A Tribe Called Quest performs 'We the People' on SNL — first national performance after Phife's death

Why it matters

November 12, 2016. Dave Chappelle hosted Saturday Night Live four days after the 2016 presidential election. A Tribe Called Quest was the musical guest. It was the first national television performance Tribe had done since Phife Dawg died in March 2016. The album We Got It from Here... Thank You 4 Your Service had come out the day before. The performance, of "We the People..." and "The Space Program," was unmistakably political. Q-Tip delivered the chorus of "We the People..." ("all you Black folks, you must go / all you Mexicans, you must go / and all you poor folks, you must go") in a register that was both the song's lyric and a direct response to the election results. Busta Rhymes filled in for parts of Phife's verses. Jarobi White did the rest. The whole sequence aired live to the entire SNL audience and was reposted across social media within minutes. The performance is one of the more direct political-pop moments of the late 2010s. The Phife absence and the political moment combined to make it something larger than a standard music-guest slot. You should watch the clip. The framing still lands.