Native Tongues

Friends on each other's records, with enough imagination to make hip-hop bigger.

What you're really asking

You can hear the friendships: guest verses, shared jokes, ideas passed from one record to the next. Native Tongues was an overlapping collective around New York hip-hop, with Afrocentric perspectives and a wide sampling imagination.

Jazz mattered, but so did soul, funk, house and whatever else made the song work.

Where it sits

Jungle Brothers, De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest formed the core of a late-1980s network that also included Queen Latifah, Monie Love and Black Sheep. Kool DJ Red Alert helped expose the music; Prince Paul's production gave De La Soul a particularly playful vocabulary.

Crew tracks such as 'Buddy' and 'Doin' Our Own Dang' made the relationships audible. The collective loosened over time, while its approach travelled into later hip-hop and soul collaborations.

The scene

Who: the core groups, their collaborators and the DJs and producers who connected them. What: conversational rap, unusual samples, Afrocentric identity, humour and room for distinct personalities.

It was not a single label, and not every jazz-sampling rapper belonged. Follow actual collaborations first; Common, the Roots and Dilla are onward routes rather than interchangeable founding members.