Retro Cuts: Native Tongues

Today at work, I threw in my Black Sheep A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing cassette (favorite track, “Pass the 40”). And, during a brief break from paperwork, I did a little Google search and educated myself on Black Sheep and the crew they ran with in the early 90’s. I’d heard of Native Tongues before but didn’t realize how many amazing and influential artists were associated with the crew over the years.

Ok, let’s start with the founding members… Jungle Brothers, De La Soul, and A Tribe Called Quest…. hip hop royalty. And collective that starts out with guys like Mike Gee, Q-Tip, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, and the De La crew is pretty incredible in my book. Now let’s throw in Black Sheep, Talib Kweli, Mos Def, Common, Queen Latifah, and Fu-Schnickens among others… This isn’t even touching the affiliates and others that ran with the crew from time to time like Leaders of the New School (Busta’s crew), The Beatnuts, J Dilla, and Prince Paul.

It’s too hard to even know where to start with this crew, but I decided to share 6 videos for the TPM faithful. Here are a few of my faves from members of this crew. (The HBMS video is some kids homemade video of one of my favorite tracks of theirs because their only official video on YouTube- “The World’s Gone Mad” – is not embeddable).

For those who didn’t know, now you know!

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~ by thepaintedman on May 12, 2010.