A Group, a Sound and an Era
Hanif Abdurraqib, Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest. University of Texas Press, 216pp, $17 paper.
In one of many letters addressed to the individuals that made up legendary hip-hop act A Tribe Called Quest, Hanif Abdurraqib writes to the late emcee Phife Dawg, “I’m going to talk to you like this isn’t about facts, but about memory.” The statement may as well be Abdurraqib’s thesis for Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest, the author’s love letter to—as the cover puts it—“a group, a sound, and an era.”
And a love letter to each of these it is. While the book’s central focus is A Tribe Called Quest, Abdurraqib’s lens pans to everything circling the group—beginning with the roots of rap in African rhythms and ending with the Grammys’ career-long slight of the rap group that serves as evidence of an institutional disregard for hip-hop and black culture at large.
Between these two poles of celebration and lament, Abdurraqib leaves no record unscratched: he considers Tribe in relation to their peers, both within their Native Tongues collective and alongside other acts of the era, from N.W.A. to the Wu-Tang Clan; he contextualizes the significance of black-owned print magazines in order to enlighten readers who have maybe never held one on why the announcement of Tribe’s breakup on the cover of The Source was monumental; he situates Tribe within the histories of jazz, sampling, and Rodney King.
Abdurraqib’s lens pans to everything circling the group—beginning with the roots of rap in African rhythms and ending with the Grammys’ career-long slight.
Writings on hip-hop are perhaps best known through outlets that now run primarily online, but in the genre’s relatively young history, there are already a wealth of books both about and by the artists of the genre. Go Ahead in the Rain is perhaps the first notable hip-hop book—at least by an author who does not rap or play drums (here’s looking at Questlove)—to seamlessly blend memoir with sociocultural history.
Abdurraqib seems to know every story there is to tell about A Tribe Called Quest; that said, he never gets so deep into the group’s mythos that he forgets himself. Along with frequent personal letters addressed directly to each member of Tribe, Abdurraqib looks deeply into his own history in order to reveal the unseen—or unheard—layers of the music, interweaving personal history with that of A Tribe Called Quest, hip-hop, the 90s, and black culture writ-large.
He considers an album’s quality in the 90s to be intimately entwined with its ability to be played through without skips, so that he would not have to remove his gloves in the Midwestern winter or worry about someone on the school bus asking to hear what he was listening to. He interrogates Q-Tip on issues of brotherhood, understanding the complexities of the leader’s relationship to Phife in relation to his own brother. He weighs the news of Phife Dawg’s death due to complications with diabetes, thinking of how he read the news with sugar on his own tongue. Each vignette masterfully harmonizes memory and history, actively resisting the archaic notion of objectivity as a reality in describing the music that moves us.
Along with frequent personal letters addressed directly to each member of Tribe, Abdurraqib looks deeply into his own history in order to reveal the unseen—or unheard—layers of the music, interweaving personal history with that of A Tribe Called Quest, hip-hop, the 90s, and black culture writ-large.
His is a moving and wide-spanning vision, each story providing a kaleidoscopic view of one of the greatest acts to ever exist. In a description of the beginnings of hip-hop, he acknowledges that the story of hip-hop’s origins are a mythology, “And so like all of the best stories told by anyone, anywhere, any part of it could be true or not true.” That may be, but it is hard to disbelieve anything Abdurraqib writes with how close each story seems to pulse with the rhythms of his own heart.
There is an argument throughout the book that interrogates the eyes of the beholder, how a group of friends could appear as a crew or a gang depending on who is looking at them, how A Tribe Called Quest has long been used as a weapon in the battle over “real” and “fake” hip-hop. But beyond the debate of “real” hip-hop—an argument that mostly boils down to essentialism and disallows room for a multitude of creative approaches—there is the challenge to make hip-hop real to people, to answer the question of what it does for its listeners and how it has evaded omens of being a mere fad to persist as a lasting worldwide movement. In Go Ahead in the Rain, Abdurraqib makes the compelling case that hip-hop is the culture of a people who “still find a way to speak to each other across any distance placed between us.”
A Tribe Called Quest has long been used as a weapon in the battle over “real” and “fake” hip-hop.
Abdurraqib believes that A Tribe Called Quest bridged a gap between his parents, their parents, and his own generation, their sound “a long reach backward toward something magical, in hopes that an unspeakable distance, perhaps between a parent and a child, can slowly become closer.” Similarly, throughout his book-length love letter, Abdurraqib successfully bridges the gap between himself and the next generation of Tribe listeners. He tells the story of introducing A Tribe Called Quest to students he meets in lectures at schools, and there is indeed “something magical” in his wide-eyed and unabashed appreciation for a musical act from the 90s, especially in the fast-moving, forgetful world of today.
At one point Abdurraqib describes his love for the cassette tape at length, however inconvenient it had already become in the wake of CD players gaining popularity. Cassettes are hard to fast forward through, they unravel easily, and they stopped being cool. But though it is not always prudent to love without reserve, there are things in this world that are worth the work we put into them. Cassette tapes demanded Abdurraqib’s attention and commitment to albums, and that attention and commitment has made him one of the best music writers in today’s landscape.
Abdurraqib still loves A Tribe Called Quest, in an era where most rap stars only have a few brief moments before being replaced by the next, and A Tribe Called Quest already being thirty years old. Who could still be thinking about the past, wearing into its grooves to hear a pattern, or a lost sound? After reading Go Ahead in the Rain, I hope that Hanif Abdurraqib is not the last person to choose a deep and abiding love for the music that makes us real to one another.