Subconsciously, I’ve known I should be more familiar with the discography of A Tribe Called Quest for a long while. I try to be knowledgeable about music from before my time, and knowing so little about one of the most seminal and revered rap acts of all time, is something I should’ve amended by now. That said, I’m only twenty-two years old, and I’m interested in many different genres. There is a lot of music I feel like I need to catch up on. I just started listening to Bjork’s old stuff for the first time last week (shit is fire, btw). Midnight Marauders came out on November 9, exactly seven days before I was born. Somehow, socially conscious jazz-rap didn’t catch my ear as a toddler. After that, the paucity of music from any of the group’s members meant that their presence was never felt in my life, outside of listicles ranking musicians and albums by some arbitrary metric. Those lists can feel like homework to me sometimes, and I’ve never been a fan of homework. So A Tribe Called Quest became very much out of sight, out of mind for me.

Fast forward to 2016, and that eighteen-year gap between albums actually became a selling point for me. Due to the speed and vastness of the internet, albums are very rarely treated as events anymore. But the wait, combined with the untimely passing of Phife Dawg (the outpouring after his death really got to me), made the album feel like it was more than just a collection of songs. This mere existence of We Got it from Here... Thank You 4 Your service meant something to a lot of people. The excitement of other people was incepted into my brain.

And my first reaction to A Tribe Called Quest? “Hooollllllyyyyy shit, this is heavenly.” For an album made by a bunch of dudes in their forties, the vibrancy on show here is incredible. They clearly had a lot of fun making this. “Dis Generation” feels so playful to me. The way Q-Tip, Phife, Jairobi, and Busta pass the same verse off to each other would make Gregg Popovich cry a single tear Denzel-in-Glory style. The words are substantial as hell, too. Phife Dawg’s verses exacerbate what a shame it is that he’s already gone. He was so good at rapping! The songs where the rest of the group say goodbye are an appropriate mix of beautiful and sad. Songs like “We the People” and “The Killing Season” would be stirring any time of the year, especially during a week where an inexperienced fascist became the leader of this wonderful country called America. The greatness of this album keeps the anxiety and despair I’ve felt since Tuesday night out of my conscious mind for a little while. I needed that.

The production is generally fabulous throughout. It feels retrograde and futuristic at the same time. Every song has so many levels to them. “Solid Wall of Sound” is smooth as hell. The beat switch in “Mobius” is godly. The daring choices in the instrumentation reminded my millennial ears of Kanye and Kendrick Lamar, especially. I retroactively feel the influence of Tribe’s work in a lot of my favorite hip-hop artists. I have some catching up to do. RIP Don Juice. Thanks for the art.