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

by Hanif Abdurraqib

so the children of slaves made what sweet sounds they could and stole a small and precious thing after having a large and precious history stolen from them.

when slaves were first brought to North America in the early 1600s, slaves from the West African coast would use drums to communicate with each other, sending rhythmic messages that could not be decoded by Europeans.

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.

I imagine it was the lack of spoken language in the music that drew him to it—the understanding that not all silence is silence.

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.

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.

It was the springboard N.W.A. needed to brand themselves as the World’s Most Dangerous Group—something that was boosted dramatically when already-hysterical Christians and cops realized that their name stood for “Niggaz Wit Attitudes” the whole time.

I wish Q-Tip would have gone on to describe the feeling that hits you when you realize you have lost your wallet, or some other precious thing—the way shock begins in your legs and carves a home in your stomach for a while, before even getting to the part of your brain that asks the “What do I do?” question.

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.

Jet was also known for its relevance in covering the civil rights movement when few other places would. The most infamous case of this came in 1955, when Jet sent reporters to the funeral of Emmett Till. The coverage of his funeral included the now-infamous picture of his horribly disfigured body, swollen, beaten, and water-logged. Jet chose to run the images uncensored.

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.

The day they killed Martin we could not return to New York City our visiting senior class stuck in Huntsville streets blazed with suffering in that small Alabama town in the dull shroud of morning the whole world went crazy devouring whatever light that lit our half-cracked windows.

I know it is different to lose a person who was distinctly yours but also everyone’s. What is that feeling? Is it better or worse? To have a loss be something you are mourning in a singular way, which is not the way everyone else is mourning, though perhaps they think it is.

I always wanted to be the only one in the room to get the last line of your bars. It always felt like unlocking a puzzle.