The rapper who left a legendary hip-hop group to become a chef
It’s every aspiring young musician’s dream: to release a groundbreaking debut album that brings you huge levels of success and acclaim. But not everyone who achieves the dream is left feeling totally satisfied. There is more to life than just music.
With the release of People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm in 1990, A Tribe Called Quest announced themselves as a driving force of alternative hip-hop. Led by Q-Tip, the group, completed by Ali Shaheed Muhammad, Phife Dawg and Jarobi White, opened up new possibilities for how hip-hop could be done.
But for Jarobi, there was another path that called to him. He decided to take a step back from his hip-hop group so he could focus on another of his passions. He went to culinary school to train as a chef.
Jarobi had been with A Tribe Called Quest since the very beginning, when they were all teenagers. He lived close to Phife Dawg and the two boys became friends, before, eventually, Phife introduced him to Q-Tip. The group hung out and did what kids do, playing basketball and videogames things like that, and they soon developed another interest.
“Around the age of 13,” Jarobi reflected to the DayAfterDayDC blog in 2011, “it was like, ‘Yo man, let’s make a rap group up together,’ because Phife always used to rhyme. His mom was a poet, so he was always good with words. I used to do the beat-box.”
The trio initially showed off their developing skills in talent shows, but, fairly quickly, they started to take things more seriously. When Ali Shaheed Muhammad joined, they started to record demos and, by the time Jarobi was 17, they released People’s Instinctive Travels. His role on the record wasn’t necessarily as central as the others’, but he unquestionably helped to set its tone.
“What the music is, I guess that’s what my personality is,” he told Slate in 2011. “I’m free-spirited, witty, biting sometimes.”
Jaorbi believes he was “a tour guide” on People’s Instinctive Travels, introducing the other members of the group to listeners and otherwise “providing the vibe backbone.” But for album number two, The Low End Theory, he stepped forward to contribute some actual verses. These, in the end, were cut, and Jaorbi left the group not long after that to focus on his cooking.
Jarobi insists that there was no bad blood between himself and the rest of the group, and, even though he’d stepped back as a full member, he still contributed to Tribe’s efforts. “The first three albums I was in the studio, doing production and stuff like that,” he claimed to DayAfterDayDC. “The fourth album, my influence kinda slacked off a little bit. The fifth, I came in at the tale end, during the mixing process, but I didn’t have too much to do with the recording of it.”
Jarobi was also present on the group’s sixth and final album We Got It from Here… Thank You 4 Your Service, and, clearly, he is a core part of A Tribe Called Quest’s story. But there’s more to him than the music.
“I can cook anything,” he proclaimed proudly to DayAfterDayDC. “But if I had my own restaurant it would be like a fusion thing, like an Asian-American fusion thing.”