Oakland Athletics’ A Tribe Called Quest Tribute Really Has a Lot of Flavor

Baseball’s hottest Twitter feed is like butter

 

With apologies to the Cleveland Indians, some baseball fans are focused today on a different Tribe.

The Oakland Athletics’ Twitter feed is celebrating the release of the (excellent) new A Tribe Called Quest album with a series of tweets and Facebook posts pairing Athletics GIFs with the names of ATCQ classics. A smooth catch by Jake Smolinski is titled “Electric Relaxation.” Some air-drumming in the dugout is called “Jazz (We Got).” Two players studying a tablet? “Lyrics to Go.”

If the blend of baseball and hip-hop sounds weird, bear in mind: Tribe’s Phife Dawg was living in Oakland before he died. He traveled back and forth while working on the new, final Quest album, “We Got It From Here… Thank You 4 Your Service.”

Phife was known for dropping sports references into songs. On the group’s “Award Tour,” which shouts outs Oakland, Phife delivers the line, “Coming with more hits than the Braves and the Yankees.”

It’s safe to call the A’s Twitter feed the hottest in baseball, not that there’s much competition. It drew lots of attention last month for a good-natured feud with the 90s band Smashmouth after the group inexplicably called the A’s “a joke.”

At one point the back and forth included the A’s tweeting at Smashmouth: “Guess you’ve got it all figured out. Except how to make a hit since 1999.”

We can’t wait to see what they do for the next E-40 album. It’s out next week.

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