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

by Hanif Abdurraqib

When they took the drums of slaves, the slaves simply found new drums in everything, and this is how African rhythms were retained and passed down, held close by those who knew what it was to have a culture ripped from them.

It can be said that the entire story of jazz is actually a story about what can urgently be passed down to someone else before a person expires. Jazz was created by a people obsessed with their survival in a time that did not want them to survive, and so it is a genre of myths—of fantasy and dreaming, of drumming on whatever you must and making noise in any way you can, before the ability to make noise is taken from you, or until the noise is an echo in your own head that won’t rest.

But the first bits of hip-hop were born out of DJs breaking apart funk and disco beats and relegating every other sound to a graveyard until all that was left

was the percussion, cut up into small, danceable portions for the people in the audience to sweat to. And sweat is sometimes political. Say, if it comes off the back of someone who is working in a field that is not their own field in a country that wasn’t always their country. Sweat is sometimes political when it falls from the shoulders of an athlete who is playing for a college in a place where they might be one of few black people on campus. But sweat isn’t always political—not when it’s the small river being formed between two warm bodies in the midst of some block party or basement or anywhere music is coming from hands touched to records.

I like to imagine that hip-hop became political when someone threw the first rock or brick into a glass door or window and walked inside a store to retrieve a mixer; that hip-hop became political when it took food out of one person’s mouth to put food into another’s.

By the 1990s, rap had become political to the world but not yet dangerous.

I know some wise heads who will say that as long as there have been police and black skin to bruise, the two have been wed.

When the letter was made public, people set N.W.A. records on fire. Politicians denounced the group and urged parents to keep their children away from the music they made. And not just the music they made but also the musical genre they trafficked in.

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.

These two groups point out the ways that rap artists had begun to craft their own mythologies, like wrestlers in the ring: N.W.A. with their fearless, hyperviolent personas, rooted in some truth but absolutely rooted in some idea of what would make young white people most excited and old white people most afraid; and the Jungle Brothers, with their heavily Afrocentric imagery, tone, and aesthetic, rooted in some truth but absolutely rooted in some idea of what would make young black people most curious and old black people most welcoming.

This song shows something about rap and the way rappers on each coast imagined one another and their landscapes at the early turn of the century, before the East Coast–West Coast rap war exploded and so many rappers were confined to their singular bubbles.

If you’re N.W.A. or Public Enemy, you want to rattle the cage of public consciousness and push for some uprising among the people to take back what is theirs, or to incite some violence against an oppressor.

If you’re Too Short, you want to captivate a listening audience of young men who imagined sex but hadn’t experienced it beyond their imaginings or the pages of some illicit magazine swiped from the room of a parent or an older sibling.

If you’re A Tribe Called Quest, or at least if you’re Q-Tip, the story you tell is one that is mundane on the surface, built around something meaningful only to you and a handful of your pals, piled in ...

When layering sounds in this manner, there has to be a unifying one that each of them can fit into comfortably without throwing the groove off.

Q-Tip was, in many ways, an extension of rap’s early DJs, chipping away at a massive block of music and peeling off only what he needed.

An example would be something like the frantic and hectic album Tusk by Fleetwood Mac, which was a stark departure from the pop-drenched sounds of their previous album, Rumours. The album helped signal the New Wave sound, but at the time, it was a confusing release, loved by a few critics but only a fraction as commercially successful as their previous two albums, until the middle of the 1980s, when the sound they were reaching for began to make more and more sense to people.

I got in my old car and headed back east, and the muffler on that car was so loud, but instead of getting it fixed, I just got a louder stereo and I fingered the leather seams of my newly retrieved wallet and I laughed at the absurdity of it all and then I remembered: there’s a song for this.

I have no hard evidence on the distance between a crew and a gang, or what makes someone designate one group a crew and another a gang. I imagine it might depend on who owns the eyes looking upon the cluster of people considering themselves a crew, and what skin is most prominent on that cluster of people, and perhaps the clothing they have on—how it hangs or doesn’t hang from their bodies.

We weren’t cool, but people would come to us to find out what was cool. To that end, we had a purpose. To have a purpose was to be needed, and to be needed was to be slightly protected. I would ride the back of the school bus with headphones on, attached to my Walkman, and people would talk to me because they knew I was listening to good music, and they’d want to know what music was good so that they could talk about it in their far cooler circles.

Latifah—and later her protégé Monie Love—upset that concept in different ways: Latifah was interested in turning a lens toward the layers and complexities of black womanhood. It would be reductive to paint Latifah as a matriarch in contrast to the skilled and rambunctious group of young men making up the rest of Native Tongues. 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.

There is a sadness there—from a knowledge that nothing as pure and self-mythologized as that can last. The worlds most at risk of collapsing are the ones we pull together ourselves, out of thin air, or thin ideas, but with dear friends.

I miss loosely defined collectives in rap music, and I think the genre misses them, too. They aren’t entirely obsolete, though. The Los Angeles collective Odd Future, formed by Tyler, the Creator in 2007, is unlike Native Tongues in sound but similar in spirit: a bunch of young, talented artists, tethering themselves together for the sake of community or collaboration, or just from the desire to be weird together.

DEAR TIP, I, too, have in interest in that which can be felt more than heard. You know this from jazz, as I do, but also from the way the body reacts with a low, joyful moan after placing the first bite of a good meal on your tongue.

