E2 EZ EE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MARCH 27 , 2022
music
BY DAN HYMAN
D
e La Soul’s Posdnuos
still remembers the
call: March 22, 2016. 3
a.m.
His friend, Dion Liv-
erpool, better known as DJ Rasta
Root, was on the other end of the
line. Liverpool was calling with
devastating news: Phife Dawg —
their mutual friend and a found-
ing member of one of the most
celebrated hip-hop groups of all
time, A Tribe Called Quest — had
unexpectedly died of complica-
tions of diabetes. He was 45. “I’ll
never forget that moment,” Pos
says. “I know what it is to lose
people,” he said. “But I’m telling
you, that one with Phife hurt. You
just didn’t see it coming.”
Phife Dawg, born Malik Taylor,
had battled diabetes since he was
first diagnosed in 1990. On rec-
ord, he was the self-proclaimed
“funky diabetic.” And while he
had been undergoing regular dial-
ysis treatments in the weeks and
months leading up to his death,
according to those who knew him
best, Phife was as vibrant as ever
in his final days. Hence the shock.
“His energy was so high during
that time,” says Liverpool, a
friend, manager, DJ and producer
who worked closely with the rap-
per for more than two decades.
Liverpool goes on to recall how
during his final years, the rapper,
poet and proud amateur sports
historian was simultaneously
working nonstop on both his
long-gestating second solo album,
“Forever,” as well as what would
be become Tribe’s monumental
final album, “We Got It From
Here... Thank You 4 Your Service.”
The Tribe album was eventual-
ly released mere months after
Phife’s death, but the fate of “For-
ever” was still in the balance. The
project was intensely personal for
Phife, as he looked to shed his
status of an underdog, something
his widow, Deisha Head-Taylor,
says Phife often called himself.
Now, more than a half-decade
later, thanks to a profound effort
from Head-Taylor, who executive
produced the album along with
the rapper’s mother, Cheryl
Boyce-Taylor, and Liverpool, “For-
ever,” has finally been released.
“It’s bittersweet,” says Head-
Taylor, pausing during a recent
interview as she gets slightly som-
ber reflecting on the album.
“Sometimes I get emotional even
talking about it because I know
what this album meant to him
and I know the blood, sweat and
tears he put into each song to get
the album done,” she says. “There
were times where we needed emo-
tional time just to process him not
actually being here to complete
the album. So it’s been a long
process for several reasons. But
it’s been exciting as well.”
The result is a stunning accom-
plishment, both from Phife as
well as those including Liverpool
who labored over the material for
years, working tirelessly to make
sure it aligned with the late rap-
per’s vision for the project. It finds
Phife at his most lyrically adept —
sharp, witty, playful yet always
direct — hardly a surprising fact
to Liverpool. According to the
producer, Phife was “sharpening
his pen” in a major way in the
years before his death. “Having
recently toured with Tribe [in the
late-aughts and early 2010s], that
gave him the energy to have the
brain space to start creating
again. It also allowed him to know
financially that he was good,
which gave him a little more space
to delve into his creativity.”
Creativity was paramount to
Phife in his final years. Having
relocated from his native New
York City to the Bay Area around
this time, the St. Albans, Queens-
raised Phife regularly jettisoned
back and forth between there and
his former home to work on both
his solo project as well as the new
Tribe album. When on the East
Coast, Phife’s days were typically
jam-packed: dialysis treatments
in the morning, record what
would become “Forever” during
the afternoon, before retreating
to his Tribe bandmate Q-Tip’s
house in New Jersey to record for
several hours at night on “We Got
It From Here.”
“Nothing would stop him,” Liv-
erpool says.
Reflecting on this time period,
Phife’s mother, the poet and social
worker Boyce-Taylor, who ap-
pears on “Forever’s” beautiful
spoken-word “Round Irving High
School,” admits she often worried
about her son’s health. Namely,
how could someone undergo in-
tense dialysis treatments and still
exert themselves so creatively?
She didn’t dare tell Phife, though.
She knew work — and more spe-
cifically, writing rhymes — was
what gave him life.
“I knew how important it was
for him,” Boyce-Taylor says. “In
fact, some days when he was very
sick, the most important thing
was for him to keep doing his
work. I remember him being in
the hospital and taking inter-
views and making videos. He nev-
er stopped. It made him live.
