Albums

The Low End TheoryReleased: 1991A Tribe Called QuestATCQ

LINER NOTES: A Tribe Called Quest, The Low End Theory (1991)

By: Mark Anthony Neal

You might think of the late 1980s and early 1990s as Hip-Hop’s most wide open period, premised in part by the national circulation of a sound born and raised in the Afro-Caribbeanized Bronx (the actual mixtape of that moment as analog social media)--success less the matter of a Blueprint--though KRS-One did in fact drop one in the summer of 1989, the same summer that Public Enemy told u that it was was “a number, another summer...sound of the funky drummer” from the metaphoric theme-song for Spike Lee’s attempted takeover of the business of producing relevant cinematic images of Blackness. 

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