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

by Hanif Abdurraqib

My father wanted to defend me against the teacher’s slight, I’m sure. But even beyond that, he wanted to defend a history that he knew and understood. He wanted to defend the sounds that got him through his long days and the language that he could walk into easier than most others. 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.

So this is the story of A Tribe Called Quest, proficient in many arts but none greater than the art of resurrections—a group that faced the past until the present became too enticing for them to ignore.

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.

Kamaal Ibn John Fareed and Malik Izaak Taylor grew up together in Queens, New York—childhood friends who used music as a bridge to each other. Before Fareed was Q-Tip, he was MC Love Child, performing occasionally with another pal from Queens Ali Shaheed Muhammad, who acted as his DJ. Before Taylor was Phife Dawg, he was Crush Connection, collaborating with MC Love and Muhammad regularly, before eventually joining their group.

and Ali Shaheed Muhammad went to high school with the group that would become the Jungle Brothers, and on a demo track, Q-Tip opened with a line about being Q-Tip from “a group called quest.” Jungle Brothers’ member Afrika Baby Bam told him to change it to “A Tribe Called Quest,” and so, like all good names, it came from someone else.

Death is such a reckless and unexpected visitor, waiting to make a mess of our past, present, and future in equal measures.

It’s the voice of America turned in on itself, the voice that many of us pretended was at a distance until it was a consistent and low drone, until it had begun activating the most violent among us, from the highest office in the country. It’s jarring, to hear a sentiment made that plain in a week when the country vomited on its own shirt and then looked around and asked who made the mess. It says what we’ve known all along, even as people now wring their hands, eager for the “new” art that marginalized people will create: Black folks have been creating with their backs against the wall for years, telling the future, speaking what is coming to the masses that aren’t eager to hear it until what’s coming actually arrives, looming over them.