On the heels of DJing his own Beats 1 Radio Show, Q-Tip recently showed fans how to DJ a set and really brought out a lot of Hip Hop history in the process.
Recently speaking with Complex about the set, among other topics, the former Tribe Called Quest producer and emcee spoke about not only Hip Hop history but where current-day occurrences fit into that history.
When asked about the Drake and Meek Mill beef, Tip says that more important than the details of the battle between the two emcees is the conversation it sparks.
“This is not about Meek. It’s about the culture,” he said when asked about the back-and-forth. “I want this to be something that spurs conversation and interest. I want people to be like, ‘How come you didn’t put this? How come he put too much of that?’ I want to see people talk about it. I want to see people engage in it. Like, ‘I didn’t even realize he said that!’ I want people to have that kind of conversation. You can hit certain subjects and it’s just as fresh as when they first said it. When you listen to, ‘Just A Friendly Game of Baseball,’ it’s just so timely. It was so ill. It was really unique and it was a specific innovation to those lines, those bars, that choice of words, the cadence. To have that living next to ‘Fuck niggas up, laugh about it’ is just interesting. The concepts of it all are really interesting.”
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Q-Tip also says that Kendrick Lamar’s verse on “Control” took him back to the early days of Hip Hop beef and cited some old Queensbridge lore involving Roxanne Shante’s beef with numerous emcees during the late 1980s.
“I was just happy for that. I love that,” he said. “I felt like, as MCs and artists in hip-hop, we’ve kind of strayed a little bit from that. I think the last person who called a whole bunch of people out was probably LL or Shante. Roxanne Shante is just a beast. I feel like she’s really unheralded. She had her first battle when she was 10. Her mother took her to this contest because there was a prize of $50. The DJ had to take the records out of the crate for her to stand on top of the crate so she could battle this dude. All she was battling were dudes. And she won. She had this crazy aptitude to come off the top of the head.”
In addition, Q-Tip spoke about a lot of his early influences growing up in New York and says Slick Rick, Kool Mo Dee, Melle Mel, Rakim and others really sparked what he was doing early on. Read the full interview here.
For additional Drake – Meek Mill coverage, watch the following DX Daily:
