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

by Hanif Abdurraqib

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.

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.

A Tribe Called Quest made rap music for our parents and theirs but left the door open wide enough for anyone to sneak through. Anyone with rhythm or anyone who knew how to find it before the bass high-stepped itself across a dance floor. Q-Tip, in the first verse of “Jazz,” sums it up evenly: “I don’t really mind if it’s over your head / ’Cause the job of resurrectors is to wake up the dead.”

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.

People’s Instinctive Travels was, indeed, a blueprint for what was to come. Tribe’s sound didn’t just shift the direction of hip-hop; it offered alternative windows into the world of sampling, cadence, and language.

The core members of Native Tongues were the Jungle Brothers, De La Soul, and a fully formed Tribe Called Quest—with Phife and Jarobi locked in to complete the group. Other members considered part of the original core group were Monie Love, Queen Latifah, the group Black Sheep, a group of young rappers called Leaders of the New School—which featured a charismatic young MC named Busta Rhymes, French MC Lucien Revolucien, upstart group Fu-Schnickens, and a sixteen-year-old rapper named Chi-Ali.

There is plenty out there worth doing alone, but for everything else, there is a need for your people. It would behoove you to have a crew.

To be most effective, the Bomb Squad needed to craft its sound around a very particular type of MC. Chuck D was an obvious choice for Public Enemy: his voice was loud enough to work in concert with the clashing of sounds, and his flow was sharp and even enough to let the music work around him. He wasn’t trying to overpower it so much as he was trying to find a way to live within it. It takes a special MC to find a comfortable pocket amid the hectic rage swelling out of the production of the Bomb Squad. It needs an MC who is equal parts ferocious and generous, willing to bow a bit to production even if it means slightly muting some of the MC’s better instincts.

The complete dissolution of N.W.A. took place in 1991, when allegations arose that Eazy-E had signed over the group’s contracts to Ruthless Records while holding on to a portion of N.W.A.’s publishing rights behind the group’s back. The N.W.A. fallout—starting with Ice Cube’s departure—began a series of events that would define the West Coast hip-hop moment of the early 1990s.

A Tribe Called Quest were not often fixtures on their album covers anyway, so the fact that their faces don’t show up on the cover of Midnight Marauders isn’t much of a surprise. But it’s who was on the cover that makes it interesting, given the time when it was released.

Midnight Marauders was released in November of 1993, on the same day as another hotly anticipated rap album: a debut from the Staten Island rap group Wu-Tang Clan.

What made the engines turn on Wu-Tang Clan was specifically the fact that there was no drop-off in skill from each of the MCs. On the album, it was hard to find any weak link in the group, as if they were each born to play their deeply specific role in the makeup of the band.

Dilla was a perfect fit to fold in with the desired evolution of Tribe. He was of the same generation as Q-Tip, with a similar self-taught technique but a different sound palette and execution. Dilla was utilizing unique and unexpected drum sounds and unconventional sample chops that dipped heavily into 1960s rock and soul.

Beats, Rhymes and Life was A Tribe Called Quest’s first Number 1 album. It was long overdue for them to achieve commercial success, after being critical darlings for years. The album was certified gold, and then platinum.