A Tribe Called Quest’s Final Performance Was Already Behind Them
By the time 2018 arrived, A Tribe Called Quest had already played their last show — most people just didn’t know it yet. The group, one of the foundational acts in hip-hop and a central force in the jazz-influenced Native Tongues movement, had reunited in 2015 after a long hiatus. They decided to record one final album, We Got It From Here… Thank You 4 Your Service, working around the schedule of Phife Dawg, who was undergoing dialysis three times a week. Phife died in March 2016 from complications related to Type II diabetes before the album was finished. Remaining members Q-Tip and Ali Shaheed Muhammad completed the record and toured behind it in 2016 and 2017, including a memorable performance on Saturday Night Live’s first post-presidential-election episode. Their headlining set at Bestival in England on September 9, 2017 turned out to be the group’s final live performance.
Green Day Went Quiet After a Decade of Relentless Output
Green Day’s silence in 2018 made sense in retrospect, even if it felt conspicuous at the time. Between Dookie in 1994 — which sold 10 million copies and made them one of the biggest American rock acts of the decade — and Revolution Radio in 2016, the band released 10 studio albums, two live records, and helped develop the Broadway musical American Idiot. That’s an extraordinary pace sustained over more than 20 years. A rest was overdue. The band’s last release before going quiet was a 2017 greatest hits compilation, Greatest Hits: God’s Favorite Band — a fairly reliable signal that a band is buying itself some breathing room. Drummer Tre Cool offered a hint on Instagram in summer 2018 that the group was preparing a 2019 tour to mark the 25th anniversary of Dookie, suggesting the quiet was temporary rather than permanent.
My Bloody Valentine and the Album That Never Arrived
My Bloody Valentine’s relationship with release schedules has always been strained. The shoegaze band spent so much time and money perfecting their 1991 album Loveless that it nearly bankrupted their label, Creation Records. The follow-up took 22 years. mbv finally appeared online in February 2013, and by 2017, frontman Kevin Shields was again promising a new record — festival promotional materials that year specifically stated the album would arrive in 2018. It did not arrive in 2018. This was not exactly surprising given the band’s history, but it did leave them absent from the musical conversation for another year, with no official explanation for the delay. The gap between ambition and delivery has become a defining feature of the band’s post-Loveless existence.
