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

by Hanif Abdurraqib

the understanding that not all silence is silence.

“I don’t really mind if it’s over your head / ’Cause the job of resurrectors is to wake up the dead.”

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 the thing about road trips is that nothing at the end of the journey can live up to the anticipation of the unseen destination once we arrive there, and

The difference between a gang and a crew sometimes boils down to reputation or intention.

sometimes you run into the fray in the name of people you love, even if you don’t share blood with them.

I’m always thinking about the distance between love and sympathy, Phife. How quickly one can feel like the other in the right light, or in the right season, or with the right song acting as its anchor.

But I don’t know if I’m talking about faith or God here as much as I’m talking about what it is to offer someone sight where there was no sight.

Not because I wanted to hurt him, but because I wanted him to imagine a world in which I was unafraid to hurt him.

There is a difference there—between wanting to harm someone and wanting to be feared.

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.

Anger is a type of geography. The ways out of it expand the more you love a person. The more forgiveness you might be willing to afford each other opens up new and unexpected roads. And so, for some, staying angry at someone you love is a reasonable option. To stay angry at someone you know will forgive your anger is a type of love, or at least it is a type of familiarity that can feel like love.

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 don’t want to burden anyone, but 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.

Death is such a reckless and unexpected visitor, waiting to make a mess of our past, present, and future in equal measures.

we keep our ghosts close to us—how we store them and pull them out of our closets when we most need their memories—how, if we’re lucky, we have a new echo to mix in with the old.

I am not OK, and even if I were to find the time to be OK, there are too many people I love who are not OK, and I feel that weight on top of my own.