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

by Hanif Abdurraqib

I don’t remember the day much, but for the dirt that remained on my good pair of dress pants.

It is one thing to witness violence but another entirely to understand it for yourself by the swelling of pain that comes when your hand collides with someone else’s bones.

He wasn’t necessarily a bully so much as I was constantly an annoyance.

This is the way to make yourself endless, after already making yourself immortal.

I take issue with the word “muse” when it is attached to a woman who is written about extensively by a man—as if she serves no other purpose.

I hope to live a full life loudly, and then slink off into death quietly, perhaps holding the also-sleeping hand of someone I have loved for so long that their emotional architecture has grown into mine.

The CD Man sometimes has DVDs and sometimes has electronics and sometimes has free advice.

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.

or that Alton Sterling didn’t get to go home to the people who worried that a neighborhood would kill him instead of a country.

and I guess this is what a country can get away with when people consider themselves afraid.

There is knowing, and then there is hoping against that knowing.

The verses of the dead are a funny thing.

I’m talking about what it is to be from a place that promises to love you while holding a gun to your neck.

To briefly hold a hand over your eyes and make a new and welcoming darkness of the world outside, even when it is on fire.

It isn’t always what you hear on the surface, but what you hear trying to claw its way out.

It demands someone willing to sit awhile and let the music enter them.

looking to vanish into anywhere but here.

I hope they’ll put it in a CD player and let a room be carried away.