Image via Complex Original
Q-Tip was born 44 years ago in Harlem, New York, then moved to Queens shortly after. He attended Murry Bergtraum High School in Manhattan, alongside such other notable hip-hop artists as Brother J from X-Clan and members of the Jungle Brothers. But his own career took off when he and childhood friend Phife linked up with Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Jarobi to form A Tribe Called Quest, who recorded some of hip-hop's most well-regarded albums: Low End Theory, and Midnight Mauraders in particular.
This, you already know.
What don't you know about Q-Tip? He's enigmatic, and hasn't done all that many interviews—although he's opened up in recent years, even sitting down with Chairman Mao for a two-hour session for Red Bull. Nonetheless, there are plenty of facts that folks just don't know about Tribe's primary beatmaker...oops, just gave one away.
Without further ado, here are 20 Things You Didn't Know About Q-Tip.
Ken Duro Ifill—a famous engineer and CEO of Desert Storm Records—interned with Q-Tip during The Infamous sessions.
Q-Tip engineered a number of the tracks on Mobb Deep's The Infamous-and helped negotiate between the main engineer and the group. Q-Tip ended up mixing about "five, six" records and produced three others on the album.
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Q-Tip liked to stack drums in the studio when producing Tribe albums, laying different drum sounds on top of each other.
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Dilla met Q-Tip backstage at Lollapallooza in 1994, when Dilla and T3 were managed by Detroit Piston John Salley.
Amp Fiddler put Q-Tip onto J. Dilla. "The first thing I saw was his smile," Q-Tip told Chairman Mao at a RedBull Lecture. Once Tip heard the Slum Village demo Dilla gave him, they put together the Ummah production team: D'Angelo, Tip, Ali, Raphael Saadiq, and Dilla.
[via Vibe and RedBull]
MC Hammer dissed Q-Tip on The Funky Headhunter.
Ostensibly, this was because of the close of "Check the Rhime": "What you say Hammer? Proper Rap is not pop, if you call it that then stop." (Hammer had just done a KFC commercial.) The song was called "Break Em Off Somethin Proper" and is little known to this day, probably because as disses go, saying Q-Tip "couldn't flow if he was a river" is just...wrong.
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"Keep It Moving" was a response to MC Hammer.
"He thought that I was saying that HE was pop. He was like the most iconic figure in Hip Hop (at the time) and people were calling his music Pop. So it got misconstrued. He started dissing, then I said something," Tip told Moovmnt.com. "At the time he was starting this whole phrase "playa hater." That term came from (East) Oakland, so it was lots of his people saying that 'hater, hater, hater.' That's where the term first came from, so I was speaking specifically to Hammer (on "Keep It Moving") because it came from him and his crew. So it was a little thing but we sorted it out."
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In 1993, Q-Tip was attacked by members of Wreckx-n-Effect ("Rumpshaker") and gets a black eye.
Wreckx-n-Effect was a group that originated with New Jack Swing pioneer Teddy Riley; it's rumored that they were angry about Phife's lyric "Strictly hardcore tracks/Not a new jack swing" from the song "Jazz (We've Got)."
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Much of the pre-production for Tribe's debut album was done at the house of Deee-lite member Towa Tei.
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Big Daddy Kane let Q-Tip hear his single "Raw" before it was released.
"Q-Tip meets Big Daddy Kane outside famed club the Latin Quarter; Kane invites Q-Tip and Afrika from the Jungle Brothers into his limo and lets them hear his classic single "Raw" for the first time."
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Q-Tip and Phife knew each other from the time they were babies.
They first met when they were two years old. Later on: "Q-Tip's mother attends the same church as Phife's grandmother. Phife attends the church's private school, which Q-Tip joins in third grade, and they become close friends."
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Although the beats on the first few Tribe albums are credited to the group, they were almost all produced by Q-Tip himself.
"I did all of it," he said in a recent interview. "Except for where Skeff Anselm's noted."
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Q-Tip co-wrote D'Angelo's "Left & Right."
The now-legendary R&B album included production and songwriting from a variety of Ummah affiliates; Q-Tip in particular was responsible for working on "Left & Right."
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In 1998, a fire destroy Q-Tip's home, computer, and a huge music collection.
Q-Tip and his roommate, Khalil Moses, smelled smoke early in the morning of Saturday, February 8, 1998. They both escaped his New Jersey home, but Q-Tip's record collection was demolished, and he lost music he'd already recorded in his basement studio. ''I am happy that everyone is all right, but I just had so much stuff, and now it's destroyed,'' he said to the Times at the time. ''I am going to have to start all over.'' This would later inspire him to begin taking piano lessons and learning more about music theory.
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Q-Tip once had a hit out on his life.
At least according to his song "Do It, See It, Be It," a bonus track from his solo album Amplified. "Had a hit on my life, he thought I screwed his wife."
Q-Tip produced Mariah Carey's megasmash single "Honey."
Well, co-produced, alongside Puffy and Stevie J. Nonetheless, "Honey" was massive, Mariah's third single to debut at the top of the Hot 100. The song flips classic hip-hop tracks "Hey DJ" by the World Famous Supreme Team and "Body Rock" by the Treacherous Three.
Ali Shaheed Muhammad first knew Q-Tip as the kid who used to rap Jimmy Spicer's "Adventures of Super Rhyme" to himself in high school.
No word on whether or not he could rap all fifteen minutes.
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Q-Tip was responsible for informing Kanye West about blood diamonds in Sierra Leone.
Kanye: "Mark Romanek, the director that did Jay's '99 Problems,' and Q-Tip both brought up blood diamonds. They said, 'That's what I think about when I hear diamonds. I think about kids getting killed, getting amputated in West Africa.' And Q-Tip's like, 'Sierra Leone,' and I'm like, 'Where?' And I remember him spelling it out for me and me looking on the Internet and finding out more. I think that was just one of those situations where I just set out to entertain, but every now and then God taps me on the shoulder and says, 'Yo, I want you to do this right here,' so he'll place angels in my path and one angel will lead to another angel and it's like a treasure hunt or something. And I finally found the gold mine, which was the video 'Diamonds (From Sierra Leone).'"
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Between "Amplified" and 2008, Q-Tip recorded 500 songs.
And 200 had vocals. Most of these, obviously, have never been released.
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Q-Tip, accompanying Nicole Kidman, was almost ejected from the premiere of "The Hours" by a publicist who thought he wasn't supposed to be there.
At the time, Tip and Kidman were rumored to be an item: "At the moment he was sitting by himself with a media power couple on either side—News Corp's Rupert Murdoch and wife Wendy to the left, and Viacom's Sumner Redstone and his lady friend on the right," wrote Fox News' Roger Friedman at the time.
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Q-Tip's original stage name was "MC Love Child."
Yes, he really went by "MC Love Child." Q-Tip had just been a high school nickname, coined by Baby Bam from the Jungle Brothers. "All the girls started calling me that, so I just said fuck it," he once told an interviewer.
