A Tribe Called Quest's Phife Dawg and Jarobi On the Beats, Rhymes & Life Beef and Rap Today

One of the great positive elements in the film is all the love between you guys, especially you two.

Jarobi: Well, this is my brother. There's no way to get around it. From the first two weeks that we met or whatever, we've kind of been together the whole time since 12 years old. That's how it is.

How do you both see the landscape of hip-hop having changed over the years, especially with a film like this, which teaches a new generation about the Native Tongues movement?

Jarobi: When we, in our time and our little place and our little section of hip-hop, it was the streets dictating to everybody else what was going on. Now somebody gets a popular song or whatever and it's become very formulaic. I guess it's just the nature of intellectual minds to try and analyze stuff, and make algorithms -- okay, variable x, y, and z connect and that's a song! So people just shoot for that automatically instead of just pouring out their hearts, like we do. We weren't concerned about records sales, nothing like that. When we walked out of the studio and were met by other rappers, because it was a big community in our day, we wanted them to be like, "Yo, you've got the flyest stuff out of everybody." That's all we want.

What was great about that whole movement was that you all guested on one another's tracks, and it all seemed like such a collaborative community. Do you still feel that exists now?

Phife: It can, but there's so much hating going on nowadays that it's few and far between.

Jarobi: I think that type of thing is a little harder to do nowadays. When everybody comes up with these posses and these crews -- I hate to call people out -- but these crews, it seems very contrived. We just met. It was like, "I like what you do." "I like what you do." "Hey, we have a studio session -- why don't you guys come through?" "Okay, we'll come to the studio session!" It literally started from there. It's not like, "Yo, have my manager call you, we need to collaborate on some records, I'll have my agent call you." No, it wasn't like that. It was just the three groups, plus Monie, Latifah, Brand Nubians, we were all of like minds and wanted to hang out together, and that's all. We weren't concerned with, "Who's the most popular? I've got to have three De La Soul songs on my album for it to sell."

Tribe and that group of musicians always seemed different in that way.

Jarobi: Yeah.

Phife, you mentioned there are more haters in rap now -- what do you mean?

Phife: Same thing Jarobi just said, you've got to go through this person and go through that person and they might really want to say no.

Do you figure that comes from rap becoming commercial?

Jarobi: It has a lot to do with it.

Phife: And being gassed. [Laughs] Getting a big head and stuff like that, until they're brought down to size. But I'm not even saying it to be disrespectful, it's just how it is right now. There are certain people I know I could reach out to and do a nice record with and it wouldn't be forced or anything like that. But as Jarobi said, you don't want to just rock with somebody because they're the hottest thing right now. That becomes old really quick.

Jarobi: You've got to have some synergy, you've got to feel something.

It's interesting to have the both of you here together, because you both eventually pursued outside passions -- cooking and sports. So is there less of an immediate impulse for you to continue with music and make more Tribe albums?

Jarobi: I mean, there's always an immediate necessity to create. And I think we just found other avenues. Unfortunately, the four of us weren't in the same place and the same time to be in the studio making a record worthy of the records that we've made before. So that's why it hasn't happened yet, period.

Phife: It's up in the air, as far as we're recording.

Jarobi: Can never say no.

Phife: Can never say no, but I don't want to say yes and it doesn't happen and I don't want to say no and it happens real quick. As far as my love for sports and his love for cooking, if I may answer that, the grass always looks greener on the other side, and those were our first loves, respectively.

Jarobi: It sounds crazy being as young as we had started but rap was kind of a second thing --

Phife: And we did it for fun! It just turned into livelihood. But sports and cooking? He taught me everything I know about cooking, and I taught him everything he knows about basketball!

Now I'm getting hungry.

Jarobi: Yeah, you got a kitchen?

Phife: I'm getting hungry for NBA season!

Phife, I hear you might be interested in pursuing acting in the near future.

Phife: A little bit. I think my focus is more on being a sports broadcaster, more so than anything else. But if they came to me with a script and I liked it, I'm not turning down anything but my collar. I might turn the collar up, due to character! [Laughs]

Jarobi: I guarantee if he had a venue to do his own half and hour spot...

Phife: I'm doing it right now! It's called The Fanalyst and we do it every Thursday. Right now, I've been doing press and my partner's in New York so I'll call in and give my take on certain things in the world of sports. But once all this is said and done, we'll be doing the split screen, we'll be doing the Skype thing. It's gonna be crazy.

Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest is currently in limited release.

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