Notes on a book bought in the spring and finally finished this week. The book: Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest by Hanif Abdurraqib, a poet and critic. He grew up listening to the great rap group, A Tribe Called Quest. The book is his attempt at placing that love into words. It is a dialogue that he has with the members of group, fans of rap, and the reader. He makes sense of the nostalgia for the group for the time that was as he grew up with their cassettes and CDs. What they meant to him and to the genre and to a young black man.
It is good.
I grew up with A Tribe Called Quest as well. I grooved to this nostalgic trip of a book. I bopped to ‘People’s Instinctive Travel and the Paths of Funk and Rhythm’ my sophomore year in college. ‘The Low End Theory.’ That’s my jam. It blew my mind my senior year. ‘Midnight Marauders’ is the sound track to my post college malaise. Head nodding along with the beats.
Their last two albums don’t register much with me as hip-hop evolved and as I grew older and looked for an identity to call my own. I blaze a few tracks from them now and then, but like all Tribe fans don’t really like the two.
2016. R.I.P. Malik Taylor. And they drop ‘We Got It From Here: Thank You 4 Your Servic’e days after the Donald was elected. The Donald is also a track on that album. I remember grinding on coding problem at work, earbuds in listening to that album knowing that it was call to action, resistance. Head nodding. Just something special to keep the head up as the darkness seemed to envelope us all.
The dark is still here. The albums of A Tribe Called Quest are still, too. Put them on once in a while.
