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.
There are a few other standouts littered across the album’s 13 tracks. “Wow Factor” features De La Soul’s Maseo and a backwards-looking, Wu Tang-esque thump undergirding a terrifically entertaining name-check of the strengths of just about every rapper Phife admires, a speedrun through hip-hop history. (Though it gradually, and comically, segues into admiration for various famous attractive women, before eventually ending on Phife observing, “The minds of Will Ferrell and Ben Stiller? Hilarious.”) And “God,” featuring Dwele, is a heartfelt meditation on regret, longing, and getting through the pain by finding the pleasure, aided by production straight out of the early 2000s, a time itself in love with looking back to the sounds of ’70s soul.
Unfortunately, the consistent production on Forever is a little too consistent. A jazzy retro bounce, a soulfully sung hook for a refrain, all wedded to a mid-tempo beat maximized to enhance Phife’s playful boom-bap-meets-mutter delivery, is the formula that recurs again and again. It all starts to become repetitive, blurring together and lacking sufficient deviations in tone and tenor. The primary distinction comes between those tracks that serve up a slower, lilting swing beat with jazzy guitar licks, and those that traffic in a more aggressive version of synth-filtered rhythms. When the two don’t alternate, one song tends to slide unnoticed into the next.
But the overall impression left by the record is the sound of a middle-aged rapper trying to figure out how to translate his more thoughtful, mature musings on the back half of life into a lively hip-hop release. Your mileage may vary on how successful he is: At times, his waxing poetic on family, children, and the importance of being a loving caretaker can sound inspired. (See: “Residual Curiosities,” or “Dear Dilla.”) At others, Forever can get cloying and downright corny. (The song-length “please take me back, baby” pleadings of “Sorry” are dangerously close to a Tim & Eric parody of the same.)
Still, when the mischievous and brilliant rascal lurking within Phife comes out to play, it’s like a Low End Theory outtake. Whether he’s goofing on the idea of Canadian seduction in “French Kiss Trois” or serving up morality plays on “Only A Coward,” there are moments when the Phife of old lives neatly alongside the thoughtful, reflective artist considering his life and legacy shortly before his death. And despite some missteps, both are well worth hearing—tragically, for probably the last time.