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

by Hanif Abdurraqib

In 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.”

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.

Jazz, then, is a music born out of necessity. When slavery was abolished in 1865, many former slaves went into entertainment with all they had: the music knowledge they’d kept as a means of staying alive, blended with what other black musicians had learned along the way.

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.

To hear it made plain—to be told that my body was, indeed, not made for it—was first comforting and then deflating. Yes, of course, I remember thinking. Of course I am not worthy of this glorious machine.

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.

Those two lawsuits opened up the floodgates and instilled fear into record companies, who realized that their back catalogs were all getting sampled freely, sometimes by artists they had signed to their label. The industry acted quickly before more lawsuits came down, setting a rule that if you release a record on any major label, you have to clear a sample.

I’m always thinking about the distance between love and sympathy,

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.

I think often of how someone large and black is seen as a vessel for love or a vessel for fear, depending on who is doing the looking.

Times were urgent—a moment for people to say what they really meant and leave nothing to chance. Leave it to rap, once neglected by the Grammys and then tediously embraced, to flip that switch.

Resist. It is a silly thing we do, attach awards to art and then judge it by what it can or can’t win.