A Tribe Called Quest

While the rise of gangsta rap grabbed both the top of the charts and the tut-tutting news headlines, A Tribe Called Quest ushered in one of hip-hop's most creative eras. Alongside De La Soul, the Queens collective led the influential Native Tongues movement, promoting positive Afrocentric messages and a commitment to musical diversity that reached back to rap pioneers like Afrika Bambaataa and Gil Scott-Heron. But it was the creative delivery of rappers Q-Tip and Phife Dawg that made the band stick out: the conversational rhythms and tricky rhymes of early singles like "Bonita Applebum" and "I Left My Wallet In El Segundo" immediately made most '80s hip-hop sound dated. Early albums like People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm and The Low End Theory sold well to hip-hop diehards but also attracted adventurous alt-rock fans, and Tribe directly inspired not only immediate followers like Arrested Development and Digable Planets, but a later generation ranging from mainstream stars (Common, Talib Kweli) to more underground figures. Further underscoring their historical importance, the group's last two albums featured production work by a young J Dilla, whose work with Q-Tip and Tribe's resident DJ/producer Ali Shaheed Muhammad under the collective name The Ummah gained him his first notice outside his native Detroit. In 2011, 13 years after Tribe's split, actor Michael Rapaport made his directorial debut with the affectionate documentary Beats Rhymes and Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest.