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

by Hanif Abdurraqib

a window of some dreams being fulfilled in a place that might not be your place,

There is more news and far less time to read it.”

Mamie wanted to have an open-casket funeral as a way of reflecting the world’s horror back onto itself.

And so, in the homes of black families and on newsstands in black neighborhoods, there was the photo of an icon, immovable, teeming with frozen blood.

Otis Redding should probably have never taken off with that plane in the first place, but isn’t that how all stories like this one start?

It is funny—all the ways we use drowning as a metaphor.

1998 was one of rap’s greatest, most sonically diverse years.

hip-hop’s answer to the Beatles.

Their sounds came from the South but spread everywhere.

Here, it is the one who stood in the center of the photo to absorb the full weight of whatever came next.

But I know that sometimes you have to pull away from your brother in order for you to keep looking at him like he is your brother.

I’m reminded of how black magazines lean first on sight before trying to stimulate any of the other senses.

It’s funny, isn’t it—the things that play on our screens and in our heads for years, detached from any fullness.

I’m going to talk to you for a second like you don’t remember.

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

sometimes, it’s just the one thing.

Phife. Everything is a game of small movements—of jolts and bumps and unexpected turns.

It’s all so impossible to keep up with.

the impossibility of the moments so many of us are asked to rise to,

the hem of greatness

We know all the drama and narrative of success and failure and wins and losses.

a ball that decided its own destiny.

because some people out there don’t, and I’m talking to them as much as I’m talking to you, anyway.

something as immovable as a school day

But I must imagine you saw it, perhaps in a dream.

you were a builder of soft spaces for anyone who needed them.

whatever a teenager imagines as love,

tied to the end of countless possibilities.

every time I hear that song I think of a moment when I was not afraid.

What a way to be part of a religion—to have yourself named after the greatest prophet the faith has to offer.

I am wondering if in the summer, you climb to the rooftops and put on headphones and let a world be built around you,

But I still opened my windows one night and just let the sweat arrive.

learned to make the music you had been hearing in your head the whole time.

Sometimes, it’s a gift passed down from somewhere holy, and sometimes it’s just hard work, and sometimes it’s both.

and all white people could talk about was blood and bullets.

This is why geniuses have to die first, I guess.

or maybe somewhere there is a house on fire with every record that someone owns on the inside while they watch from a street where they can see the notes of all the music they love drifting into the air.

Do you know what it’s like to be a little brother? You’re always proving yourself, even when you think you’re not.

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.

Anger is a type of geography. The ways out of it expand the more you love a person.

or it could be that they just needed the comfort of anger to see them through an otherwise difficult and trying reality in which they would otherwise be forced to love each other like they once did, in a past they might not have wanted to return to.

confident enough to lie about how confident he truly is;

There was always something about the way A Tribe Called Quest negotiated the noise around them, almost becoming it, until everything was awash with a sound you desired.

There is a way to read a poem, and then there is a way to allow the poem to exit the body and be read by everyone in the room.

they hang heart and lungs teeth and bone

dem words loop poems ’round moon neck and if yuh hear dem hear dem write

ah write ah write dem down

It’s all a song at the end of the day, isn’t it?

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 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.