Saturday, April 23, 2016

My Tribe



From fifth-grade through high school, large-framed glasses engulfed the upper portion of my face. My fashion sense was non-existent. In high school, I ran to homeroom every morning -- backwards. Greek myths were my obsession, to the point that I loathed hearing anyone say Hercules because I knew that was his Roman name and his Greek name was Heracles. I loved Voltron and Kung-Fu movies and Transformers.
I was a geek. But I was not a proud geek. When you're growing up, being a geek isn't considered cool. You want to blend in, not stand out. At least that's what it was for me. Because when you're different and you stand out, you become a target. You get teased.
You're not cool.
And I, like any other kid, wanted desperately to be cool. Get the daps while walking through school. Have the hot girls look at you like you could get it if you talked to them. In fact, you could get it without saying a word.
But I wasn't cool. Not then.
Until I discovered A Tribe Called Quest and discovered I had always been cool. I just didn't know it.
Didn't believe it.
I didn't find A Tribe Called Quest until the group's second album, The Low End Theory, came out in 1991. I don't know where I bought it. I had heard the group's hit, "Check The Rhyme," and "Scenario."
I popped the cassette into the tape deck and pressed played. I never pressed fast-forward. Mostly, I rewound and listened again.
It's hard to say exactly what kept me listening over and over again until the tape had wore out. I could point to the jazz horns overtop the boom-bap beats. I could say I loved the back and forth between Q-Tip, the Abstract Poet, and Phife Dawg, that five-foot force of braggadocious swagger.
But more than anything, I honed in on the group's insistence on standing out when it would have been so much easier to blend. So much easier to do what everyone else in the rap game was doing.
But A Tribe Called Quest, part of the Native Tongue family, was all about originality.
Listening to Phife Dawg, Q-Tip, Ali Shaheed Muhammad and maybe Jarobi taught me that I was cool the way I was. I didn't have to blend in.
I didn't have to water myself down to make others comfortable.
A Tribe Called Quest was the soundtrack to my childhood, more than any other group. I memorized the lyrics to the songs, bumped my head to the beats, and just absorbed the love that boomed from each of the group's albums.
I recognized that the voices in my head were urging me to be myself and never follow someone else.
Since Phife Dawg died at age 45 last month, I've been in a fog. And just this week, Prince, the one and only Prince, died.
Those two deaths have hit me hard. They taught me the greatest lesson -- being you is enough. Trying to be someone else only leads to cracks in the mirror.
I am wrapped in a beautiful skin, a God-given skin that no one else has, a skin I was destined to be in. And it's fine the way it is. That's hard when people around you reject you for who you are. When people turn their backs on you for refusing to walk the same path but decide to choose the other road, the less traveled one that might lead to joys unseen.
That's tough. But what helps is finding out that other people have traveled that lonely path and you realize it's not that lonely. And they lived and they thrived and they found that voice inside themselves that the world needed to hear.
Both men were famously short but the loudest and most impactful voices come in small packages.
As I grow older, I realize that the people I love the most will part from this world. I know that I will be surrounded by the spirits of those who are no longer here. And my heart will grieve for the empty space where the body I hugged and face I smiled at used to be.
I never knew or met Prince and Phife Dawg but the legacy they left is expansive.
That kid with the large-framed eyeglasses who ran backwards to homeroom is now a man who has grabbed hold of that long-hidden cool and owned it.
And I've found my tribe of quirky, geeky friends and family. A Tribe Called Quest taught me there were more of us out there than I even imagined.
We're about to take over the world.