Phife Dawg

Malik Izaak Taylor was born on the twentieth of November 1970 at the St. Albans district of Queens, the only child of Walt Taylor — a Trinidadian-born mechanical engineer — and Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, a Trinidadian-born poet and educator. The Taylor household was a Black Caribbean-American intellectual family. He was raised at St. Albans and attended the Public School 131 and Garden City High School. He met Jonathan Davis — subsequently known as Q-Tip — at St. Albans Public School 131 at the age of three. He met Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Jarobi White through Q-Tip in high school.

The four formed in 1985 at Garden City High School the early-career version of what would in 1988 become A Tribe Called Quest. The Tribe signed with Jive Records in 1989 — together with the De La Soul, the Jungle Brothers and Queen Latifah, the four signed Native Tongues collective acts that across the following five years constituted the principal alternative-hip-hop nexus of the late 1980s.

The Tribe released across the following nine years five albums — People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm (1990), The Low End Theory (1991), Midnight Marauders (1993), Beats, Rhymes and Life (1996) and The Love Movement (1998). The 1991 album The Low End Theory — recorded at the Battery Studios in Manhattan across late 1990 and 1991 — is widely regarded by present consensus as one of the principal hip-hop albums of the 1990s and the foundational document of the alternative jazz-influenced school of hip-hop production. Phife's vocal performances across the Low End Theory and the subsequent Midnight Marauders — particularly on the singles Check the Rhime, Buggin' Out, Scenario and Award Tour — established his five-foot-three stage persona and his Trinidadian-Queens cadence as the principal vocal counterweight to Q-Tip's higher-register declamation.

The Tribe dissolved in 1998 over accumulated tensions and reformed for the 2016 album We Got It From Here... Thank You 4 Your Service.

He was diagnosed with Type I diabetes in 1990. He died of complications of diabetes at Burbank, California, on the twenty-second of March 2016, at forty-five.

He is honored here as the vocal counterpart of A Tribe Called Quest.