JULY HIP HOP 50th ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL: Q-Tip – The Renaissance

How to feel old? Realise that hip-hop turns 50 and that when it was born you weren’t even (quite) alive. But it feels pretty incredible to be celebrating a genre of music so wide and vast that is just as strong as a pop-cultural touchstone, a movement, a social bedrock and so much more. So we had to try and pick something out ourselves to celebrate it all.

It shouldn’t be any surprise to listeners of the podcast that I am not the biggest hip-hop head of the four of us. In fact if Joey, David and Nolan are all dipping for the line, I’m still sauntering around the home straight. But this doesn’t mean I don’t love it: I adore so many cuts from its five decade history. But while everyone else was getting into Nas, Public Enemy, NWA or KRS-One, my nerdy teenage self was, well, into pop music, indie and guitars. Yes, I saw the odd track on Top of the Pops, and the Chart Show, even the safest on Now albums (though White Lines is gloriously on Now 3, which I have on vinyl at home), but like dance music, it wasn’t until I went to university that this really changed. So for one, I was a late starter, and for another point, for a long time I was a singles man. So many bangers, so much great tracks through the late 90s and into the 2000s, but did I even own an album before the new millennium? No, I did not.

Given we are all choosing our favourite hip-hop album for Episode 34 of the podcast, unlike the other four, narrowing it down to even ten, I was struggling to even pick 10 I owned and knew. We’ve reviewed some brilliant, epochal albums on the blog before: Kendrick’s To Pimp A Butterfly is a modern classic, RTJ’s RTJ4 was the first episode of what would end up as the podcast, 3 years and counting. We’ve covered Rapsody, Mac Miller, Skyzoo, Apollo Brown, Little Simz, Gangstarr, N.E.R.D, Loyle Carner, Tribe…. in fact I’d go as far as saying that this blog and podcast single-handedly got me into hip-hop albums so amen to that!

But picking one that came to me via elsewhere, nominated by someone else, never felt right, however much I loved it (Tribe’s glorious comeback We Got It From Here was a flirtation though). So I had to go back to the slim pickings and actually work out what I liked in the end that was truly ‘mine’. There were some great albums, just not many! I loved Jurassic 5’s J5, a 1998 classic that I still play now. But while it was fine, it wasn’t one that would want me reaching for the repeat button. Of course, by the 90s and 2000s, I owned classics like 3 Feet High, It Takes A Nation Of Millions, Midnight Marauders, and I’d got and loved Beastie Boys long players, but I wanted to pick one I was there from the start with, and in the end, with my love of sample-based, Native Tongues-adjacent rap, it could only be Q-Tip’s The Renaissance, from 2008.

Now, if you asked me what my two favourite hip-hop acts were, it would be easy to answer: De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest. They were incredible musicians, they went against the grain of so much hardcore and hood/gangsta hip-hop that didn’t really connect with me. But I remember seeing De La and that departure from what I thought hip-hop was, as they played with samples, conscious lyrics and it changed things for me. Tribe were not far behind. But in 2008, Q-Tip, their beating heart, released his second solo album: The Renaissance. I pretty much fell in love with it at the time. Melodies and hooks? Tick. Samples galore: tick. Q-Tip’s distinctive flow all on his own? Yep. Funk? HELL YEAH. And then some perfectly pitched guests – D’Angelo, Raphael Saadiq, and (even) Norah Jones. BINGO.

That was enough to get me in, but why is it so good? Because whatever others think – and it’s definitely considered a classic – there’s so many reasons to adore this record. For one, it is so optimistic. It arrived after Obama got into the White House – even with a sample of one of his speeches on Shaka – and seemed to evoke so much of what we all hoped would happen (and that really didn’t). Contrast it with the fantastic comeback from Tribe – We Got It From Here in 2016, to see just how far the world had fallen. From the opening bars of Johnny Is Dead, with its cascading guitar chords and that so distinctive flow (‘What good is an ear if a Q-Tip isn’t it it?’, indeed!) breaking into the harmonies in the chorus. It is simply life-affirmingly good. I challenge anyone to listen and not come out of it feeling better.

It just has so much life, energy, positivity and goodness. The bumping Won’t Trade, trading on soul vocals and Gettin’ Up’s sun-drenched vibes (with that great Black Ivory Sample) it just has you nodding and wondering where this album has been all your life. Across 46 minutes (my perfect hip-hop album length, no hour plus stuff, this is just tight and fizzes along) it goes from introspective break-ups (You), funk and soul half-songs (WeFight/WeLove), the Can-sampling ManWomanBoogie’s head-nodding brilliance (giving props to all the great artists along the way), Move’s all-out maximalism sampling the Jackson 5, and slower jams Life Is Better and Believe. Arguably its strongest effect is from the Dance On Glass, (picking up the hypocrisy of the industry, ‘ The people at the label say they want something to repeat / But all my people really want something for the streets’) with its first minute of just pure unaccompanied flow.

For an album that’s 15 years old, it still absolutely pops. There’s so much to enjoy about it, and it’s so musical, some of the tracks almost songs in their own right, even if its’ a guest vocal or sample, and with Tip let loose to do what he wanted. It’s an artist still at their top of their game, and enjoying the freedom of a solo project. It came with a lot of pressure and history, given a decade after his solo debut, Amplified, and label-denied false starts (the jazzy Kamal the Abstract from 2001 was a niche masterpiece for me too), the Renaissance came with a lot of expectation and delivered. It was when Tribe were on hiatus too, so for a creative like Q-Tip, it must’ve been a real release to put something out so good.

Talking about it ten years on, in an interview with the NME, he mused about where he was and what the album meant: “The Renaissance was about dealing with classic colloquialisms about self.…. I wanted the music to have a sound that stood the test of time, it was all about our humanity. It felt like I had re-entered hip hop. At the time I exited, music was vastly different.” In 2008, it was all about Kanye, Jay-Z, Lil’ Wayne, a world from Tribe’s heyday. But he delved into not just some of the usual subject matter, but Renaissance was a much more personal album that I’d expected: “You” was hard to go through, but easy to recount. It’s much like going through a break up and telling your boy what happened as therapy. That was to one of my ex-girlfriends, actually.” So it had layers beyond the samples, or the flow. And that’s why I still come back to it.

It’s been a total joy to get back into it. I must have rinsed it 20+ times in the last 6 weeks and I could let it go back round again and again. While I struggle to stick with hip-hop albums, this feels so easy. It has so much of everything I love about the genre in it, and it has an infectious positivity and outlook that seems to be in scant supply 15 years later, with so much of hip-hop on a much darker tip than the time of Tribe and De La (not that they didn’t talk about reality, of course). So it’s a ray of sunshine, a classic artefact of the best of hip-hop, a slice of pre-Trump goodness we could all benefit from a listen to.

And that’s why it’s got my vote.