Go Ahead in the Rain
Notes to A Tribe Called Quest
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4.4 • 25 Ratings
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Best Seller
2019 National Book Award Longlist, Nonfiction
2019 Kirkus Book Prize Finalist, Nonfiction
A February IndieNext Pick
Named A Most Anticipated Book of 2019 by Buzzfeed, Nylon, The A. V. Club, CBC Books, and The Rumpus, and a Winter’s Most Anticipated Book by Vanity Fair and The Week
Starred Reviews: Kirkus and Booklist
“Warm, immediate and intensely personal.”—New York Times
How does one pay homage to A Tribe Called Quest? The seminal rap group brought jazz into the genre, resurrecting timeless rhythms to create masterpieces such as The Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders. Seventeen years after their last album, they resurrected themselves with an intense, socially conscious record, We Got It from Here . . . Thank You 4 Your Service, which arrived when fans needed it most, in the aftermath of the 2016 election. Poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib digs into the group’s history and draws from his own experience to reflect on how its distinctive sound resonated among fans like himself. The result is as ambitious and genre-bending as the rap group itself.
Abdurraqib traces the Tribe’s creative career, from their early days as part of the Afrocentric rap collective known as the Native Tongues, through their first three classic albums, to their eventual breakup and long hiatus. Their work is placed in the context of the broader rap landscape of the 1990s, one upended by sampling laws that forced a reinvention in production methods, the East Coast–West Coast rivalry that threatened to destroy the genre, and some record labels’ shift from focusing on groups to individual MCs. Throughout the narrative Abdurraqib connects the music and cultural history to their street-level impact. Whether he’s remembering The Source magazine cover announcing the Tribe’s 1998 breakup or writing personal letters to the group after bandmate Phife Dawg’s death, Abdurraqib seeks the deeper truths of A Tribe Called Quest; truths that—like the low end, the bass—are not simply heard in the head, but felt in the chest.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Music biography, emotional fan tribute, on-point cultural criticism, and candid memoir. Go Ahead in the Rain can’t be squeezed into a single category—and that’s what makes it so brilliant. Throughout his examination of hip-hop legends A Tribe Called Quest, poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib never half steps, whether he’s discussing the group’s Afrocentric garb or the way the Rodney King beating shaped perceptions of the Tribe’s jazzy, minimalist second album, The Low End Theory. He makes connections between the group’s trajectory, the cultural context of the moment, and his own experiences as a young hip-hop devotee growing up in ’90s Ohio. Abdurraqib’s writing shines with enthusiasm, particularly in the passages where he addresses members of the band directly, pondering their feelings and motivations. The joy he takes in exploring his musical heroes is obvious—not to mention contagious.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet Abdurraqib follows up his collection of music criticism They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us with an impassioned, incisive biography cum memoir arguing for hip-hop's importance to the black youth of his generation. Abdurraqib focuses on A Tribe Called Quest, a group that broke out from Queens, N.Y., in 1990. Noting the band's wide-ranging samples Art Blakey, Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone he explains that "The Tribe was one of the first groups to repurpose a long line of sound that our parents, and perhaps their parents, were in love with." He describes his experience trying to find himself as a seventh-grader in Ohio listening to hip-hop on a Walkman and appreciating the band's willingness to tread "a thin line of weirdness." In high school, he got by with a crew of friends whose quick wit and music knowledge gave them enough social cred to keep out of fights. Abdurraqib builds a nuanced portrait of the band and their scene in New York, culminating in a touching series of chapters framed as letters to Q-Tip, the group's founding MC; Phife Dog, "the five-foot assassin with the roughneck business," who died from diabetes in 2016; and Phife's mother, the poet Cheryl Boyce-Taylor. This is a standout volume on hip-hop.
Customer Reviews
Wow
Beautiful book from beginning to end, once I started I couldn’t stop. The whole time I was reading it I felt somewhat of an empty hole knowing Phife is no longer with us, but the story telling made it feel like he was right there reading it with me all along. Great read, great insight. Loved it.
For everyone
Going into this book I know nothing of the group; just a big fan of Hanif. And I wouldn’t have anyone else teach me.