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

by Hanif Abdurraqib

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.

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.

“Excursions” is the first rap song I knew that could sound good in almost any situation: in headphones, in the background on any night with a thick and heavy moon hanging above your head, in a car with the windows rolled down on a hot day.

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. Of how I found myself beautiful enough for jazz music, but only in their image and nowhere else. Of how, in the Midwest, their songs first did not play out of passing cars but then played everywhere. Of how you can be both uncool and desirable all at once. Here, a story begins even before jazz. Like all black stories in America, it begins first with what a people did to amend their loss in light of what they no longer had at their disposal. With an open palm against a chest, or a closed fist against a washboard, or a voice, echoing into a vast and oppressive sky, or an album teeming with homages—here is the story of how, even without our drums, we still find a way to speak to each other across any distance placed between us.

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 my hand, balled into a tight fist and thrown at the jaw of a bully in my ninth grade year, the year my older and bigger brother and I weren’t at the same school and I became a target. 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.

I’m saying there’s a language for this that I never quite understood but for you showing it to me. I hope whatever path you take leads you back to the arms of Tribe, but even if it never does, you’ve found a way to make a world again. You’ve found a way to give someone like me a place to land this time, and it wasn’t just in a high school gym, but also in the open mouth of a window in a summer when it was too hot to breathe. Lucy Pearl was a feeling, Ali. I imagine you first as the angel that held me close and asked me to read when I could not see the words for myself. I imagine you first as the person who guided my hand, who guided the language onto my tongue.

Everyone uses the same metaphor about fire: how those immersed in it rise from the ashes newer and sometimes better. It’s tired, to be sure. But it works here. How you—with no records to sample—learned to make the music you had been hearing in your head the whole time. You learned to translate the beating on the table from the school where you and Phife were once young.

Tip, did you ever listen to Phife’s album? The solo album that no one bought and the one we were told no one listened to? I listened to it, Tip. It occurs to me now, all these years later, that he was maybe writing to you the whole time. Not as an apology—but just to show you how great he was all along. Do you know what it’s like to be a little brother? You’re always proving yourself, even when you think you’re not. I’ve started to wonder if no one loved Phife’s album because it was a love letter only to you and no one else. I want to know if you listened to it then, and I want to know if you still listen to it now. I want to know if you’re as proud of him as I was. You don’t have to tell him out loud, but I wish I could see the faintest smile spread across your face at the first opening of your brother’s rhymes, Tip.

I once balled up a small fist and swung it as hard as I could at my older brother’s face. Not because I wanted to hurt him, but because I wanted him to imagine a world in which I was unafraid to hurt him. There is a difference there—between wanting to harm someone and wanting to be feared. The part of the story that I don’t tell is that after I hit my brother—after the punch danced across his face and left a small red mark—I ran away and locked myself in a closet while he seethed with rage. I made myself small in a corner with a pile of dirty clothes. I held my knees to my chest and I wept, and I am not sure why. I was maybe afraid. Not of the consequences, but of the brand-new knowledge of what my fists were capable of. If we are blessed with working hands at our birth, we then spend our lives making them into the machines we want them to be.

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.

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.

It seems, Ms. Taylor, that we are nothing if not for our histories, and so much of mine is tied up in the business of ghosts. I don’t want to burden anyone, but I consider anyone who has lost someone my kin, because I think we are all faced with the same central question of how we go on. How we live the life that best reflects the people who aren’t here and are still counting on us.

My brother is still living, so I do not yet regret the times I was less than good to him. I will, and I know I will, but there isn’t any road to that for me yet. It might happen over years. We’ll both go gray in our beards and begin to lose the things that marked us as young. I can prepare, in due time, my long list of apologies for those things I cannot carry with me after he’s gone. There will be a discussion of the weight to these things—the things we keep inside ourselves when we lose someone close to us with whom we used to share a knowledge and history.

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.