Credit: Spotify

It doesn’t get much more hip-hop than Q-Tip. He’s behind one of the greatest rap groups of all time, A Tribe Called Quest, both as an MC and producer, with People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, The Low End Theory, and Midnight Marauders serving as some of the genre’s best projects. Not only that, but his solo works, Amplified and The Renaissance, are classics in their own right.

Q-Tip was born and raised in New York City and had his first experience with hip-hop before the age of 10. It was around the time Grandmaster Flash was prominent, and Tip, now aged 50, can pinpoint the exact moment he encountered rap.

“My mother used to make my sister take me wherever she went,” he told Spin. “My sister is six years older than me, so she was taking me to block parties or jams. This is, like, 1977, ’78, ’79. By then, Grandmaster Flash was a legend in the Bronx.”

His first memory involves hearing a disco song called ‘Hot Shot’ by Karen Young. Q-Tip remembers it being summer and everybody doing “the freak,” which coincided with lyrics from the song: “Hot shot, hot shot, hot.” Released in 1978, it was a record that reached number 67 on the Billboard Hot 100 and 34 on the UK Singles Chart.

“The DJ was bringing it back and forth,” he recalled. “It was really hot outside, and I was a kid, so I related to things in a very simple way, and I remembered that. I just felt like, ‘Wow, what was that?’ Then, when I heard ‘King Tim III (Personality Jock)’ and ‘Rapper’s Delight’ on the same day, I saw everything differently.”

However, there wasn’t a moment of realisation that he wanted to be a rapper at that point. Tip never considered that he could compete with people on that level. Instead, it was his Tribe bandmate, Phife Dawg, who inspired him to pick up a mic after properly playing music from The Sugarhill Gang, who are best known for their classic 1979 hit, ‘Rapper’s Delight‘.

“I was more fascinated because I didn’t have a relationship to music like that,” he said. “I didn’t think I could be in the same setting with the greats, because these were our heroes, so I didn’t really look at it like, ‘I want to do this.’ What made me do it was Phife. After listening to The Sugarhill Gang, he was like, ‘Listen to this, man. They’re rapping.'”

His first time rapping occurred at a family gathering when his mother told him to entertain everyone. Growing up as an African American, it was a common scenario he was used to. “When one of the kids has a special talent, the mother usually puts the child up for entertainment: ‘Go on baby, show ‘em you can do that there,’ or whatever,” he explained in Ice T’s The Art of Rap documentary. “So then, for me, the first time I had an audience was my family. I forget what it was, one drunken weekend with some BBQ.”