"While doing those takes I was like, 'Man, I gotta make something out of this mess.' " It's a glimpse of rap's humble beginnings but also its early hurdles: the need not just for equipment and technical prowess, but for a connection, for finding someone with clout to whom you could hand that tape. As he told Red Bull Music Academy later, he would take "some janky-ass stereo system" with dual cassette recorders and make pause tapes out of his dad's jazz collection, taking hours at a time to loop small sections of songs into crude beats. Like most Black kids then, he didn't have a track machine, so learning the craft required a workaround.
But circumstances forced the young Q-Tip, the rapper-producer who would soon found A Tribe Called Quest, to get creative with his equipment. Once upon a time, not long ago, to paraphrase a great rap storyteller, an 11-year-old in Queens became obsessed with the nascent rap movement. Here's a story about one measure of the distance hip-hop has traveled in its 50 years.
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