To most British listeners, A Tribe Called Quest are the New York rap quartet behind the languid “Walk on the Wild Side”-sampling “Can I Kick It?”, one of the few early 90s hip-hop hits you can still expect to hear on oldies radio stations otherwise concerned with rock music or soul. Like their contemporaries De La Soul, they embodied a short-lived era of “conscious” rap: both groups were part of a collective called Native Tongues, which preached Afrocentric positivity in the teeth of hip-hop’s burgeoning penchant for violence and nihilism. To hip-hop devotees, however, A Tribe Called Quest are among the most significant bands of the decade, whose influence and importance outlived the brief Native Tongues era. Their second album, 1991’s The Low End Theory, is routinely acclaimed as one of the greatest of all time, praised for its subtlety, its intelligence, its inventive use of jazz samples and the sparking chemistry between the band’s two main protagonists, Q-Tip and Phife Dawg; the reputation of its successor, Midnight Marauders, is only a fraction less stellar.
And to poet, cultural critic and academic Hanif Abdurraqib, A Tribe Called Quest are a lifelong passion. Go Ahead in the Rain is a brief, intensely personal attempt to explore and explain why their grip on his imagination has never slackened over the course of 30 years, a melding of autobiography, social history and the kind of attention to nerdy musical detail that only a truly obsessive fan can muster.
The presence of the latter shouldn’t put the less committed reader off: Abdurraqib is blessed with a keen eye for a particularly telling fact, and what seems like digression invariably turns out to make a wider point about music or culture. Similarly, a book that bills itself a “love letter to a group, a sound and an era” is not an obvious port-of-call for those looking for incisive, clear-eyed criticism, but amid the personal reminiscences and the writing styled as personal letters to the band’s members, Abdurraqib is both perceptive and sharp, with a frequently bold and an intriguingly atypical viewpoint. The real difference between the gangsta rap of NWA and the ostensibly more welcoming style of A Tribe Called Quest and their fellow Native Tongues rappers, he suggests, lies not in the perceived wisdom that the former were a scream of black rage while the latter were more affable, unthreatening “hip-hop hippies”. Rather, the NWA were “absolutely rooted in some idea of what would make young white people most excited and old white people most afraid”, while the Native Tongues rappers were “absolutely rooted in some idea of what would make young black people most curious and old black people most welcoming”.
Critics tend to disdain nostalgia in music – the artist who spends time looking back would be better served looking to the present or, better still, to the future – but Abdurraquib views retrospection as laudable, even noble. His schoolfriends mock A Tribe Called Quest – with their samples of Art Blakey and Eric Dolphy and their guest appearances by legendary Miles Davis sideman Ron Carter – as “the kinda shit old people like”. Abdurraquib, though, is quietly delighted that his jazz-loving parents will allow their albums in a house where rap music is banned, helping to bridge “a gap between my father and me”. “A Tribe Called Quest,” he writes approvingly, “made rap music for our parents and theirs but left the door open wide enough for anyone to sneak through.”
But then everything about A Tribe Called Quest delighted him as a teenager. Abdurraquib crams a lot into 216 pages, from the birth of the blues to the 1977 New York blackout to the 30-year controversy over the Grammy awards’ treatment of hip-hop artists: one of his most impressive skills is an ability to lurch between topics without losing the reader, turning a miscellany into a cohesive linear argument. At this book’s heart lurks a brilliantly vivid portrayal of a certain type of obsessive fandom: not the spectacular kind that leads people to camp outside artists’ houses, turn up to greet them at airports and harass them on social media, but a more subtle, internalised variety, where an artist’s music ceases to be something you merely love and gradually infects you to the point that it becomes a prism through which you view almost everything. At the height of his teenage fixation, he’s constantly reminded that “there’s a song for that” and sees A Tribe Called Quest everywhere, from his relationship with his friends – a “crew of weirdos” who “understood our way around a soundtrack” – to leaves falling from trees in the autumn that the band release their mediocre 1998 album The Love Movement and announce their split: “they slowly began to gather around the tree’s base, as if to say: we tried our best, we’ll try again next time”.
A Tribe Called Quest reformed in 2015, but instead of the acclaim that the music on their next album We Got It from Here… Thank You 4 Your Service warranted, their story became mired in tragedy and darkness. Dawg died of complications from diabetes before its release; the album came out two days after Donald Trump was elected president, lending some of its lyrics a terrible currency: “All you black folks you must go, all you Mexicans you must go … Muslims and gays, we hate your ways.” For Abdurraqib, their prescience confirms a universal truth: “Black folks have been creating with their backs against the wall for years, telling the future, speaking what is coming to the masses that aren’t eager to hear it.”
Even a cursory glance at pop history will confirm he has a point and, as such, he is more cautiously optimistic for hip-hop’s future than a lot of fans his age. Equally, he’s convinced there will never be another band like A Tribe Called Quest: in writing a book that could make even a naysayer want to hear their music as a matter of urgency, Abdurraqib has provided a perfect epitaph.
• Go Ahead in the Rain is available from utpress.utexas.edu/books. It will be published in the UK in August (Melville House).
