. 2,” which plays a track-length game with the rapper in the form of a directive to see how many multisyllabic words starting with “in-” he can artfully string together. (He’s joined by Busta Rhymes and Redman, who play their own versions of the game with “un-” and “keep,” respectively.) There may not be any Q-Tip, but when you hear this rapper announce “Phife Dawg is in the building” over a signature old-school Tribe-like beat, it’s a goosebumps moment for anyone who came of age in the world of ’90s hip hop.