A bassline Lou Reed decided to keep, and to invoice
The upright bass does not hurry, because it has already done its walking on another record. Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side lends Can I Kick It? a saunter, and A Tribe Called Quest treat the loan as a room they are allowed to stand in. Q-Tip asks. The answer comes back yes, you can, from Phife and from a chorus that feels like a handshake. Nothing in the track raises its voice. Jazz samples and a patient snare keep the afternoon long. The question is not a challenge. It is a greeting, the kind you can repeat until the whole block has answered.
The song lives on People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, the debut, released in 1990 and produced by the group themselves, much of it cut at Calliope Studios in New York. Q-Tip takes the first verse, Phife Dawg the second, nineteen and still growing into the voice he would later wince at for being high. Ali Shaheed Muhammad holds the pockets. The sample was the door and the bill. Phife told Rolling Stone in 2015 that Jive had not cleared it cleanly, and that Reed, instead of saying no, said they could use it if he took all the money. Publishing, royalties, the lot. To this day, Phife said, they had not seen a dime. He did not begrudge the deal. It was Reed’s work. The label’s fault, he thought, and the good news was that they were not sued. There could have been no song.
On the radio the handshake traveled further than a debut of that patience was supposed to. The call and response became a test you could give a stranger. Live, Tip and Phife passed the question like a ball, Jarobi in the early rooms, the bassline doing Lou’s job without Lou’s narrative. The wild side, in this version, is a place you are invited to kick it, which meant hang, not confess. Tribe’s whole early argument is in that swap: hip-hop that your shoulders could accept, still dense with reference, still theirs in the rhyme even when the money was not.
Instead of Lou Reed saying, you can’t use it, he said, y’all can use it, but I get all the money from that. To this day, we haven’t seen a dime from that song.
(Phife Dawg, Rolling Stone, 2015)
Phife’s grace about the invoice is part of the record’s afterlife. He was grateful the door opened, honest that the door had a toll, and unwilling to pretend the toll was fair in the way a young group can afford. The song kick-started a crossover the album’s stranger tracks did not need. Listeners who never heard Reed still knew the question. Listeners who knew Reed heard a new sentence on an old walk, which is what sampling is when it is doing more than decorating.
What remains is the yes. Can I Kick It? still functions as a greeting twenty-five years after the man who said it died, and longer after the man who owned the bass took the check. The saunter does not know about the contract. The contract is why the saunter got to leave the studio. Both facts belong in the room.
