Until recently, the odds of the Cubs winning the World Series and a Donald Trump presidency seemed slim if not fantastical, but still more substantial than the existence of a new A Tribe Called Quest album.
Despite sporadic reunion tours over the past decade, the Golden Age hip-hop legends were destined for permanent dissolution, with Q-Tip and Phife Dawg living on opposite coasts and harboring seemingly irreconcilable grievances. Those were captured in all their tense combativeness in the 2011 documentary, “Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest.”
But in the aftermath of November’s “Tonight Show” performance commemorating the 25th anniversary of their debut, the group covertly re-formed and embarked on a path that ultimately produced their best album since 1993’s “Midnight Marauders.”
The brilliance of the new “We Got It From Here: Thank You 4 Your Service” stems partially from its ability to serve multiple purposes. Foremost, it functions as a requiem for the greatest sidekick this side of Scottie Pippen, Phife, who died this spring at 45 due to complications from diabetes. But it’s also a caustic political screed against the xenophobic and bigoted forces that helped elect Trump, and somehow still a celebration of the chemistry, musical adventurousness and irrepressible joy that made Tribe the platonic ideal of a rap group.