Known for their unique alternative hip-hop sound, The Pharcyde are golden children of classic West Coast rap. The four-piece ensemble, featuring Slimkid3 Tre, Imani, Fatlip and Bootie Brown, formed in 1989 in South Central Los Angeles. Their colorful debut album, A Bizarre Ride II The Pharcyde (1992), is featured on both Rolling Stone’s list of 500 Greatest Albums of All Time and in their list of the 200 Greatest Hip Hop Albums of All Time. The record also carries their most popular tune to date, “Passin’ me By.”
Their follow-up project, Labcabincalifornia (1995), achieved similar popularity. Pharcyde’s music is novel, sometimes comedic, sometimes dark and, as noted in their album title, always bizarre.
After a messy 30-year beef, and 15 years after a chaotic one-off reunion, three of the four members (save for Bootie Brown, aka Romye Robinson) have officially joined back together and are performing as The Pharcyde once again.
For the first time ever, The Pharcyde will be taking on the Oregon Country Fair. They take the Main Stage Sunday, July 13.
While two of them are OCF virgins, Slimkid3 (Tre Hardson) has been an attendee half a dozen times and has a classic Oregon Country Fair mask hanging above his door at his home. He says, “For that energy to call for us to be there, I was over the moon about honoring the place, just to add my cosmic energy to this whole concept of the Oregon Country Fair.”
The Pharcyde is fresh off a European tour in support of their 2025 EP Timeless and just kicked off their North American dates.
At the beginning of their career, Fatlip (Derrick Lemel Stewart) says The Pharcyde’s creative process looked like this: “We were just hanging out with each other, high as hell, listening to the music that was top tier.” From those moments, with the then 20-somethings sitting around the table and bouncing off elevated ideas of one another, their greatest art arose.
Their blissful days were limited, because as centrally comedic and resistant lyrics are to ’90s L.A. hip-hop, so too, is beef. After their heyday, The Pharcyde almost immediately deteriorated. Fatlip was kicked out, Slimkid3 departed, and Imani (Emandu Rashaan Wilcox) and Bootie Brown kept working together under multiple monikers. The groups flipped around and they all had their own stint in the solo and duo world.
This was due to typical hip-hop beef archetypes, where they all wanted to have their cake and eat it too. “I feel like we created something,” Imani says about The Pharcyde’s prime, “But they all had different plans, and then the universe just takes you in different places, whether you planned it or not.”
Their situation seems inevitable for being young men who found unexpected fame. “Just to make it long story short,” Imani says, “we did the first record, and then we did the second record.”
He says that quickly in the industry, “things change drastically. We were learning how the business worked, and we were having conversations with the record company.” Imani continues, “Money starts getting weird, questions start to arise. Fingers start getting pointed. Ego starts getting flared up. And then it was a dark, ugly period where there was no communication between any of the groups. It’s something that started that was really easy, and became really difficult.”
After two legacy-making records, they fell completely apart.
“It felt like we created a whole universe and kind of abandoned it,” Imani says.
In 2008, all four members reunited for the annual Rock the Bells hip-hop festival. “There was a lot of money involved. We probably got paid the biggest check of our career. Shout out to Rock the Bells,” Fatlip says. “But we hadn’t seen each other for a long time, and the only motivation was the check. There was still a lot of bad blood and unresolved issues, and that played out on stage.”
Fifteen years later, all three members say that it took maturity, growth and help from Imani’s little cousin to speak again after the 2008 show. Almost all of the members performed together (separately) on-and-off for a while. But Slimkid3 and Imani, who had been close since they were part of the dance battle scene in college, say they never envisioned themselves speaking to each other again.
That is, until Imani’s cousin, Sizwei, who had known and rapped with the boys since he was a little kid, urged them all to hop on a call and sort everything out so they could start making music again.
“It was like medicine,” Slimkid3 says when he talked to Sizwei, Fatlip and Imani together. “It was really cool to get together on a mutual field.”
Imani says that call, and many subsequent meetings, “was a lot of humble pie. It was a lot of ego death. It was a lot of recreating hard conversations that needed to happen, and it’s still a work in progress. But we got through a lot of the bullshit, and we were able to create new music.”
What began as the trio working on a single song turned into Timeless, which extended to touring, and thus led them to performing at the Oregon Country Fair.
As for Bootie Brown’s absence, all three members are saddened that he has yet to join the reunion, maintaining that “The Pharcyde is Imani, Bootie Brown, Fatlip and Slimkid Tre,” Imani says.
Fatlip says Bootie Brown “contributed a lot to this band. We play his verse of ‘Passin’ Me By’ a cappella, because he’s not here to do it himself.” Slimkid3 chose to abstain from speaking about Bootie Brown in his interview with Eugene Weekly, saying it would hurt too much.
Slimkid3 says, “I feel like, on an ancestral level, the spirits of The Pharcyde were pulling us together. I always have to speak on it in this capacity, because the spirit of The Pharcyde has always taken care of us separated and together. The ancestors are definitely standing with us energetically to bring that fresh return to us. I give all the thanks and blessings to the ancestors.”