Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest (American Music Series)

by Hanif Abdurraqib

This is the thing about history and people who come from a people who have had it taken from them. They know if they don’t protect what they can, there will be nothing to pass on to their children.

And so it can be said that rap became political when the people making it needed it to be fed, and it became dangerous when those people being fed realized they had the power to feed themselves forever off the power they had.

To be aware that your presence in a space is political is to sometimes assume and take on the responsibilities that come with that presence, whether or not you feel as though you should have to.

I understand more clearly now what I didn’t understand then: how The Low End Theory isn’t only about that which cannot be heard, but it is also about society’s unseen, the people who exist but may be able to navigate an entire landscape as invisible, until some violence or some tragedy deems them less so.

It’s hard to innovate the new when thousands of voices are still singing along to the old. They

The divide between that which was commercial and that which was “real” seemed larger, and what was real didn’t always sell, so there was pressure from both sides of that divide: be real enough to stay underground, or go pop enough to get money.

The value of the tape was also the crafting of a mixtape. I am from an era when we learned not to waste songs. If you are creating a cassette that you must listen to all the way through, and you are crafting it with your own hands and your own ideas, then it is on you not to waste sounds and to structure a tape with feeling. No skippable songs meant that I wouldn’t have to take my thick gloves off during the chill of a Midwest winter to hit fast-forward on a Walkman, hoping that I would stop a song just in time. No skippable songs meant that when the older, cooler kids on my bus ride to school asked what I was listening to in my headphones, armed with an onslaught of jokes if my shit wasn’t on point, I could hand my headphones over, give them a brief listen of something that would pass quality control, and keep myself safe from humiliation for another day.

I suppose there is something to be missed about a print magazine breaking big news. I’m not sure if that could happen now.

“Toni Morrison once said of black art that it must look effortless. If it makes you sweat, you haven’t done the work.

But I know that sometimes you have to pull away from your brother in order for you to keep looking at him like he is your brother.

To stay angry at someone you know will forgive your anger is a type of love, or at least it is a type of familiarity that can feel like love.

later fight to unlearn—from the right to the left. I think there is a very particular mercy in being born to a woman who writes, or at least to a woman who sees a world worth writing about.

There is a way to read a poem, and then there is a way to allow the poem to exit the body and be read by everyone in the room. The way you, with impeccable rhythm, hung each bit of language from the lights in that room and let me see them, even with my eyes closed. There are beats that happen in between the breaks of words that I think most poets don’t tend to understand. There is a way for a reader to manipulate silence so that it is no longer silence but something drawing a listener toward a brief and breathless anticipation that, too, is a type of beat. We know how to read our poems, if nothing else. I say we and mean black people, sure. People who have, at some point, clapped on the two and the four. But you, especially, are carrying songs to the people.

It is one thing to throw your hands in the air and say “the world is burning again, oh the world is burning,” but to see a people fight for access to clean water in the face of a very particular American greed is haunting.