“He really wanted people to
understand that when you find
something that makes you tick
and makes you happy, it can out-
last anything that you’re experi-
encing — illness, ill will, bad ex-
periences,” she continues. “I could
never tell him, ‘I want you to be
stop. I’m afraid.’ He would never
listen to me! He was like that from
a child.”
Phife also was regularly con-
sulting with his mother about his
music. “Because I am a writer
myself, he’d ask me questions,
he’d share his opinion, I’d share
mine and then he’d go to work,”
says Boyce-Taylor. “When he
would finish a song, he would
send it to me to see what I
thought. We were very close in
that way.”
He was also intensely close
with Liverpool. So much so that
when it came time for Phife’s
widow, Head-Taylor, to discuss
how to proceed with “Forever” in
her husband’s absence, she says
there was never a thought Liver-
pool wouldn’t be at the project’s
helm. “That was his right-hand
guy,” she says of Liverpool. “I also
knew Dion clearly understood the
vision as well because they
worked so close together.”
Speaking on a recent after-
noon, Liverpool smiles upon
hearing this before taking a deep
breath and exhaling, letting out
something resembling a sigh of
relief. He’s spent the better part of
the past six years completing his
friend’s album — clearing sam-
ples, piecing together disparate
verses, roping in features; he says
he did the “creative job” of six or
seven people — and the weight of
it being done is finally hitting him.
“I don’t think my life could contin-
ue normally without having fin-
ished the album,” he admits.
“No one gives you a blueprint or
a manual on how to do a posthu-
mous album,” Liverpool adds of
the struggle to get “Forever”
across the finish line. “People are
touchy with posthumous work be-
cause it can be done wrong. I
think that’s what was holding us
up — nobody knew what to do.
Luckily I had the hard drive with
all the music and there were
emails sent around and writings
of Phife’s where he kind of left the
blueprint for us.”
One of Phife’s well-known de-
sires was to have his friend, band-
mate and occasional adversary,
Q-Tip, on the album. Over the
years, the pair had notoriously
disagreed on many things: “Had
no idea me and my boy would
bump heads/ If I could do it all
over again/ I’d sit down with my
friend,” Phife raps on the album’s
title track, a rundown of the highs
and lows of his time in Tribe and,
in many ways, an open letter to his
bandmates. But in the years be-
fore his death, Phife and Tip had
made amends. (Q-Tip was not
made available for comment for
this story.)
Despite people telling him it
might never happen, “in my heart
I just felt compelled to keep push-
ing and being persistent,” Liver-
pool says of wrangling Tip. In the
end, Q-Tip appears on the chorus
of “Dear Dilla,” an ode to his and
Phife’s mutual friend and collab-
orator, the late iconic hip-hop
producer J Dilla. “It’s one more
way people can hear [Phife and
Tip] together,” says Liverpool
proudly.
Other longtime friends of
Phife’s appear on the album, from
Redman and Busta Rhymes
(“Nutshell Pt. 2”) to Maseo of De
La Soul (“Wow Factor”). But it’s
the final song on the album — the
title track, the last song he record-
ed for the album before his death,
where Phife runs through the ups
and downs of his time in Tribe —
that is likely to stick with listen-
ers.
“When I first heard that, I just
started crying,” Head-Taylor says
of the OutKast-sampling “For-
ever.” “That was sort of a letter to
his friends, his bandmates.”
It’s still tough, his widow ad-
mits, for her to listen to the song.
But she knows how vital and pre-
sent her husband was when he
recorded it, which gives her sol-
ace. “He was in good spirits,”
Head-Taylor says emphatically.
“He was just loving what he was
doing. He was in his element until
the very last minute.”
Phife Dawg put
everything he had
into ‘Forever.’ So
did his supporters.
After his death six
years ago, the
Tribe Called Quest
rapper’s second
solo album,
‘Forever,’ has
finally been
released thanks to
the efforts of his
friends and family
JACOB BAYER
RAYMOND BOYD/GETTY IMAGES
ABOVE: Phife Dog was
“sharpening his pen” in a
major way before his
death, says producer
Dion Liverpool, who
worked with P hife’s
mother and widow on
“Forever.” BELOW:
Q-Tip and Phife Dawg of
A Tribe Called Quest
perform at Mecca Arena
in Milwaukee in 1991.
The two had once been at
odds, but Q-Tip appears
on the new album.
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