NEW YORK: Phife Dawg, the high-pitched and snide rapper whose pioneering group A Tribe Called Quest brought a fresh artistic aesthetic to hip-hop, has died, his family said Wednesday. He was 45.

Phife Dawg, whose real name was Malik Taylor, died Tuesday from complications of diabetes, a family statement said. He long suffered from the illness — even calling himself in a song the “funky diabetic” — and had a kidney transplant in 2008.

“We are devastated. This is something we weren’t prepared for although we all know that life is fleeting,” the band said in a separate statement.

Phife Dawg formed A Tribe Called Quest in the mid-1980s with Q-Tip, his classmate in the New York borough of Queens whose thoroughfare of Linden Boulevard would feature prominently in the lyrics. The two rappers became one of hip-hop’s defining pairs, with Phife Dawg, whose voice in early recordings was markedly high and nasal, generally playing the shrewd back-up man to the smooth and cerebral Q-Tip.

Tensions were never far from the surface, with Phife Dawg gradually taking more vocals but Q-Tip becoming the face of A Tribe Called Quest and going on to a successful solo career, recently being named the first artistic director for hip-hop at the Kennedy Center in Washington.