Native Tongues

Thank you.

Everybody can agree that Tribe was the bigger group of the three groups in the, uh, Native Tongues, right?

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

What was it called? I forget what it was called.

Native Tongues? No, that wasn't it.

Yeah, I think it was Native Tongues.

Yeah, wasn't it? Maybe.

I don't know.

Here's an image of some of the early members of the Zulu nation.

Afrocentricity spread throughout early hip hop to groups like Tribe Called Quest, who were part of a larger collective of hip hop groups called Native Tongues, of which Queen Latifah was also a part of, amongst De La Soul, the Jungle Brothers, and other early hip hop groups.

But again, you can see the kind of nod to Afrocentric styles and aesthetics here.

All right, I want to ask you guys some questions now about gender politics and all this music before we get to some more music.

... uh, uh, uh-

Native Tongues, all that

...

Native Tongues.

Yeah, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

It's less, I guess, it's less minimal than something like Mother or even Gold.

It's got a bit more energy to it in a couple of tracks, but to be fair, up until something like Sentimental Love and Let Me Cry um it gets very very you know same samey that's a good thing you know um in flow productions of course um there's also a uh chronix uh uh uh injection uh earlier in the album as well um so yeah it's clear cleo's voice carries the whole thing obviously, and it's Cleo's voice, um, one of the best voices in music today, so you never, she's, she's never really going to miss, right, but is this like, you know, is this gonna make my album list? Who knows, we shall see, um, but anyway, but that's it, we'll leave it there and hop it, hop into our topic for this episode, which is all about Jungle Brothers, uh, since we've I've been on a kind of native tongues kick in the past few weeks, so I thought, why not continue on with that particular trend and hop into the, well, next to De La Soul, technically the group that started it all.

I mean, their first album was the first album from any of the native tongues, so technically they started the whole thing.

But I'm sure Ben knows the story.

So with that said, Ben, what have you got for us?

where they became fast friends and discovered both were heavily into hip-hop music.

Their story isn't dissimilar to so many we've had on this pod before.

They met, they both loved hip-hop, they began working on tapes and demos together with Homemade Production, making tapes together after school to show their friends and prospective label situations, but i think most importantly is that they actually formed the native tongues so mike g was connected to dj red alert he was his nephew so this gave him an in into the music industry that very few artists especially young artists could ever imagine to have red alert was pivotal in getting them in the studio for their early work and helped them out massively by introducing them around the industry giving them a big leg up q-tip is actually on their debut album he's on both black is black and the final track the promo He met the original duo Mike G and Africa Baby Bam in high school.

Uh, we've been in a jungle, uh, jung- oh, fool, nearly ruined it.

We've been in a, uh, a, a Native Tongues bag, um, re- more recently.

But well, Ben picks the topics pre- uh, most, most of the time.

Um, so yeah, he's, he's, he's in his Native Tong- Native Tongues bag and, uh, yeah, we're getting our Native Tongues bag re- recently, so, uh, yeah, that's fun.

Anyway, with that said, um, let the beat drop.

Let's get into the show.

Sing along, it's that same old song.

You ain't tough, step up and Native Tongues'll have to call that bluff.

Ayo, straight out the laboratory, got a bag of stories for you fairy tale niggas.

I exercise this lovin' to define figures.

Everybody, right? One day, Leo comes in the office and says, "We're disman- we're dism- we're shutting Rush Management down." Everybody could take who they've been fucking with and go do what you want with them.

Chris was already the Rush Management rep for the whole Native Tongue shit, which was Tribe, De La, Jungle Brothers.

We was managed by Rush Management and Chris was our rep, but we wasn't in Native Tongue.

Mm-hmm.

But we was like, kind of like-

Family

... honorary Native Tongue.

Yeah, yeah.