Biography

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, Rovi