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

by Hanif Abdurraqib

In the beginning, from somewhere south of anywhere I come from, lips pressed the edge of a horn, and a horn was blown. In the beginning before the beginning, there were drums, and hymns, and a people carried here from another here, and a language stripped and a new one learned, with the songs to go with it.

The tradition, generally rooted in one-line melodies and call-and-response, existed to allow the rhythms within the music to reflect African speech patterns—in part so that everyone who had a voice could join in on the music making, which made music a community act instead of an exclusive one.

In the early nineteenth century, free black musicians began picking up and playing European stringed instruments, particularly violin. It started as a joke—to mimic European dance music during black cakewalk dances. But even the mimicry sounded sweet, and so the children of slaves made what sweet sounds they could and stole a small and precious thing after having a large and precious history stolen from them.

In 1740, the slave codes were enacted, first in South Carolina. Among other things, drums were outlawed for all slaves. Slave Code of South Carolina, Article 36 reads: “And . . . it is absolutely necessary to the safety of this Province, that all due care be taken to restrain . . . Negroes and other slaves . . . [from the] using or keeping of drums, horns, or other loud instruments, which may call together or give sign or notice to one another of their wicked designs and purposes.”

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.

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.

What made A Tribe Called Quest special is that if one looks closely enough, it is possible to believe that they were sent here directly by some wild-dreaming ancestors, straight from another era.

It is much easier to determine when rap music became political and significantly more difficult to pinpoint when it became dangerous.

the first bits of hip-hop were born out of DJs breaking apart funk and disco beats and relegating every other sound to a graveyard until all that was left was the percussion, cut up into small, danceable portions for the people in the audience to sweat to. And sweat is sometimes political.

These songs and others were political but still felt as though they weren’t aiming at a specific target. A target can turn the political into something dangerous.

N.W.A. members were detained by the LAPD for shooting at people with a paintball gun, which is perhaps when rap music became dangerous.

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.

These two groups point out the ways that rap artists had begun to craft their own mythologies, like wrestlers in the ring: N.W.A. with their fearless, hyperviolent personas, rooted in some truth but absolutely rooted in some idea of what would make young white people most excited and old white people most afraid; and the Jungle Brothers, with their heavily Afrocentric imagery, tone, and aesthetic, rooted in some truth but absolutely rooted in some idea of what would make young black people most curious and old black people most welcoming.

Tip and A Tribe Called Quest weren’t selling futuristic grooves as much as they were selling new interpretations of past grooves, layering samples from every corner of the crates and pulling out only the useful parts of the music.

Tribe’s sound didn’t just shift the direction of hip-hop; it offered alternative windows into the world of sampling, cadence, and language. That the album sold better as it aged was simply a reflection of people catching up to it.

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,

There’s a lot of currency in the space between immensely cool and not at all cool.

my crew sometimes pretended not to like sports even though we kind of liked sports.

My brother was an actively good person who was also good to be around and good at the things he undertook. I was a significantly less good person who was sometimes fine to be around and marginally good at some of the things I undertook.

They were uncool enough to define a new type of cool on their own terms. They were successful, but not entirely always what the popular kids were listening to. They fashioned themselves as outsiders, and the thing about fashioning yourself as an outsider is that no one can call you anything that you haven’t already decided for yourself. The Native Tongues briefly built a world in which they knew themselves as each other’s people. The collective is, more that anything, a support system. Musically, yes. But beyond that, it is a grouping of friends telling each other that their ideas are valuable, that someone will believe in them, even if the people who believe in them are confined to the same studio, tinkering in all of the same weird ways. There is a sadness there—from a knowledge that nothing as pure and self-mythologized as that can last. The worlds most at risk of collapsing are the ones we pull together ourselves, out of thin air, or thin ideas, but with dear friends.

The songs begin to sound like they have checks being chased at the end of every hook.

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.

I, too, have in interest in that which can be felt more than heard.

I’m talking about vibrations. In music, it works best if one imagines hearing as a straight line, with the larger number of hertz on the high end and the smaller number of hertz on the low end. Any music you hear falls along that spectrum. Higher noises—like cymbals crashing together or a car stereo with the treble turned all the way up—fall on the high end. Sounds that demand the ear’s most eager attention. Sounds that are jarring enough to get a room to snap to focus. On the extreme end of this spectrum would be some guitar feedback, wrung through a speaker. The low end is where the bass and the kick drums exist. You found a home here, as I did

Tip, what I most love about “Jazz” is the way the Low End is not only desired but prayed to. I am wondering what space you went to when you let your chest direct your musical curiosities and allowed your ears to rest. Some might say it is too wild to strip away all those sounds and just leave a song’s backbone, but you knew what you were trying to spell out:

When asked about the sophomore slump, you said, “What the fuck is that? I’m going to make The Low End Theory.” And I must say that I am impressed by how you never imagined a failure at your doorstep.

