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

by Hanif Abdurraqib

But the cassette is more fragile and less beloved when viewed through a lens of nostalgia. In the battered Walkman I owned, the tape inside the cassette would often get wound around one of the spokes inside the player, forcing the tape to unravel from the shell of the cassette. Countless tapes were ruined this way, by having to hand-wind the tape back into the cassette’s plastic body, warping the insides and leaving a listener with a cacophony of only barely decipherable warbling.

A cassette locked a listener into a commitment,

But what was more vital than all of this was The Source’s album review system. It was the first album review metric I ever knew, and one I came to rely on. It was simple: albums were rated on a scale of one to five mics.

Black Digest was changed to Negro Digest before its first publication, and then eventually to Black World. In 1945, Johnson used the slight momentum and trust he had gained to start Ebony magazine, which took off, regularly selling out of its 25,000-copy run. What Johnson knew was simple: when these magazines took off, black people not only wanted to see positive images of themselves, they needed to see positive images of themselves. It was the right magazine at the right time. Many living black people in the early to mid-1940s were like Johnson and his family: children and grandchildren of slaves. The historical impacts of slavery were still echoing far and wide throughout parts of the country, particularly in the southern states. Ebony, in its initial stages, offered full-color photos of successful black people, along with photo essays and glamorous ads with black people in them. It wasn’t a magazine that could save the world or any black people in it, but it did offer a small glimpse into a better possibility—a window of some dreams being fulfilled in a place that might not be your place, but a place where someone who looks like you is living a little better, and you could live through them.

Fewer people mention this when they mention Jet and the legacy of black magazines using stark imagery to provoke readers.

This is what a picture in a magazine couldn’t capture. The often-untold story about Otis Redding’s death is all about what it is to be unable to save the people you love, even though you want to. It’s a question of choosing to save yourself first over choosing to save everyone else. Ben Cauley said he never stopped having nightmares about the crash, right up until he died in 2015.

I listened to The Love Movement longingly on a school bus in the early fall in Ohio, where the leaves began to fight against their inevitable departure. By the tree that hung over my bus stop, the leaves slowly began to gather around the

tree’s base, as if to say We did our best. We’ll try again next time

The problem was that A Tribe Called Quest simply didn’t have it in them to fight anymore. They built the whole tree, and held on to it for as long as they could, and then their season arrived, and they decided to drift down and make their peace with falling.

What is hard to do is imagine a world in which someone you have loved—before you knew what love is—has to balance that love with whatever ambitions they have for a journey you set out on together.

DEAR PHIFE,

I’m always thinking about the distance between love and sympathy, Phife. How quickly one can feel like the other in the right light, or in the right season, or with the right song acting as its anchor.

What you gave in song was so much larger than what you were asked to give outside of it. I was thankful for your anger, Malik.

You only get to be the underdog once, you know. You only get to fight back

from something that seems insurmountable one good time before people get tired of seeing you do it, and I loved you for trying.

I loved you the way I loved the way the grass felt as I fell to my knees after upsetting the greatest high school soccer team in my league when I was a senior, nearly a year after Ventilation had come and gone.

Did you ever think people would dance to you anywhere you crawled out of a speaker? There’s something black about this urgency, sure. But I must imagine you saw it, perhaps in a dream.

Of all the stories we hear in Muslim households—and I’m sure you’ve heard as many as I have, if not more—the one I return to most is the story of the Archangel Gabriel coming to Muhammad and demanding that he read.

But I don’t know if I’m talking about faith or God here as much as I’m talking about what it is to offer someone sight where there was no sight.

I wonder if you listen to things with your eyes closed sometimes, as I do. I am wondering if in the summer, you climb to the rooftops and put on headphones and let a world be built around you,

Rapaport was a longtime Tribe fan who thought there was no reason not to attempt to put a film together. Even in 2011, thirteen years after the group’s final album, there was still interest in them.

Moreover, Tribe became a staple around the discussion about what “real” hip-hop was. This discussion becomes more common with each passing year, as hip-hop heads of a certain era age, and the genre becomes more watered down—something that happens to every genre of music as it gets older.

