A Tribe, Their Dawg, and His Milkshake

Back in the day, in the sweltering summer of 1934, a flat tire forced ice cream entrepreneur Tom Carvel to sell his custard in a nearby pottery shop parking lot in Hartsdale. Camping out in said lot all summer, Carvel found that people passing by fell in love with the sun-softened treat, leading him to net $3,500 that summer (more than $60,000 in today’s dollars).

Almost 60 years later, Trinidadian rapper Malik Izaak Taylor, forever immortalized as Phife Dawg, can be heard lamenting his financial misfortune with the line “Went to Carvel to get a milkshake,” in A Tribe Called Quest’s 8 Million Stories. As many Tribe disciples may already know, remaining members Q-Tip, Jarobi White, and Ali Shaheed Muhammad are set to churn out their first album since 1998, to be titled We Got It From Here…Thank You 4 Your Service, in tribute to Phife Dawg’s passing earlier this March.

What began as an ice cream truck with a flat tire grew into the Carvel empire

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â€‹Photo Courtesy of Carvel Ice Cream

The album, featuring the likes of André 3000, Kendrick Lamar, Jack White, Elton John, and of course Busta Rhymes, is set to drop this Friday. And in a most reverential nod to the late five-foot assassin and the forthcoming album, Carvel will be offering one dollar off milkshakes from Friday to Sunday. While simply a clever marketing promotion, anything concerning A Tribe Called Quest is worth talking about in our book. That being said, tell your mother, tell your father, send a telegram, so you all can say you “went to Carvel to get a milkshake.”