Happy 20th Anniversary to Q-Tip’s debut solo album Amplified, originally released November 30, 1999.
The backlash Q-Tip received when Amplified came out was real. Fans of A Tribe Called Quest considered Amplified to be too much of a departure from what people expected a Q-Tip solo album should sound like, and I know this first hand because I was among those moaning loudly. Tribe is basically my favorite rap group, and at the time I was caught inside the echo chamber of collective disappointment with the sound and direction of Amplified. In retrospect, 20 years on, I honestly haven’t a clue anymore why any of us were moaning.
Revisiting it now, Amplified is absolutely what a Q-Tip solo album should have sounded like, and is very much in the same universe as a Tribe record. Yes, its flashier, shinier, and often self-indulgent, and yes, it does have club-friendly singles. It’s also a great album and a worthy solo debut from one of the world’s most creative musicians.
We all now worship at the church of J Dilla, and rightly so. But in 1996 there was another minor backlash when A Tribe Called Quest expanded the group’s production duties from Q-Tip and Ali Shaheed Muhammad to also include J Dilla (then still known as Jay Dee), combining creative forces under the moniker The Ummah. Fans of Tribe’s classic albums thought the new sound Dilla brought was different to what they were used to, but on that occasion, I can honestly say I didn’t mind Dilla’s involvement at all. I happen to love Beats, Rhymes and Life (1996), and there’s also nothing particularly wrong with The Love Movement (1999).
We certainly owe Q-Tip thanks for bringing Dilla so majorly into our lives. After being introduced to Dilla beat tapes by Dilla’s mentor, Amp Fiddler, Q-Tip was blown away and formed The Ummah soon after. The co-sign and placement on Beats, Rhymes and Life gave Dilla the platform to become the masterful producer we remember and revere today.
Q-Tip subsequently chose to have Dilla co-produce almost the entirety of Amplified, and the album is a great demonstration of the producer’s versatility. Dilla could turn his hand to pulsating club singles that reflected his love of strip clubs (“Breathe and Stop”), soulful headnodders (“Let’s Ride”), and anything else Q-Tip envisioned, like the Korn-featured outlier “End of Time.” Q-Tip himself is, of course, an incredible producer. We’ll probably never know who did what on the shared-production credits, but you can hear the touch of both Q-Tip and Dilla throughout Amplified, and as a joined-force their music is damn near flawless.
Moaning Tribe fans also thought that what Q-Tip was rapping about on Amplified was too much of a change, and a lot more concerned with material things and the pursuit of the opposite sex than on Tribe’s records. Looking back, this was again unfair. Tribe were one of the 90s’ most “conscious” rap groups, with a deep sense of cultural history and social responsibility. But they were also about fun, and could get very sexual with their lyrics. It reflected Q-Tip’s eclecticism, and Amplified is a continuation of this, just on a grander scale. Like the debut solo albums of both André 3000 and Mos Def, two artists clearly inspired heavily by Q-Tip, Amplified was destined to be a colorful mix of different things. This approach doesn’t always work (see Mos Def’s disjointed second album The New Danger), but it definitely works on Amplified.
It should be noted that while Tribe heads may not have liked Amplified all that much, music critics did, better able to listen to the album free from the institutionalized perspective of being a die-hard Tribe fan. I should have set aside my own preconceptions and enjoyed the album with no expectations. Maybe Hype Williams was to blame. He directed the video for “Vivrant Thing” in the middle of his run of making epic, big budget promos. The “Vivrant Thing” video was a far lower-key affair, but still had slow-motion shots of women gyrating in their underwear and lots of shiny things. It wasn’t how we were used to seeing Q-Tip, and ultimately clouded our judgement of Amplified. Had I just blocked out all of these judgments, I’d have had 20 years of enjoyment out of Amplified instead of turning up my nose at it for many years. Bonus points also go to Q-Tip for inventing his own words—try as you might, you won’t find the word “vivrant” in any dictionary.
When A Tribe Called Quest triumphantly returned in 2016 in the wake of Phife Dawg’s death with We Got It from Here... Thank You 4 Your Service, it sounded more in the spirit of Amplified or Q-Tip’s 2008 album The Renaissance, rather than The Low End Theory (1991) or Midnight Marauders (1993). Q-Tip, Phife and Ali Shaheed Muhammad had evolved and matured into something different, but still great, in the 18 years since they last made an album. Amplified was an important part of that long journey.
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