Shortly after the album cover was shot, she found out she had cancer and was given six months to live. She made it longer than that, but I’ve been thinking about how the art of the sample is also the art of breathing life into someone who doesn’t have a life anymore.

And now, here he is. He’s the quintessential New York player. He has the city’s architecture built directly into his style of play. He endures, and it isn’t romantic. It’s peppered with drugs and theft and jail time. But if there’s a fight to be had, you want him next to you. Phife, I love Starks as I love you, perhaps because both of you strike me as people I would want by my side if something were to go down that I didn’t know if I could find my way out of.

The police showed us what the body of Rodney King could take, didn’t they? On the concrete of Los Angeles, the batons cut through the air and then fell again on King’s writhing body. It is hard to tell what could bring this specific type of ferocity out of anyone—particularly those who insist on serving and protecting.

It must be an odd life, to be introduced to the world first through your flaws and then through your blood on the ground, or your swollen face in a mug shot, or your bent body in a wheelchair.

I’ve been thinking a lot about invisible weapons and how they relate to the body itself. I have nothing on me, but in the wrong neighborhood, I have everything on me. And it’s as simple as a move for a pocket, or a low whistle in the wrong direction, or the song spilling out of my rolled-down car windows.

The crescendo, in which we figure out that you haven’t learned your lesson, goes like this: You wanna be treated right, see Father MC Or check Ralph Tresvant, for sensitivity ’Cause I am not the one, I got more game than Parker Brothers Phife Dawg is on the mic and I’m smooth like butter

The Low End Theory for this and this alone: how unwilling you were to provoke in the name of something that might make a listener laugh for a while, and damn, did we need to laugh, because the police beat a man right there in the street and we all watched it on television, Phife. They didn’t serve the time for it, either. So we all needed something foolish—a winding story about lost loves or a punch line about some wack shit. It’s all low, all the time. Even the laughter is low. Even the way one exhales after a good laugh rumbles the walls of a room can sound like bass flooding out of the speakers.

Cube, though, was more interested in the sounds being used by Public Enemy, who, by 1991, were four albums into their run as a fiercely political rap group that didn’t sacrifice lyrics or beats to get their message across.

Both groups were angry at the same system, but listening to Straight Outta Compton and Fear of a Black Planet back-to-back indicates something simple: the system has many hands and can place those hands around many necks at once.

Q-Tip was using the sample as a razor, and the Bomb Squad was using samples as a machine gun.

Due to Cube’s focusing his lens primarily on the narratives of south-central Los Angeles, the album was hailed as one of the West Coast’s first masterpieces.

It didn’t matter that AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted was recorded with East Coast producers at a studio in New York City. The West Coast was starting to plant its flag in the ground.

Fear as a currency can gain one actual currency, depending on how one uses the fear as a tactic to compel others.

even before setting eyes on the music videos associated with the album, I could listen to the music, close my eyes, and visualize the cars rolling in straight lines down sun-soaked roads with palm trees hanging over them lazily, letting their wide leaves cast shadows.

If Ice Cube gave the West Coast a viable solo MC, The Chronic gave the West Coast a viable sound and a label to house that sound.

The rigor of their first two projects bore significant fruit, but they were hard on Phife, who was consistently exhausted due to his diabetes and the energy it required of him to tour and write and perform interviews. His exhaustion led naturally to Q-Tip shouldering most of the group’s publicity appearances.

In this way, the work was an exchange, similar to the 1960s, when Brian Wilson was pushed by and pushing the Beatles.

Sampling is creativity until a judge decides it is theft, and that is what a judge did—going so far as to suggest that Biz Markie should serve jail time for his appropriation of the song. Right after that, the Turtles brought a suit against De La Soul for using elements from “You Showed Me.”

Dr. Dre found a way around this on The Chronic by re-creating the sounds of old songs with live musicians, manipulating notes here and there to lessen the number of samples he used. He was also fortunate to latch on to George Clinton, who was more than willing to hand over much of the

Parliament-Funkadelic catalog for a fraction of the cost that others were charging. Dre built a sound on what was affordable, but some of his peers weren’t so fortunate and didn’t have the resources he had.

Their music was laced with a type of fear and paranoia that bled through the sonic landscape: an avalanche of drums from each direction; a sharp synth slicing through like a knife; piano loops and distorted bass lines that sounded like they could have been pulled out of a horror film.

Phife had in some ways decided that he was done with the group before the group was officially done. On the other side, Q-Tip decided to convert to Islam in 1994. He had previously been leaning toward Islam, but a reading of the Quran refueled his desire for faith, and he became devout. By the time A Tribe Called Quest set out to record their new album in 1995, the group’s chemistry had entirely shifted.

Being good is only a failure if you’ve been impossible three times in a row. If you’ve carved new paths out of seemingly nothing, people might become confused when you don’t do it again or when you veer into different territory that feels both new and uncomfortable rather than groundbreaking.

It makes sense that the album on which Q-Tip decided to take his hands slightly off the wheel was also the album where Phife shined the brightest, but it was also the album seen as a letdown to the general public. Beats, Rhymes and Life is an album of conflict, laid over a sonic calm. It is not a happy album. Gone are the upbeat crew cuts and the odes to ease and community. Instead it includes songs about depression, stresses of fame, and bemoaning the industry they were in.

The tone of the album feels very bitter and dark, reflecting a group no longer interested in uplifting their genre and more interested in performing an autopsy on it. Still, Beats,