This is part of Creative Loafing Tampa's new issue, The Year In Music. See and listen to the rest of our top albums here.
A Tribe Called Quest, We Got It From Here… Thank You 4 Your Service (Epic) The death of A Tribe Called Quest’s Phife Dawg was one of the low points of 2016, but his bandmates do not dwell on it for their final album and first since 1998’s The Love Movement. Instead, the surviving members of Tribe (plus Phife, who appears in several places) gave a big middle finger to the entire notion of nostalgia en route to delivering statements on inequality & intolerance (“Whateva Will Be”), their favorite emcees (“Dis Generation”) and being black in America (“The Killing Season”). What’s more, We Got It doesn’t reach for brand new sounds, but still manages to sound 100 percent modern, even dragging a who’s who of guests (André 3000, Elton John, Jack White and Anderson .Paak, to name a few) out to play along the way. —Ray Roa
This article appears in Dec 22-29, 2016.