FIVE foot assassin



Lighters up.






Phife has passed.



Him and Q-tip are pretty much the reason i thought i was black for an entire decade, and when that crumbled in a wet fart of dawning realization, what i was left with was a hangover that still makes me feel like a 5 year old whenever i get into a conversation with a black person. Tribe did that to me.







Phife's the one in the middle. He was that short.



Could there be any more wince-inducing evidence of my middle-class white-kid delusion than a review i wrote of Beats, Rhymes and Life... fifteen years ago? This is some back in the salad days shit, when uploading anything onto the internet was the work of three days minimum. Nothing i say in the below paragraph makes any sense whatsoever. A 9 out of 10 strike rate for writing authoritatively on golden age hip-hop with an email address like that is also, for want of a better word, mystifying.






But it is comforting evidence that Tribe gave me a boner back then, and still does, and Phife Dawg was a big part of that. Him and Q-tip trading bars, the way their voices and their flow clashed but synched so perfectly in some explosion of yin-yang dopeness, was so heavy. Fuck it i'm starting to sound like i did back in '01, which without doubt has the potential to ruin my day so so i'll shut up.










Beginning of this vid is so heavy.






Their best tune.






My favourite.






*



What is dying?



A ship sails and i stand watching until she fades on the horizon and someone at my side says
She is gone. Gone where?
Gone from my sight, that is all;
She is just as large as when i saw her.
The diminished size, and total loss of sight is in me, not in her, and just at the moment when someone at my side says she is gone there are others who are watching her coming,
and other voices take up the glad shout.
There she comes!



And that is dying.



R I P e e e z i e


2 comments:

  1. 'The five-foot assassin made it all ok for me. He single-handedly sorted out all of my confusion, and boy was there a lot. I was a 14 year old jewish kid living in Boulder, Colorado trying to make sense of my raging obsession with hiphop......'

    http://www.etmusiquepourtous.com/2016/03/23/rip-phife-dawg/

    ReplyDelete