#Kick it song tv

Those tools in the studio became extensions of my imagination and thoughts… The rest of the Native Tongues were there with us, and we made each other better. “I was 18 years old I was a kid in a candy store. “It was another worldly place,” Q-Tip told W ax P oetics in 2015. Members of the collective could be found recording at Calliope while Tribe worked on P eopl e’ s I nstinctive Tr avels. The acts gravitated toward Power’s creative energy and willingness to experiment in the studio.“They were good people, trying to do something a different way, and I found it fascinating,” Power says. The studio’s accessibility and vibe attracted the Native Tongues collective, a group of local artists-including the Jungle Brothers, De La Soul, Queen Latifah and BlackSheep-who were pioneering the use of samples, and jazz- and rock-influenced beats in hip hop. Because we were one of cheapest studios in town, that’s where musicians doing new, non-mainstream things would come.”

#Kick it song tv

“Even through I had scored TV for years and produced a lot of stuff, I was really happy at that point to be concentrating on engineering. “This was a really big time of learning for me as an engineer, and it was fascinating,” Power says of his early days at Calliope, a low-budget studio in a loft on a gritty stretch of West 38th, near Eighth Avenue. But in 1989, he was transitioning from being an in-demand jingle writer, guitarist and arranger to full-time engineering, and he was working at Calliope. Power, currently a professor at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute, has long been recognized as a Grammy-winning producer/mixer who helped shape some of the most iconical bums in hip hop and R&B. But it was producer/engineer Bob Power who ultimately forged an enduring creative partnership with Tribe, one that would continue though the completion of P eopl e’ s I nstinctive Tr avels and subsequent albums. P eopl e’ s I nstinctive Tr avelswas recorded at Calliope Studios (and to some extent, Battery Studios )in New York, by a team of engineers that included Anthony Saunders, Shane Faber and Tim Latham. They made some demos, which caught the attention of Jive Records. They started writing rhymes that captured the essence of growing up black teenage boys in ’80s New York City. Their idols were LL Cool J and Run DMC.Īs the hip hop sounds of the streets gravitated toward radio, the teenagers went crate-digging after school at record stores in the Village, mining the dark, obscure corners of rock and jazz to build beats.

Ali Shaheed Muhammad, Jarobi White, Malik “Phife Dawg” Taylor, and Kamaal “Q-Tip” Fareed had grown up in Queens and Brooklyn, listening to their parents’ jazz records and the sounds of neighborhood DJs from their fire escapes. The album was recorded in 1989 as hip hop was entering into its first Golden Age. It was innovative, soulful-a party record with a conscience. The record, with its intricate collages of samples that drew from a wide palette of ’70s jazz and rock, its youthful, exuberant energy, and its positive, Afrocentric message, helped lay the foundation for a new school of hip hop. Things settle in for a few bars, and Q-Tip asks, in that buttery drawl, “Can I Kick It?” Yes, you can.Įveryone’s favorite hip hop anthem was the third single released off A Tribe Called Quest’s debut album, P eopl e’ s I nstinctive Tr avels and the P aths of R h ythm, released on Jive in 1990. Then, that greasy, jazzy drums sample lays down the groove. You know it the moment it starts: that unmistakable bassline, Lou Reed’s“Walk on the Wild Side” recast as the slinky pulse of a head-bobbing hip hop classic.