Samara Cyn Steps Into Q-Tip and Phife’s “Can I Kick it” Trib Feat DJ Premiere – MLS

DJ Premier said no at first. Then he built the drums in a tour van and called Q-Tip before anyone else heard it.

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• A Beat Built in a Tour Van
• Homage, Not a Takeover

DJ Premier got the call in December of last year while he was out on the road, and his first reaction was to turn it down. The ask was to rework A Tribe Called Quest’s 1990 classic “Can I Kick It?” for a new campaign, and Premier has said his gut response was that the original, built around a flip of Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” simply should not be touched. He is close with the group’s surviving members and still speaks about Phife Dawg with the kind of reverence that comes from having opened for Tribe at the New Music Seminar back in 1989, years before either act had a record deal.

What changed his mind was learning the goal was not to license the original but to build something new around it, with everyone involved, including Tribe’s camp, signed off on the idea. Premier did not have studio equipment with him on tour, so he built the drums for the new version on a laptop running Pro Tools during a five hour van ride, working from stems and reconstructing the bounce of the original from memory. The label sent the track back once asking for a faster tempo, and Premier re tapped the entire drum pattern to match before it went to vocals.

Those vocals came from Samara Cyn, the Tennessee raised, Arizona based rapper who has spent the past two years building a following on the strength of projects like her 2024 debut EP and this year’s “Detour.” Premier has said he expected her to write original bars for the cover and was surprised when she came back performing Q-Tip and Phife’s original verses nearly word for word, with small lyrical updates swapped in to fit the new context. He has pointed to her confidence and delivery as the reason the take worked without him needing to send it back for revisions, calling her one of the rare new artists who did not need coaching to sound convincing on the mic.

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The finished cover is streaming exclusively on Amazon Music as part of the platform’s Amazon Music Original series, and it exists because of Major League Soccer’s new marketing push, “Thanks World, We’ll Take It From Here.” The campaign is built around the idea that the ongoing FIFA World Cup is pulling a wave of new attention toward soccer in the United States, and MLS wants that attention pointed at its own season when it resumes play on July 16 and 17.

Premier has been careful in interviews to frame the cover as tribute rather than replacement, saying directly that he reached out to Q-Tip to let him know the rework was happening out of respect for a record he considers untouchable. In a statement tied to the release, Premier said covering a timeless A Tribe Called Quest record is an honor he does not take lightly, adding that he wanted Q-Tip to hear it from him first given that the original is already, in his words, a masterpiece.

The new version keeps the sample of “Walk on the Wild Side” intact while speeding up the tempo and layering in Premier’s own drum programming and scratches, giving the track a sharper, more percussive edge than the original without erasing what made it recognizable in the first place. The campaign spot built around the song features a wide cast that spans current MLS ownership and international soccer figures, and it is set to debut during Fox’s broadcast coverage of the World Cup semifinal and final matches before expanding to Apple TV and other platforms as the MLS season gets underway.