[videowaywire video_id=”2389797E3F1054F1″]
*Earlier this month, A Tribe Called Quest announced they that their “last video” would be arriving in the coming weeks. On Thursday, it surfaced on Apple Music.
Titled “The Space Program,” the track appears on their ”We Got It From Here…Thank You 4 Your Service” album and features an 8-minute visual that features a number of famous colleagues to help them bid farewell.
The Warren Fu-directed video begins with Q-Tip in a bathroom with the walls covered in tally marks. In another scene, Q-Tip wakes up as he and Jarobi deliver politically driven lines about the African-American experience in today’s America.
“They’d rather lead us to the grayest water poison deadly smog/ Mass un-blackening, it’s happening, you feel it y’all?/ Rather see we in a three-by-three structure with many bars/ Leave us where we are so they can play among the stars,” Jarobi raps.
As the late Phife Dawg’s is heard, Q-Tip attempts to break free from the spaceship he’s trapped in. Consequence, Erykah Badu, Vince Staples, Pharrell Williams, Common, Alicia Keys, Janelle Monae, Rosario Dawson, Questlove and more perform Phife Dawg’s poignant closing chorus where he pleads, “Gotta get it together forever/ Gotta get it together for brothers/ Gotta get it together for sisters/ For mothers and fathers and dead n—as.”
Photos of civil rights activists like Rosa Parks and Muhammad Ali as well as visuals of police officers beating black men and black prisoners locked up behind bars play on TV screens. Q-Tip continues his attempt to escape as a nearby monitor reads “I Can’t Breathe” referencing the last words Eric Garner spoke before being choked to death by police officers. The visual ends with “For Malik” on the screen, a tribute to Phife Dawg.
Watch a snippet of “The Space Program” visual below. Watch the full visual at Apple Music.
