“Yo—microphone check, one-two, what is this…”
Not many rap verses have ever started better. What else is there to say: RIP to Malik “Phife Dawg” Taylor from A Tribe Called Quest. Tribe was a lot of people’s first rap group and a lot of people’s Greatest Rap Group of All Time, and Phife was every bit as essential to their immeasurable impact on hiphop—I don’t have the words to calculate Tribe’s cultural footprint, and it’s huge enough that I don’t need to—as the rest of their Holy Trinity (Q-Tip and Ali Shaheed Muhammad, duh, but no dis intended to Jarobi, the four-man crew’s “sometimes Y”). Maybe since Phife was rap’s premier sports superfan, it would be better to invoke the legendary “triangle offense”—except everybody knows what a lifelong Knicks fan he was…