De La Soul, the Roots Honor Tribe Called Quest at Rock Hall of Fame

A Tribe Called Quest had a parade of longtime friends and collaborators — and fellow hip hop legends — hit the stage to celebrate their induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame on Saturday. Queen Latifah, De La Soul, Common, Busta Rhymes and the Roots all paid tribute to the Queens group.

They started the performance with Latifah, dressed in all black, rapping the group’s iconic “Can I Kick It?” with Black Thought and De La Soul’s Posdnous quickly jumping into “Check the Rhime.” Common joined them for “Bonita Applebum” before Busta Rhymes jumped in for the “Scenario” remix before transitioning into the original version from Low End Theory.

Watching from the sidelines for the performance were two of Tribe’s surviving members Q-Tip and Jarobi White. Ali Shaheed Muhammad didn’t attend Saturday, and Phife Dawg — who died in 2016 of complications from diabetes — was posthumously honored.

The performance recognized Tribe’s legacy of alt- and avant-minded hip hop experiments, which started when the group came together as kids in New York in the Eighties. (Q-Tip and Phife had known each other since they were toddlers.) After recording a couple of demos as teenagers, they released their groundbreaking debut album People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm in 1990, which quickly established them as imaginative hip hop innovators. They continued with more albums that now stand as classics: The Low End Theory in 1991, Midnight Marauders in 1993, Beats, Rhymes and Life in 1996, and The Love Movement in 1998.

Saturday’s tribute was also a nod to Tribe’s place at the center of the Native Tongues, a New York-based collective active in the Eighties and Nineties that helped pave the way for everything from neo-soul to conscious rap. Some of the collective’s most prominent members included Latifah and De La Soul, making their Rock Hall tribute a particularly special reunion.

Dave Chappelle, who inducted Tribe into the Hall Saturday night, said that “music was never the same” after Tribe released Low End Theory.

“Tribe has always been about togetherness. On their way up during their ascension, they helped form or found what hip-hop calls the Native Tongues, which included De La Soul and the Jungle Brothers and Queen Latifah and Moni love and Black Sheep,” he said. “And all these bands, in their own way, changed our music and our culture really forever. I know this is the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but this movement in hip hop was the birth of so many great artists, and it started with these men sitting at this table.”

The members of A Tribe Called Quest went their separate ways in 1998, though they reunited a few times in the 2000s. (The 2011 documentary Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest chronicled the foursome’s rise to fame and the behind-the-scenes tension that trailed their later years together.) Their final album We Got It from Here… Thank You 4 Your Service came out in 2016 following Phife Dawg’s death. It included features from Jack White, Kendrick Lamar, and Elton John, plus longtime collaborators like Rhymes.