The story behind A Tribe Called Quest’s ‘Electric Relaxation’
A Tribe Called Quest’s second album, The Low End Theory, had been a big success for the group following its release in 1991, but success, inevitably, comes with its pressures.
Attempting to follow up a truly great album with another can be a stressful endeavour, but Tribe stayed perfectly relaxed about it. Their third record, Midnight Marauders, was apparently created without too much fuss—an attitude that fed perfectly into its second single ‘Electric Relaxation.’
The writing and planning sessions for Midnight Marauders largely played out in, of all places, the basement of Phife Dawg’s grandmother’s house. Given the group’s recent popularity, they might have been expected to push the boat out in terms of where they did their work, but, clearly, they liked the more laid-back atmosphere that the basement offered them. It worked, given that Midnight Marauders, like its preceding album, is now considered to be a classic.
Large Professor was one of the producers who helped on the record, and, in an interview with Billboard in 2016, he recalled how nice it felt to work in that basement. “A lot of the Midnight Marauders album was kind of planned in Phife’s basement,” he said, “and he would just be there chilling, watching a basketball game or something, playing a video game and just listening to the beats, like, ‘Yeah, yeah, I like that right there.’ It was just so casual and cool; he was just a good guy, man, just always inviting.”
Phife also spoke about those basement sessions before he died, highlighting, in particular, the circumstances in which ‘Electric Relaxation’ was created. Speaking of the sample upon which the track is built—a snippet of the jazz organist Ronnie Foster’s song ‘Mystic Brew’—during a 2013 interview with XXL, Phife recalled, “Just that part alone, and then the way Tip put the drums underneath, it was crazy. We used to have equipment in my grandmother’s basement when we were working on Midnight Marauders. I just remember coming home from somewhere—my grandmother gave him a key, the whole nine, he used to just go in and do his thing—I came home from some type of trip and I walked in the kitchen, and you know, he’s in the basement and you could hear the music coming up, and all I heard was that.”
Phife knew that whatever Tip was working on in that moment was special. “I didn’t even say hello to my grandmother or whoever was in the house,” he admitted. “I was just like, ‘Hold on!’ and went downstairs. ‘Yo, what the hell is that?’ He was like, ‘Yo, that shit is crazy, right?’ And it just became what it is now. That’s one of my favourite, favourite, favourite Tribe songs.”
Phife also revealed that he and Tip actually swapped lines for the song, which is certainly a novel way of doing things. “On that record,” he explained, “he wrote my lines and I wrote his—actually, we wrote our own lines, and when we recorded, we traded. That’s why the whole back and forth, you know what I mean?”
The track was clearly put together in a spirit of play, which comes through even now when you listen to it. Perhaps if it hadn’t been conceived of in a basement, the sound wouldn’t ever have been quite so serene.