Tribe no more

The Quest is over.

After 10 years together, A Tribe Called Quest has released its final album, The Love Movement. Q Tip, Phife and Ali Shaheed Muhammad will now go their separate ways: Q Tip is pursuing an acting career, Phife is doing sports journalism for a hip-hop magazine and Ali is married and building his own recording studio.

The breakup can be attributed to many things: Tribe's noted disdain for the music industry, the summer fire that destroyed Tip's house and record collection, the new directions in each member's life. There was a collective feeling among the group that they needed to move on.

"Professionally, it's been10 years, and it's time to step and do something different," said Ali in the September issue of The Source. "We've learned all that we can learn. We've said all that we can say."

And damn they have certainly said a lot, all the while never sounding like anybody else. Each Tribe album has been an evolution from the previous one. They burst onto the scene with Peoples Instinctive Travels and The Paths of Rhythm, a youthful, buoyant, eclectic CD that made people sit up and listen. Next came the more polished The Low End Theory, then Midnight Marauders-Tribe's masterpiece, an immediately listenable CD that just never gets old, listen after listen.

After three bonafide classic records, Tribe faltered on their 1996 release, Beats, Rhymes and Life. The fun was gone, and even worse, they used some female R&B singers on a few tracks, which was definitely not something they needed to fall back on. Tribe fans began to worry that maybe the Quest was losing it.

On The Love Movement, Tribe raps about love, both the act and the feeling. Though some songs are a little cheesy, they aren't sleazy like Too Short. More than anybody else, Tribe can rap about love in a mature, thoughtful and still playful way (see "Electric Relaxation"). And in an era of rehashed and worn out rhymes about being hard and making money, Tribe is a welcomed change of pace. The standout songs are "Start It Up," "Find A Way," "Pad & Pen" and "Bustas Lament," and, as usual, the album is listenable from start to finish.

We'll be hearing more from Tribe's members in solo efforts (a Phife album is already in the works) as well as in other domains. But it's hard to imagine Q Tip rapping without Phife, just like it was hard to imagine Chuck D without Flava Flav or Eric Sermon without Parrish Smith. If the breakups and subsequent reformation of these other high profile rap groups (Public Enemy, EPMD) are any indication, Tribe won't be able to stay apart forever. There's just too much love between them.