A Tribe Called Quest

Midnight Marauders

A collector's item

Review Score:

(10/10)
I struggle to find the words that can sum this album up in a paragraph. As on each of the Tribe's albums, Q-Tips lirics spark the intellectual side of your brain while Fife turns it into a light-hearted affair which has and was the trade mark of this duo for years. What brings this album to the forefront of, and on my list, to the top of any hip-hop album ever produced is the effortless quality Ali Shaheed Muhammed lays down the jazz inspired beats and hooks. I should hope that no one reads the amazon.com "editorial review," as this album represents everything right with hip-hop, and that review represents everything wrong with it. It is true, the entire album flows so consistently with agreeable rhymes and rhythms that not one track can be labeled as the song to download from Napster. But this is the high point of the album, not something that detracts from it. In a world where Ludicrous and 50-cent (and I'm a fan of both) come out with full length albums where one or two songs are worthy of your time and space and the rest is garbage, an album should be praised for its consistent contribution to the auditory world, not criticized because a music novice needs that one song to skip to each time he puts on the album. So, set aside a good hour and a half (maybe 3 so you can listen to it twice) and let this album guide you through one of the most influential and important hip-hop albums that will ever grace vinyl.

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