The story of A Tribe Called Quest is, from a certain vantage, heartbreaking. His love for the group is infectious, even when it breaks his heart. He has a seemingly limitless capacity to share what moves him, which means that to read Go Ahead in the Rain, you don't need to be a Tribe Called Quest fan: Abdurraqib will make you one. Here, he takes that skill up yet another notch. In his two previous books, The Crown Ain't Worth Much and They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, Abdurraqib demonstrated his expertise at compressing massive emotions into minimal space. Go Ahead in the Rain is at once an extended critical essay, a hip-hop history, and a series of love letters to A Tribe Called Quest, and particularly to the group's two star MCs, Q-Tip and Phife Dawg. In the beginning before the beginning, there were drums, and hymns, and a people carried here." 'Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest' by Hanif AbdurraqibĪbdurraqib unspools history from here, carrying the reader through centuries of African-American music-making in a capacious few pages that end with the 1990 release of A Tribe Called Quest's first album, People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm. Like any good origin story, poet and critic Hanif Abdurraqib's Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest begins in the beginning: "In the beginning, somewhere south of anywhere I come from, lips pressed the edge of a horn.
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