Billboard is celebrating the 2010s with essays on the 100 songs that we feel most define the decade that was — the songs that both shaped and reflected the music and culture of the period — with help telling their stories from some of the artists, behind-the-scenes collaborators and industry insiders involved.
The “soundtrack to the resistance,” as Epic Chairman/CEO Sylvia Rhone describes it, arrived on Nov. 11 2016, just two days after America woke up to the realization that Donald Trump was about to become its 45th president. After an 18-year hiatus, New York rap pioneers A Tribe Called Quest returned to hip-hop’s vanguard with the release of “We the People,” the lead single from the group’s sixth and final album, We Got It From Here…Thank You 4 Your Service, and one of the most searing protest songs of the Trump era.
“It was as if A Tribe Called Quest had a crystal ball, dropping the album the very next day and channeling a vision that would unite us,” says Rhone.
Opening with the heavy thump of the drum break from Black Sabbath’s “Behind The Wall of Sleep,” an air-raid siren blast and a foreboding synthesizer riff, “We the People” never actually mentions Trump. Instead it calls out the toxic, misogynist and racist worldview he was espousing. “All you black folks, you must go/ All you Mexicans, you must go/ And all you poor folks, you must go,” the group’s leader Q-Tip practically croons. “Muslims and gays, boy, we hate your ways/ So all you bad folks, you must go.”
Although Trump was definitely on Q-Tip’s mind, he says the decision to not name-check the incoming president was intentional. “We wanted to make [the song] more of an overarching premise and not an exact indictment of anything,” he says. “We just spoke to the people — black, white, gay, poor — and to different religions. We tried to cover it all in three-and-a-half minutes.”
The track also envisions a future where gender equality is the norm. “Dreaming of a world that’s equal for women with no division,” spits Tribe co-founder Phife Dawg in what would be one of his final verses. He died at the age of 45 during the recording of We Got It From Here… from complications related to diabetes.
Gloria Kaba, who first worked with Q-Tip in 2013 and was hired as the assistant engineer on We Got It From Here… says she started at AbLab, the recording studio that the rapper had built at his New Jersey home, in December 2015, just a few weeks after Tribe reunited for a performance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. “The energy was so genuine and positive,” she says.
“Everybody was amped,” says David Kennedy, the sound and mixing engineer who had first worked with Tribe on its previous album, 1998’s The Love Movement, after which the group had not so amicably parted ways. “Phife and Tip had gone through their changes and come back together… The mood was buoyant.”
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Kaba recalls Q-Tip first playing a demo of the song for the recording and production team. “It set the tone for the album. He had a verse sketched, so the energy of the track was already there,” she says. “We were watching the news all the time and following the political race… It just seemed like a very fitting concept to drive the song. I remember Phife listening and there was an immediate connection. Once he put his verse on and Tip finished the chorus, it was a no brainer.”
For producer Blair Wells, a New Yorker who remembered the newspaper ads that Trump took out in 1989 calling for reinstatement of the death penalty after the arrests of the Central Park Five, five black and Latino teenagers who were wrongly convicted of the rape of a white jogger in Central Park, the song resonated with that injustice. “That’s the first moment that I became aware of that part of Trump’s brain,” he says.
When Phife died unexpectedly on March 22, 2016, Wells says work on We Got It From Here… took a backseat as friends of the Tribe arrived at the studio to pay their respects. “It’s not like we took off and went our separate ways,” he says. “We stuck together to get through.”
Phife’s passing hit Q-Tip hard. After falling out at the end of the ‘90s, the two men – who met when they were four – had bonded once again during their work on We Got It From Here… “I had a great degree of difficulty finishing the album because we had done it together and he wasn’t here to see it to the end,” he says quietly.
Kennedy says that Phife died without finalizing all of his vocals for the album. “We had to make do with what we had, but we felt he would have wanted us to go forward with it. We had come so far and felt that it would be healing.”
We Got It From Here… was completed fittingly on election day. “We worked through the night mixing three songs, and I remember leaving the studio around 7 or 8 a.m. and going straight to the voting booth,” Kaba says.
Four nights after the election, the surviving members of Tribe appeared on Saturday Night Live, where they performed an electric version of “We the People.” Introduced by the show’s host and longtime champion of the group, Dave Chappelle, Q-Tip exhorted the studio audience to raise a fist. “We are all one. We are the people,” he said before he and Jairobi White performed the song while DJ Ali Shaheed Muhammad manned the decks. During Phife’s recorded verse, a banner unfurled that depicted a photograph of the late rapper’s face atop a painted body with outstretched hands and a window into his heart.
That night, A Tribe Called Quest sounded prescient, but three years later, Q-Tip says, “I can’t take credit for any kind of calculated philosophical engineering.” Rather, he says, “It was God’s timing that the [song] came out when he was elected; that we did Saturday Night Live that same week; that Dave Chappelle was there. It was just all Divine order, man.”
In December, “We The People” would rise to No. 23 on Billboard’s Hot Rap Songs chart and No. 77 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was also included in a medley of Tribe’s best-known songs when the group closed out the 2017 Grammy Awards, with support from Anderson .Paak and Busta Rhymes. The latter made news that night when he dubbed Trump “President Agent Orange” and thanked him for “perpetuating all of the evil that you’ve been perpetuating throughout the United States.”
Reminded of the moment, Q-Tip gives a little laugh. “It was show business, it was rock ‘n’roll, it was hip-hop,” he says. “[Trump] calls people Pocahontas, shifty Schiff. He’s got names for everybody — so what’s good for the goose, right?”
