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

by Hanif Abdurraqib

all it takes is a surface and rhythm—a

closed fist or an open palm and something merciful enough to be trampled upon.

the music knowledge they’d kept as a means of staying alive,

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.

it is a genre of myths—

before the ability to make noise is taken

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 f...

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.

But it is, in a way, commanding an orchestra, an orchestra of skin to skin and yes, sweat.

I’m talking about the kind of landscape in which something frivolous might become political.

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.

It is an album stuffed with a cast of characters,

new interpretations of past grooves,

and the muffler on that car was so loud, but instead of getting it fixed, I just got a louder stereo

there’s a song for this.

or living when a young black child elsewhere has died.

a bunch of young, talented artists, tethering themselves together for the sake of community or collaboration,

It would behoove you to have a crew.

I’m talking about vibrations.

but Ewing found himself needing Starks to thrive and survive more than he could on his own.

When you were both ready to find the way to each other again, the journey began.

I appreciate stability so that I might appreciate that which shakes up stability,

It must be an odd life, to be introduced to the world first through your flaws and then through your blood on the ground,

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.

the people who exist but may be able to navigate an entire landscape as invisible, until some violence or some tragedy deems them less so.

those who are getting by, just trying to make a chain of solid days out of a mess

What is political in a country that would leave you bleeding on the concrete?

It’s a love story, maybe.

it is a song about the varied ways we all survive.

to dance our way into a type of brief forgetting.

Let the other groups have the anger.

doing that thing where you are half confident and half afraid.

it is not a diss to merely mention a name as a vehicle to end a line.

piling noise on top of noise to create discord instead of harmony.

wall of sound

They made the album the genre wanted, not the album they wanted to see in the genre.

album of conflict, laid over a sonic calm.

so I forced myself into loving it, believing I would never hear their voices again.

not just on its first listen but also on its fifth.

It had to be the kind of tape you could put in a Walkman and know that you would not need to skip a single song.

describe anything that was fresh.

almost as a tease and debate starter.

I suppose there is something to be missed about a print magazine breaking big news.

black people not only wanted to see positive images of themselves, they needed to see positive images of themselves.

It was the right magazine at the right time.

It wasn’t a magazine that could save the world or any black people in it, but it did offer a small glimpse into a better possibility—a