* En anglais uniquement
As a founding member of the pioneering rap group
A Tribe Called Quest and their extended Native Tongues family,
Phife Dawg helped revolutionize hip-hop. After playing a key role in classic
ATCQ albums throughout the '90s,
Phife had a hearty solo career in the 2000s and beyond. He died in 2016 while secretly working on
Tribe's sixth and final album
We Got It from Here...4 Thank You 4 Your Service, what would be the group's first new material since disbanding after the release of
The Love Movement in 1998. In 2022, after having been in the works since the mid-2000s,
Phife's second solo album
Forever was released posthumously, completed by his business associate DJ Rasta Root.
Born Malik Taylor,
Phife grew up in Queens, New York, where he spent his childhood writing poetry and eventually rapping at school and in his neighborhood whenever the opportunity was available. Along with high school classmates
Q-Tip (Jonathan Davis) and
Ali Shaheed Muhammad,
Phife founded
ATCQ, who released groundbreaking hip hop records throughout the '90s, ending in 1998 with
The Love Movement.
Phife began flexing his new freedom in 1999 with "Bend Ova," the first single for his new U.K.-based label Groove Attack. A full-length titled Ventilation: Da LP was released the following year, including appearances from
Pete Rock,
Hi-Tek,
Supa Dave from
De La Soul, and
Phife's alter ego,
Mutty Ranks. It was his only LP, although he was part of many
ATCQ reunions during the 2000s, and also recorded tracks for a solo follow-up, which he initially planned to title Songs in the Key of Phife: Vol. 1 (Cheryl's Big Son). After
ATCQ played on The Tonight Show in 2015,
Phife and the other members of the
Tribe began clandestinely working on new material.
Phife was four months into work on the new album when he died at the age of 45 in March 2016. He had been diagnosed with diabetes as early as 1990, and was given a liver transplant in 2008 but it was unsuccessful and led to a second transplant in 2012. The day after his death a new song, "Sole Men," was released, and later in 2016 another unreleased track, "Nutshell," was shared with the public. In the years following
Phife's death, his collaborator DJ Rasta Root worked on completing his friends unfinished second solo album. The album was about two-thirds complete, and Rasta Root enlisted the help of other rappers to finish the project, combing through the notebooks
Phife had left behind that laid out how he wanted the project to be in its final form. In March of 2022 the album, now titled
Forever, was finally released. It featured guest appearances from
Busta Rhymes,
Redman,
Q-Tip,
Dwele,
Rapsody, and many others. ~ Wade Kergan & Fred Thomas