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

by Hanif Abdurraqib

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.

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

The thing about Native Tongues is that they were like my crew, or potentially your crew. They were uncool enough to define a new type of cool on their own terms.

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.

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. With your hands on the machinery of whatever you imagine progress to be, it is difficult to imagine the real-time drawbacks.

It is really hard coming to terms with watching something not have any fight left.

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