How much money did Lou Reed make from ‘Can I Kick It?’
Founded in New York’s Queens borough during hip-hop’s golden age peak, the St Albans Native Tounges collective and associates crafted a colourful and eclectic psychedelia to the era’s tougher new school rap and Public Enemy‘s political militancy.
Launching the careers of De La Soul, Queen Latifah, and Monie Love, neighbourhood friends Q-Tip, Phife Dawg, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, and Jarobi White formed A Tribe Called Quest by the end of the 1980s, signing to Jive and concocting one of hip hop’s most celebrated albums.
Getting to grips with the latest E-mu SP-1200 and Akai S950 samplers, Q-Tip raided his deep record collection to stitch ’90’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm’s rich mosaic of sampled collages from The Beatles, Funkadelic, and traditional folk pieces.
Their defining hit was the album’s final single ‘Can I Kick It?’, an aural smorgasbord of Sly and the Family Stone, Dr Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band, Lonnie Smith, and most memorably, former Velvet Underground frontman and acerbic songsmith Lou Reed.
As it happened, Reed was a big fan of hip-hop, telling Peter Doggett in ’84: “Some of the rap groups coming out of New York are touching on things that interest me, and there’s some pretty good writing to be found in rap music.” He dug hip-hop so much he had Run-DMC open for his New Jersey Capitol Theatre show to a bemused audience and even gave it a stab on Mistrial‘s ‘The Original Wrapper’ featuring a hyper-comic video perfect for MTV’s insatiable promo maw.
A Tribe Called Quest’s Jive label were having issues clearing Reed’s sample, however. Lifting ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ from ’72’s Transformer, its skulking, descending bass, originally played by Herbie Flowers, proved to be ‘Can I Kick It?’s distinctive element but also its initially legally thorniest. Struggling to clear the sample, Jive managed to negotiate between the two parties a ‘good news and bad news’ arrangement regarding that all-important bass riff.
How much money did Lou Reed make?
Every red cent. The deal struck was that A Tribe Called Quest could use ‘Walk on the Wild Side’s bass so long as Reed received 100% royalties and publishing. Tough but fair. It would have been a costly and financially ruinous ordeal had they ploughed along anyhow, and the album sales overall would have been dented without their signature hit pushing People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm to Gold.
Reflecting on the 25th anniversary of their debut LP, Phife offered a conciliatory stance on the lack of return their hip-hop classic generated. “I’m grateful that (the song) kicked in the door, but to be honest, that was the label’s fault,” he told Rolling Stone in 2015. “They didn’t clear the sample. And rightfully so. It’s his art; it’s his work. He could have easily said no. There could have easily been no ‘Can I Kick It?’ So you take the good with the bad. And the good is, we didn’t get sued. We just didn’t get nothing from it.”
