Phife Dawg’s ‘Forever’ – Rolling Stone

Any posthumous album is, by its nature, haunting — the sound of ghosts on wax perpetually floating in a state between unfinished undertaking and final-ever recordings. However within the case of Phife Dawg, who died in 2016 at the age of 45 from diabetes problems, that purgatorial sense feels notably merciless. On the time of his loss of life, the rapper born Malik Taylor had reunited — albeit tenuously — with New York hip-hop icons A Tribe Known as Quest. That reunion led to Tribe’s last album, the superb We Received It From Right here … Thank You 4 Your Service, launched in late 2016, eight months after Phife’s loss of life.

Listening to We Received It From Right here, it’s apparent Phife Dawg nonetheless had lots to offer. In truth, the celebrated rapper had spent his last decade molding a treasure trove of unreleased rhymes into what he hoped can be a follow-up to his solely solo album, 2000’s Air flow: Da LP. It was by no means accomplished, however his household — alongside enterprise and musical collaborator Dion Liverpool — has lastly completed the job with Eternally, which arrives six years to the day he died.

In contrast to different posthumous albums, wherein estates and relations use guesswork and imprecise guideposts to find out what the artist wished, on this case Phife left, as Liverpool famous in a latest interview, “quite a bit of blueprints and clues.” Detailed notebooks included not simply lyrics and tune concepts however names of producers and visitor stars and different particular particulars. Liverpool estimated two-thirds of the album was both completed or close to fleshed out earlier than he even stepped in.

Eternally, which boasts appearances by Phife’s ATCQ associate Q-Tip, in addition to Busta Rhymes, Redman, Rapsody, and De la Soul’s Maseo, and manufacturing by 9th Surprise and Nottz, exists in an alternate hip-hop universe the place the style stopped after the Soulquarians broke up within the early 2000s. The spirit of Phife’s pal and collaborator J Dilla looms nearly as massive as Phife himself; the late hip-hop visionary, who died in 2006, produced the lyrically dexterous “Nutshell, Pt. 2,” and Dilla acolytes are readily available emulating his vibe (see the Potatohead Folks-produced “French Kiss Trois,” that includes Dilla’s brother Illa J). On the chilling “Expensive Dilla,” Phife eulogizes J Dilla on the verse, whereas Q-Tip makes use of the refrain to do the identical to Phife.

Phife Dawg was all the time, amongst many different issues, an unapologetic golden-age nostalgist, and on Eternally he can typically be heard reminiscing on what he thought-about hip-hop’s glory days. “Wow Issue” shouts out pioneers like Huge Daddy Kane, Rakim, and Boogie Down Productions. “I’m that Seventies child,” he rhymes. “Reppin’ hip-hop for the Nineties.” But it surely’s his calls to the long run that find yourself being probably the most inadvertently heartfelt. “Can’t wait to assist my unborn learn they first e-book,” he rhymes on “Fallback.” “Or daddy’s little woman asking, ‘Daddy, what’s a hook?’”

Eternally will be an emotionally brutal hear. Opener “Cheryl’s Huge Son” options a poignant cassette recording of Phife as a toddler, whereas a spoken-word poem from his mom Cheryl Boyce-Taylor anchors “Spherical Irving Excessive Faculty” (“Phife was the bluеs, hip-hop, and sizzling jazz,” she sings). But it surely’s album nearer “Eternally” that can perpetually stand out as a gut-punch for followers of the nimble rapper. Phife recorded the verse simply three days earlier than his loss of life, working by way of his historical past with A Tribe Known as Quest — “4 brothers with the mic and a dream” — and eschewing their fractious previous in favor of an olive department: “I like you muhfuckers, true spit, all details/Deep in my soul, I consider what can be shall be/Requiem for a Tribe.”

For anybody who watched the group’s Beats, Rhymes and Life documentary with a deep pang of remorse and disappointment, it’s each laborious and admirable to listen to strains from “Eternally,” like “If I might do it yet again/I’d sit down with my pal/Was zero purpose why this shit needed to finish.” In Eternally, we hear each a middle-aged man trying again on his successes and failures each personally and professionally, and an artist unknowingly confronting mortality and making an attempt to make peace on the finish.