No one really wants to see the story of how a band got to be a band once and how they made a lot of money, lost no friends, and rode off into the sunset unscathed by the music industry. If I tell you that my homies and I weren’t homies anymore but had to stick it out for the sake of our shared investment in a thing we’d started, you’d want to know why. If I told you that my homies and I got so close to the promised land we’d imagined that we could rest our palms on the clouds outside the gates, you might understand why we’d want to get there again, despite the fact that it might not be the healthiest endeavor for us.

I think, often, about love strictly as a matter of perspective. For some, it is something they are receiving from someone whom they might slowly be draining the life from.

There’s something about this that is like love. The way we stay angry at family because we know that, in many cases, they’ll be the ones to welcome us back first if we need them to. I fight my dearest homies the loudest and longest because I know they’ll pick up my calls when I need them to. Anger is a type of geography. The ways out of it expand the more you love a person. The more forgiveness you might be willing to afford each other opens up new and unexpected roads. And so, for some, staying angry at someone you love is a reasonable option. 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.

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.

I read a part of your poem “A Woman Speaks” out loud to myself often, when trying to figure out how to make language dance with its companions:

She read “Devouring the Light, 1968”—my favorite of yours. I recited a few lines along:

I am not here asking for a reliving of the moment, but I am here, instead, to say thank you for raising a writer. I was raised by a woman who wrote, and I don’t know if that means anything other than the fact that I saw language as a way to get free at an early age.

There’s a thing with siblings that so many people without them don’t understand. How you can punch each other until the skin pulled over your ribs begins to bruise, and how that violence is also done out of a type of love.

May we love our brothers, Tip. May we love them after they are gone, sure. But may we love them even when they fill us with rage, or even when we don’t speak to them for years, or even when we close our fists and our eyes and swing in their direction with all we have.

I take issue with the word “muse” when it is attached to a woman who is written about extensively by a man—as if she serves no other purpose.

There is knowing, and then there is hoping against that knowing.

Despite the Grammy’s flimsy political standing and its strained relationship with rap, at the inception of that relationship, it was rap music that gave the Grammy Awards a crash course in political urgency.

The Grammys knew that if they were to acknowledge rap music going forward, they would actually need the artists on board. It was a loud statement made by the rappers who didn’t attend—one that said, if you want the access to our culture, you actually have to honor it and honor it loudly, because we’re not going anywhere.

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.

Every piece of A Tribe Called Quest’s Grammy performance was calculated, sharp, and, most importantly, openly angry—led by an artist, Q-Tip, who was clearly uninterested in wasting time. Introducing their performance, Q-Tip spoke the group into existence as a single body speaking for “all those people around the world, all those people who are pushing people in power to represent them.” It is a bold statement, and its spirit—devoid of self-service—runs counter to the general mood of the Grammys. But Q-Tip’s newfound urgency makes him believable as someone willing to fight the fight next to you, even if only from a stage miles away.

He took aim at the history of the awards, pointing out all the legendary artists who had never received one: Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Marvin Gaye.

He wasn’t supposed to have gone on a tour without Phife, and he wasn’t supposed to perform at the Grammy Awards without Phife by his side, and he definitely wasn’t supposed to be fighting for the validity of his album without his brother Malik there to push him forward.

I rebuke the idea that every lyric written when I was a young hip-hop lover was sent down from the heavens and written with a golden pen. I rebuke the idea that the “turn up” is new or something that anyone in need of it should be ashamed of. Or the idea that the turn up isn’t flexible. That it doesn’t happen in the middle of a gospel song on Sunday,

If I close my eyes now, I think I see the world as A Tribe Called Quest would have had me see it. I think I can see my people dancing in the streets, like nothing they loved has ever been set on fire.

There are not enough roses in the world for me to lay at the feet of this impossible group, but I hope this effort counts. I hope Phife can see all of us still trying, from wherever he may be. I hope Q-Tip knows that he’s done something great. I hope when the time comes for the generation after mine to talk about what’s real, they’ll pull a Tribe CD out of their pockets, worn down from a decade’s use and perhaps an older sibling. I hope they’ll put it in a CD player and let a room be carried away.