A Tribe Called Quest Honor Phife Dawg During Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction: ‘Wish You Were Here’

A Tribe Called Quest was finally inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on Saturday, recognizing one of hip-hop’s most influential groups after a nearly decade-long wait since they first became eligible in 2015.

Tribe was inducted after getting passed on the ballot in 2022 and 2023, now joining a slowly growing list of rap legends in the hall, including Jay-Z, Eminem, Public Enemy, and NWA. Their exclusion — reflecting the Hall’s wider historic issues with recognizing hip-hop — had caused some controversy among Tribe’s contemporaries, with Consequence calling the group a “family tree” to hip-hop. “This the tree that brought you G.O.O.D Music,” he said. “This the tree that allowed Common Sense to be Common. This is the right-hand man to De La Soul. Stop me when I’m lying. What we not gonna do is keep subjugating that name, A Tribe Called Quest, to a white popularity contest.”

The group had broken up and reunited multiple times since their debut album People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm dropped in 1990, calling it quits for good in 2017 after group MC Phife Dawg died a year prior. Two of the three remaining members — Q-Tip and Jarobi White (Ali Shaheed Muhammad was not present) — accepted their induction in person in Cleveland on Saturday, while Phife was honored posthumously.

White: I don’t I don’t have any stories. All I have is gratitude. What I’m saying thank you. Thank you. Tribe fans everywhere, we wouldn’t be nothing without you. Ali Shaheed, I love you, boy. Wish you was here. Let me give it up right quick. Give it up for Phife’s mom and dad right here. 

Captain, what’s up? I love you to death. I love you to death, man, and thank you for tutelage, support, the gift of this life. I wouldn’t be the same without all of my brothers. You know what I mean? I’m really glad and proud to call you guys my big brothers. Mom and dad. My dad, thank you for structure; Mama Joan, thank you for teaching me the streets. My mother, Joyce, thank you for introducing me to music. My grandparents, South Carolina, Charleston, you know what I’m saying, and that’s it. Oh, my son AJ, give it up for my son, grateful to you for showing me what a man is. You know, I’m saying — super proud of you.

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Q-Tip: This is crazy. I can’t believe it. Well, I’m gonna have a preamble before I read. Part of the preamble is, it’s just an honor to be here with the fellow inductees. Miss Dionne, you were a staple in my household. Mr. Frampton, you as well. Thank you so much. My sister used to make me sing your songs and stuff and torture me. You know the M to the MC5, of course, Mary J Blige, my sister, my kindred sister. But you know, there’s so many people for us to thank, so I’m going to say this, we’re going to probably post all the names on IG. So stay tuned because if I say every name up here, then It’ll just be ridiculous. But I want to definitely thank our families, our rocks. Rest in Peace to our brother Phife Dawg. I wish you were here.  

I’m just going to read this really quick, if I may, because I wrote it, and I’m not going to let this go to waste because I lost sleep, and I couldn’t really figure it out, and I’m extremely nervous. But first of all, we thank the omnipotent, the light of the world, God, Yahweh, Christ. We give love and reverence to that entity, the Supreme Creator to which we, as artists, mainly emulate. We conjure melodies, harmonies, poetry in safe havens of garages, woodsheds, basements, bedrooms, and street corners.

To the latter, it has been the terrain for many of us to do Whoppers and Hip-Hoppers, and yes, to all of you pseudo-historians who might be confused about the corner opera in the corner hip hop is saying and rap the blues. And what’s more rock and roll than the blues? But just like our predecessors, we had to find spaces on the outskirts of cities and towns, from a southern sun house off Robert Johnson Crossroads to a transformed room in a hood tenement on Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. The need to express burns in us with an art-fueled determination. A spark. The spark that embers within many of us in this room, and the spark that burned within the four of us boys in 1985 in New York City. 

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And here’s a quick story: My older sister, Gwen, who’s here, used to date this dude named Skeff Anslem, and he was the engineer for this guy named Jazzy Jay, who was a great DJ producer and was a part of an organization in New York City called the Zulu Nation. If anybody saw the movie Warriors out there, that was about the Zulus. Before they were Zulus, they were called the Black Spades. So, they were a transformed New York City gang that changed their lives around toward art and music. Jazzy Jay was one of the preeminent figures, and my sister used to date his homeboy. So you know I was going to be on her nerves, you know. So I begged my sister to have Skeff and Jazzy come to see my five-man crew at a rehearsal space in New York City called Giant Studios. It was on 14th Street and Sixth Avenue. And ironically, we were all about 14, except for Jarobi, he was 13. After Jazzy and Skeff heard us do like two records, he stopped us, and he was like – I’m sorry for this, Miss Dionne, I may say something – but Jazzy was like, “Y’all, little niggas is good, but your voice, little niggas, that that shit needs to change. It needs to mature.” But my voice hasn’t matured since I’ve been 15. 

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But that didn’t deter us because we had that spark I spoke about and that fire, and we had a destiny to fulfill. One more story: that destiny was set in place because we heard Rapper’s Delight in 1979, and my best friend in the whole world was Malik “Phife Dawg” Taylor. We saw each other every day at school, at church, you know, and we got to call each other and talk about the game, or talk about what record we heard or whatever. We were nine years old, and after Malik heard the record, Phife heard the record, when he was nine, he was like, “Yo, we could do that too!” And I was like, “Okay,” because I was nine and I had that spark, and I followed his spark. And that spark is something I think that we all have in us and that we should all in this world try to do everything we can to secure our own personal spark. That’s what Tribe was about. No matter where you stood socially, how you looked, how you sounded, whether you were first generation here or you’re from somewhere else, we were just a mixed bag who wanted to be Grandmaster Flash as much as we wanted to be Kool in the Gang and Bob Marley, Earth, Wind and Fire. As much as we wanted to be Public Enemy and Run DMC and LL Cool J, we wanted to be the Beatles. That was just how we were tempered.

But I want to wrap it up and just say thank you so much to our families.