Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest

Hanif Abdurraqib

University of Texas Press, Feb 1, 2019 - Music - 207 pages

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.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - Narshkite - LibraryThing

A fascinating twining of the history of Tribe the history of rap and of Black music more broadly, the history of Abdurraqib and the history of America. The language here is spectacular, Abdurraqib's ...

Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest

User Review  - 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 ...

About the author

A visiting writer in the MFA program at Butler University, Hanif Abdurraqib is an acclaimed poet and cultural critic whose work has appeared in the New York Times, MTV News, and other outlets. A nominee for the Pushcart Prize, he is the author of the highly praised poetry collection The Crown Ain't Worth Much and the essay collection They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, which was included in the Chicago Tribune's 25 Must-Read Books list for fall 2017 and received  recognition from reviewers coast-to-coast, including a starred review in Publishers Weekly. He is currently at work on They Don't Dance No Mo', a history of black performance in the United States.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest
• Author: Hanif Abdurraqib
• Publisher: University of Texas Press, 2019
• ISBN: 1477316485, 9781477316481
• Length: 207 pages
• Subjects: Music / Genres & Styles / Rap & Hip Hop