Consequence Reveals A Tribe Called Quest's SNL Backstory

A positive sweep of press, euphoria revolving around Phife Dawg’s passing and of course, a dope ass album all recently contributed to A Tribe Called Quest nabbing their first Billboard No. 1 album in 20 years.

Consequence recently stopped by the DXHQ to chop it up on #DXLive with the DX Staff and breezed through his favorite tracks from We Got It from Here … Thank You 4 Your Service.

To Hip Hop heads and ATCQ die-hards, the noticeable absence of Ali Shaheed Muhammad in the liner notes and press run was hard to overlook. Cons addressed the topic with, “Ali is a member of A Tribe Called Quest. I think Ali [was working] on some projects. That’s probably more of a Q-Tip question but I know he was doing the Luke Cage soundtrack. He was with us for Saturday Night Live so there wasn’t any outright static or (anything).”

The Cons also talks about how Tip’s favorite song from the album, “Space Program,” was actually released as a completely altered version. “Space Program went through a lot of different changes. There was another beat to it. There was some other things going on [with it]. Tip was thinking about changing it to what it is now [and] even with the mix [to it] it has to have this space so that this is one of the records you can only get from A Tribe Called Quest.”

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A Tribe Called Quest, flanked with Dave Chappelle as host, made their first ever Saturday Night Live appearance to promote the album on November 11. According to Cons, it was in fact, Dave Chappelle quarterbacked the whole situation. “I played ‘Mobius’ for Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle at the crib, along with four or five other joints, and that’s kind of how the SNL show came about,” he recalled. “The whole Saturday Night Live thing with Dave Chappelle was a gift to Tribe for the album. Dave was like, ‘I’ma help y’all roll out y’all album. I’ma bring the Chappelle Show back for one night and get Saturday Night Live to do it.’”

Given the magnitude of the Dave Chappelle/Tribe episode of Saturday Night Live was, there was more in the chamber planned that the group wanted NBC to pull the trigger on. “We [approached] NBC to do, like, the Block Party movie. We initially were trying to perform the whole album for an extra segment. Like, after the credits rolled, we were going to have a [jam session]. But it [all worked out], it was incredible. It broke the viewing rating for Saturday Night Live.” The episode indeed shattered the SNL record for viewership at a 6.9 rating among households and 3.9 rating amongst the 18-49 demographic which is approximately 7.5 million viewers according to reports.

You can be on the lookout for what’s next on the horizon for Consequence as he preps his five-year-old son Caiden’s debut album and his own project right here on DX.