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

by Hanif Abdurraqib

They fashioned themselves as outsiders, and the thing about fashioning yourself as an outsider is that no one can call you anything that you haven’t already decided for yourself.

There is plenty out there worth doing alone, but for everything else, there is a need for your people. It would behoove you to have a crew.

I don’t blame Bill Buckner as much as I blame the impossibility of the moments so many of us are asked to rise to, when we would likely be better off playing catch in the backyard or kicking freestyles with our brothers in the basement inside a home where we first heard the songs our parents sang falling from their mouths while a record played.

want you to know that I no longer determine genius by how much pain someone can endure,

If there is no way to make living forever appealing, let me say that I hope to live a full life loudly, and then slink off into death quietly, perhaps holding the also-sleeping hand of someone I have loved for so long that their emotional architecture has grown into mine.