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

by Hanif Abdurraqib

I get that you thought you didn’t get your shine, and I believed you then, and I believed you always. I saw you in the interviews, sometimes bursting at your edges to speak, only to be drowned out. I saw you in photos, playing the background. What you gave in song was so much larger than what you were asked to give outside of it.

I’m saying that you built a world for me then, like you always did. What I have always loved about you, Ali, is that you were a builder of soft spaces for anyone who needed them.

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.

There’s something about this that is like love. 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.

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.

When he speaks of these moments, his voice sometimes trembles, like he is acknowledging for the first time that he and his longtime brother are no longer brothers.

it is a documentary about friendship, and about the lengths we go to in order to keep our selfish pride intact, even if it means it’s all we have left. Even if the people we love maybe want to see some glimpse of it wash away. It is comforting to hold on to bitterness, because letting it go means you have nothing but the risk of not being welcomed back into the fold of friendship.

The main character is not Q-Tip or Phife, but it is the distance between them and their unwillingness to cross it toward each other, no matter how much a viewer roots for them to do so. They’re both stubborn and deeply sensitive in the film—Phife more than Tip at most points—but even in frustration, their friendship is painted so beautifully on screen it is worth rooting for its survival. To hell with the music, let the old friends hug and make up.

I think there is a very particular mercy in being born to a woman who writes, or at least to a woman who sees a world worth writing about.

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.

The way you, with impeccable rhythm, hung each bit of language from the lights in that room and let me see them, even with my eyes closed.

A mother is never supposed to bury a son, I think. I don’t know who makes that rule, as if linear time is the only direction we all have to follow. But something about it seems particularly wrong. A cynic might say that it all depends on the length of life—who had the most fulfilling years and who didn’t. But I am not a cynic.

I am saying that I love words, and I have long appreciated what you do with them.

There are more than enough things that I can’t let go of these days—my fear, my rage, my sadness. I haven’t got as much room for guilt as I used to, despite how it haunts and wishes to crawl out of me at each opening of my mouth around anyone I have once not loved as I should have.

May we love our brothers, Tip. May we love them after they are gone, sure. But may we love them even when they fill us with rage, or even when we don’t speak to them for years, or even when we close our fists and our eyes and swing in their direction with all we have.

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.

I thought about Marianne first when I heard the news of Cohen. Specifically, I thought about what it is like to be tethered to someone or something for so long that their exit rolls out the red carpet for your own. It’s like if you love someone or something or someplace for long enough, they or it become embedded in your heart. And so their death becomes a small death of your own. Leonard Cohen loved a person enough to grow old as she grew old, and then loved her enough to want to follow her to what might be a better place.

Leonard Cohen went to sleep on November 7, 2016, and never woke up to the darkness he was asking for.

It is hard to describe the tone of the country now, looking back. All I remember is seeing some of the country triumphant and an entirely other half of the country dejected, wondering how they would live through it all. The calls for resistance and organizing came a few months later, but in the immediate aftermath, there was a haze over everything, one that I imagine will be difficult to explain to people who weren’t living in it. I casually asked folks on the street how they were and got long, honest answers.

It’s impossible to speak of this album without also speaking of the time it arrived in. The second song, “We the People . . .” is powered by its mocking, scathing hook: “All you Black folks, you must go / All you Mexicans, you must go / And all you poor folks, you must go / Muslims and gays / Boy, we hate your ways / So all you bad folks, you must go . . .” It’s the voice of America turned in on itself, the voice that many of us pretended was at a distance until it was a consistent and low drone, until it had begun activating the most violent among us, from the highest office in the country. It’s jarring, to hear a sentiment made that plain in a week when the country vomited on its own shirt and then looked around and asked who made the mess. It says what we’ve known all along, even as people now wring their hands, eager for the “new” art that marginalized people will create: Black folks have been creating with their backs against the wall for years, telling the future, speaking what is coming to the masses that aren’t eager to hear it until what’s coming actually arrives, looming over them.

The show, it seems, ends here, and we didn’t even deserve for it to take us this far. Earlier that year, I didn’t think I wanted another Tribe Called Quest album. Then Phife died, and I wanted another Tribe Called Quest album more than anything. Then it arrived, and it was even greater than I could ever have asked for. The heroic and brilliant Tribe Called Quest, who almost certainly have nothing left to give us now; the greatest rap group of all time, who returned in a week when the world caught fire to give us one final everlasting gift. It’s one way to keep a beloved ghost in our ears, no matter what uncertain hell awaits.