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

by Hanif Abdurraqib

1740, the slave codes were enacted, first in South Carolina. Among other things, drums were outlawed for all slaves. Slave Code of South Carolina, Article 36 reads: “And . . . it is absolutely necessary to the safety of this Province, that all due care be taken to restrain . . . Negroes and other slaves . . . [from the] using or keeping of drums, horns, or other loud instruments, which may call together or give sign or notice to one another of their wicked designs and purposes.”

The voice, too, is its own type of percussion—particularly when it is used to rattle the sky on a hot day, when there is endless work resting at your feet.

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.

I loved A Tribe Called Quest because I wore hand-me-down jeans to school, my clothes were sometimes too big, and I didn’t make eye contact when I spoke, so I was decidedly weird. They, too, were walking a thin line of weirdness: just weird enough to stand out from their peers, but not so weird that it seemed to be contrived.

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.

That’s beauty, though—a kind of America that can make someone feel like the wide-open spaces are calling them and all of that, that is, when not factoring in the people, some of whom wave Confederate flags on their front porches or glare ominously at an unfamiliar black face in a gas station when the person who owns the face puts their wallet on the counter with a bottle of sweet tea and a pack of peanut M&Ms and then gets the hell out of town before anyone else gets too suspicious.

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.

Maybe you don’t care about the way a good bass kick can briefly stop the heart before it starts again, refreshed. The right speaker makes the body a quick ghost before kicking it back to life, and I find that fascinating, and if you don’t, that’s fine.

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.