Hanif Abdurraqib

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.

Notes to A Tribe Called Quest

Go Ahead in the Rain

Hanif Abdurraqib is so good at making topics that a reader may be unfamiliar with feel tangible by drawing from the personal and the pop culture to create a human connection in his love for the topic. The love that he has for A Tribe Called Quest and hip hop oozes through each page, and his cadence is enviable. 

cee 

Janna

Hanif Abdurraqib is one of my favourite living poets and writers. No one else’s music writing has as emotionally scorched me and converted me to the artists he writes about. He always so brilliantly illustrates the importance of a song or a musician to him, and then deftly ties it to a common human emotion or experience. There’s a timelessness and empathy to his sensibility. This is crucial to highlight as we live now in a sea of contemporary music writing that tends to consist of reviews with few insights and much snobbiness. 

Though some might call it a history, the beauty of Go Ahead in the Rain is how vividly Abdurraqib writes of how he lived the same time period as A Tribe Called Quest (ATCQ). Rather than simply listing a chronology of rap, he ties in how the news of certain events broke, the musical and political context, the tangible experience of listening on cassettes and CDs, the moments in his life to which ATCQ acted as a soundtrack. It’s a reminder of how sacred music is and can be, how untouched by time and yet so coloured by its surroundings, how it can be a confrontation with life and yet an escape — how it is vitally all of these things at once. 

I found this harder to get into than his essay collection, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, which is another masterclass in music writing. I think it’s because, as a poet, Hanif is master of the vignette. The book is interspersed with letters to members of ATCQ, and these hold some of its most beautiful passages. He writes to Tip and Phife about ATCQ’s second album, The Low End Theory, where he takes the “low end” from bass notes in low end of the audio spectrum to dark desire to the low hum of love. Besides simultaneously reviving my love for the epistolary form, he uses something in poetry I wildly admire. It’s what I’ve heard some call “the payoff” (technically the “volta”, I think, but don’t quote me), where there is a shift partway through in thought or argument. Often, this turns the entire poem on its head so that both ending and beginning are seen in a different, more poignant light. Where the low end morphs seamlessly from musical technique into human nature. Repeatedly using this in telling a history, however, made me wish Abdurraqib had tried a more narrative style to hold all of it together in a way that didn’t require so many payoffs. That may have smoothed over a few fragmentary jumps, lulls, reaches, and repetitions. 

But, seen this as a love letter, I can’t really fault it. ATCQ are heroes for Abdurraqib, just as many artists are to us in our most formative moments. The arc of this is almost mythological, though I can’t say whether the hero’s journey is ATCQ’s or Abdurraqib’s. (Who better, after all, to partake in the mythical than a tribe quite literally called “quest”?) These heroes, larger than life, fall and become human, as our parents are also revealed to us as flawed people when we grow up. And yet the magic of their music remains, for the superhumanity of their work is held in exactly that: the superb, intense humanness. Something Abdurraqib is himself able to extract and recreate and reach across time and space — until I am here, penning my own love letter to his writing and how sacredly I hold it.

Go Ahead in the Rain Notes to A Tribe Called Quest

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