It is really something to make the music talk so that the rapper doesn’t have to speak until they are ready.

I’ve been thinking about how the art of the sample is also the art of breathing life into someone who doesn’t have a life anymore.

the sample is a joy, isn’t it? The wind blows a memory of someone into a room through sound, and the architect captures that memory with their bare hands and puts it on wax. Is this, too, the low end? The feeling of something familiar that sits so deep in your chest that you have to hum it out?

I imagine the low end to be anything you could touch once but is now just a fading dream. I imagine the low end to be a bassline that rattles your teeth, too. But I also consider the low end to be the smell of someone you once loved coming back to you. Someone who sang along to Aretha, or Minnie, or Otis. Someone who loved you once and then loved nothing.

Phife, I love Starks as I love you, perhaps because both of you strike me as people I would want by my side if something were to go down that I didn’t know if I could find my way out of.

The police showed us what the body of Rodney King could take, didn’t they? On the concrete of Los Angeles, the batons cut through the air and then fell again on King’s writhing body. It is hard to tell what could bring this specific type of ferocity out of anyone—particularly those who insist on serving and protecting.

Los Angeles wasn’t on fire yet when The Low End Theory was being made or when it was released. But it would be on fire by the time the songs were playing in heavy rotation all across America. What had already begun, though, were all of the replays of Rodney King’s beating, his legs twitching on the ground with each strike of the baton. The constant replaying of the footage was laying a new groundwork for rage in communities miles away.

What is political in a country that would leave you bleeding on the concrete? What is political when those who did the beating walk free of all charges, despite the footage of their crime?

The Chronic introduced a new stable of West Coast artists, steeped in versatility, that shifted hip-hop’s focus away from its birthplace.

Sampling provided more than just a backbone for the music; it was a way to get a new generation to engage with the history of sounds the new music was pulling from.

Sampling created a dialogue between past and present and helped bridge a gap between the music a rapper was first introduced to and the music they desperately wanted to share with the new world.

The time it took to make albums grew, so the space needed between releases grew, thus the anticipation revolving around releases grew, and so disappointment was often plentiful.

There is a cost to moving the world—a cost that one perhaps doesn’t consider when pushing an entire sound or genre or country forward.

The album was certified gold, and then platinum. And this is how it works sometimes: when there is a crisis of faith, both musical and personal, the things we create become beloved, even though we know the interior of that creative process and want never to imagine being inside it again.

Let the Rhythm Hit ’Em—Eric B. and Rakim AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted—Ice Cube One for All—Brand Nubian De La Soul Is Dead—De La Soul Illmatic—Nas Life After Death—The Notorious B.I.G. Aquemini—Outkast

In October of 1998, the cover of The Source sent especially jarring shockwaves through the communities it landed in. Against a soft blue background, all three members of A Tribe Called Quest are cloaked in black. To the right is Phife Dawg, round sunglasses atop a head full of waves, looking at the ground. On the left, also looking at the ground is Ali Shaheed Muhammad, somehow looking even more morose than Phife, his lip protruding slightly. In the center is Q-Tip, the only one looking straight at the camera, but through a low hat, his head bowed slightly, his eyes fixated on the cameras lens—one of the few white things in the shot. It is a piercing photo. Even if one didn’t read the words below the picture, it would be obvious to anyone holding the cover that something had gone or was going awry. The words below the picture confirmed every worst fear: “Exclusive Interview: BREAK UP! A Tribe Called Quest Disbands.”

Mamie wanted to have an open-casket funeral as a way of reflecting the world’s horror back onto itself. Jet felt a duty to amplify this. And so, in every home and on every newsstand within Jet’s circulation, there was the picture of Emmett Till’s remains. The photo created an urgency around a movement. The things black people had been experiencing and trying to tell the world about were presented, right there, for everyone to see. A worthwhile reason to fight back emerged. The casket was always going to be open, as Mamie Till wished. But it was Jet’s ability to capture the moment that made the funeral echo through generations.

The often-untold story about Otis Redding’s death is all about what it is to be unable to save the people you love, even though you want to. It’s a question of choosing to save yourself first over choosing to save everyone else. Ben

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

Outkast made the hyperserious focus of Tribe—particularly Q-Tip—seem archaic. The two albums, when contrasted, felt like listening to what rap was, and then what rap was becoming.

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

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.

I’m saying that I’m an optimist, overwhelmed with sympathy for those who touched the hem of greatness but then let it slip through their fingers.

I guess I’m saying mercy is something I’ve reserved for even the people who surely don’t need it from me, and I’m wondering if you’ve ever done the same.