Electric Relaxation

In a conversation with XXL, Phife Dawg revealed that the beat was created in his grandmother's basement by Q-Tip:

I just remember coming home from somewhere—my grandmother gave him a key, the whole nine, he used to just go in and do his thing—I came home from some type of trip and I walked in the kitchen, and you know, he's in the basement and you could hear the music coming up, and all I heard was that. I didn't even say hello to my grandmother or whoever was in the house, I was just like, "Hold on!" and went downstairs. "Yo, what the hell is that?!" He was like, "Yo, that shit is crazy, right?" And it just became what it is now  ... On that record, he wrote my lines and I wrote his—actually, we wrote our own lines, and when we recorded, we traded. That's why the whole back and forth, you know what I mean?[2]