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

Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest by Hanif Abdurraqib
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Louis Armstrong once famously said of understanding jazz, “If you gotta ask, you’ll never know.” As evocative as that legendary phrase has been to representing the meaning of the form, though, there were still some of us who had to ask.

I was lucky to have a father who got it. Not the cutting edge stuff, not Eric Dolphy or AACM, but he was open-minded to a degree that’s astonishing only in retrospect. Without being a fanatic, he knew a lot of the good music that was out there, at least first-generation. He told me once that he was able to see Sidnet Bechet play regularly, and he once wrote a story inspired by the experience. The first time he took me to hear Dixieland jazz – at a cousin’s wedding in New Orleans – he told me most of what I needed to know: the music was a conversation, with each separate performer telling his (or rarely, her) version of the same story, commenting on, amplifying, or contradicting what others had said. His one sentence changed the way I heard the world.

All of us were lucky to have, most prominently among other fine writers, James Baldwin, who explained the creative work behind jazz’s next generation. “Sonny’s Blues” taught me to hear Thelonius Monk, Horace Silver, Bud Powell and other pianists; it opened up the space between the notes as something I could appreciate as much as the notes themselves.

And now, with this, those of us who still have to ask are lucky enough to have Hanif Abdurriq to tell us about what was happening in the early years of hip-hop as a strain of artists found a way to wed the new aesthetics of production to an artistic and political vision that stretched back through Baldwin and the most thoughtful of the African-American tradition.

I picked this up to get a primer on how to listen to A Tribe Called Quest, and that would have been enough. I didn’t expect to find a writer so gifted, one who – like Baldwin – is able to strike his own pose while keeping one foot in the academic world and another in the smoky jazz club/house party cultural space. Abdurriq is a jazz poet himself, though, someone whose rhythm of language matches the complexity of his rhythms of thought.

So, reading him is a joy, as much a joy as learning about the music that inspired him. I already had a feel for “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo” (some 20 years after it was really hot), but this is my first time appreciating “Bonita Applebum,” and some of the other pieces. I had already liked what I heard of their final album – their Saturday Night Live performance in the wake of the Trump election was a comfort in its focused anger – and now I have a larger way of connecting their earliest work with their final.

Not all of this is as incandescent as the early chapters. Toward the middle this “descends” to what I’d originally hoped it would be, a catalogue of the band’s material and, at times, a look behind the scenes at how the pressures of the industry changed their dynamic and relationships. I enjoyed even this part, though, since it’s what I thought I was coming for. Abdurraqib presumes a background knowledge of Q-Tip and Phife-Dawg that I didn’t have, but that’s nothing that a couple minutes on Wikipedia can’t cure.

What’s more, there’s the bonus for me that, while he’s writing as an African-American who came of age in hip-hop’s adolescence, he’s also writing as a Midwesterner in a genre defined by a clash of different coasts. More specifically, he’s writing as an Ohioan – he went to Beechcroft High School, close enough to my own that my team wrestled there every year – so I feel guided here by someone on whom I can make a modest claim of shared perspective (even if I am a decade older).

I’d have recommended this if all it did was answer my basic question(s) about the Tribe of Quest/Native Tongues school of hip-hop. It turns out to be much more than that, though. It’s elegant and excellent enough that, if I get the chance to teach African-American literature again, pieces of it will be on my long-list of possible things to share.


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