★ 03/16/2020

Poet Abdurraqib follows up his collection of music criticism They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us with an impassioned, incisive biography cum memoir arguing for hip-hop’s importance to the black youth of his generation. Abdurraqib focuses on A Tribe Called Quest, a group that broke out from Queens, N.Y., in 1990. Noting the band’s wide-ranging samples—Art Blakey, Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone—he explains that “The Tribe was one of the first groups to repurpose a long line of sound that our parents, and perhaps their parents, were in love with.” He describes his experience trying to find himself as a seventh-grader in Ohio listening to hip-hop on a Walkman and appreciating the band’s willingness to tread “a thin line of weirdness.” In high school, he got by with a crew of friends whose quick wit and music knowledge gave them enough social cred to keep out of fights. Abdurraqib builds a nuanced portrait of the band and their scene in New York, culminating in a touching series of chapters framed as letters to Q-Tip, the group’s founding MC; Phife Dog, “the five-foot assassin with the roughneck business,” who died from diabetes in 2016; and Phife’s mother, the poet Cheryl Boyce-Taylor. This is a standout volume on hip-hop. (Feb.)

In lining up his own story with that of A Tribe Called Quest, Abdurraqib lovingly pays the group the highest tribute possible. Part memoir, part biography, all heart and all great.

Beyond the glorious trivia to be found in these pages—great fun for all people instinctively traveling—Abdurraqib invites a more general readership. Particularly when he explores why we love the sounds we love.

Warm, immediate, and intensely personal...This lush and generous book is a call to pay proper respects not just to a sound but to a feeling.

A stunning work.

Music fans should be reading absolutely everything Hanif Abdurraqib writes, period. He approaches all his subjects with deep generosity and respect, making observations personal and political, all written with a poet’s canny pen. Here he turns his ear to A Tribe Called Quest...He deftly situates their work within the rap landscape and the broader music scene with his astute, critical lens.

[A] provocative commentary…Abdurraqib uses his fandom of this influential and jazzy 1990s-launched hip-hop group to come to grips with his own life, thoughtfully reflecting on everything from African drums and American slavery to the deaths of Leonard Cohen and Minnesota's own Philando Castile to provide context and perspective.

Go Ahead in the Rain is an accurate, honest documentation of the band, their music, and the time…Brilliantly entertaining, informative, and self-reflective. This is essential reading.

By trying to explain why he has always loved A Tribe Called Quest, Abdurraqib manages to give us insights not just about himself but about the evolution of hip-hop, its place in the world today, and the very nature of fandom.

Abdurraqib’s Tribe expertise inspires the reader to seek out albums, playlists, and songs, with a spirit of exploration that reflects the group itself.

[Go Ahead in the Rain is] illuminating for fans of the group, but even hip-hop novices will be moved by Abdurraqib's book. It's a tribute to A Tribe Called Quest and a tribute to the power music has to grow with the listener. It's a book for anyone who has secluded themselves in headphones, pressed play, and heard themselves singing back in someone else's voice.

One need not be a fan of Tribe in order for [Go Ahead in the Rain] to do its work, and this is because Abdurraqib elegantly underpins his personal investment in Tribe with the long history of race, culture, and aesthetics in American life.

Even at his most introspective, Abdurraqib embraces nostalgia without succumbing to it, and honors the experience of fandom while interrogating it...With Go Ahead in the Rain, he manages to both celebrate their achievements and 'lay them to rest.'

[A] searing, thoughtful coming-of-age story about hip-hop, race, and the beloved Native Tongues jazz rap luminaries fronted by Q-Tip and the late Phife Dog.

The beauty of Go Ahead in the Rain, of its engagement with Tribe Called Quest's jazz-influenced hip-hop, is how Abdurraqib discards well-trodden assumptions about what criticism is: that it must relegate the critic to a position of detached, passionless analysis, or that it must proceed in orderly, logical fashion in order to prove a point. In place of these conventions Abdurraqib presents a work concerned with enmeshment in and with the music, the history that it expresses and alters, and the communities that have given us this music...Go Ahead gives us a glimpse into a criticism that doesn't just subject black music to the conventions of the critical essay. Rather, it allows black music to contort and reinvent those conventions.

[Go Ahead in the Rain] manages to be both a vivid history of early hip-hop and an extended elegy for a rap group that defined the author's sensibility.

Abdurraqib can tell better stories about music than sometimes the music can tell about itself…He can take one note and extrapolate an entire psychic history, both of his own wolrd and the world of the musician.

Some of the most insightful writing I’ve seen on the evolution of hip-hop into a brilliantly cohesive whole. . . Abdurraqib’s analysis of grief, authenticity, and the political content of hip-hop stand out, and the letters he writes to the group’s members highlight his evolving compassion and empathy for the group’s struggles.

Riveting and poetic…Abdurraqib's gift is his ability to flip from a wide angle to a zoom with ease. He is a five-tool writer, slipping out of the timeline to deliver vivid, memoiristic splashes as well as letters he's crafted to directly address the central players, dead and living.

Booklength criticism masquerading as memoir, an account of growing up as boho youth whose ears and brains get opened, Hanif Abdurraqib’s fond exegesis chews over A Tribe Called Quest like even the most meticulous 33 1/3 entry doesn’t.

Go Ahead in the Rain might appeal most to the music-obsessed, but its audience is wider than its title suggests. At its heart, the book looks at the constant conversation between life and art: how music changes the way we understand and interact with the world, and alters the culture at large.

Abdurraqib…is one of the most exciting and empathetic writers we've got…[Go Ahead in the Rain is] a full book of trenchant and highly personal essays about [A Tribe Called Quest].

[Go Ahead in the Rain] reads like a well-researched journal entry meets hip-hop history lesson.

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...in writing a book that could make even a naysayer whant to hear [Tribe's] music as a matter of urgency, Abdurraqib has provided a perfect epitaph.

Abdurraqib offers a level of historical understanding that only a passionate fan could deliver.

The beauty of Hanif Abdurraqib's trim volume is that it doesn't try to be definitive. Instead, Abdurraqib embraces the subjectivity of his fandom, putting the seminal hip-hop duo into context via his own experiences coming of age along with the genre. There's a lot of critical insight into this first great book about ATCQ, one that hopefully won't be the last but will endure regardless.

Reading [Go Ahead in the Rain] is like listening to The Low End Theory with a good friend, and confiding in each other all the feelings and thoughts the music brings up…For anyone who's listened to Tribe so many times that their music feels commonplace, part of the air, invisible, Abdurraqib brings it back to vivid presence through context and beautiful, poetic description.

Abdurraqib brings specificity to what being a Tribe fan means by threading the path of the East Coast rap group with his own.

Go Ahead in the Rain is not just for fans of A Tribe Called Quest, but for anyone who has ever felt deeply understood by a band, or found comfort in the solitude of putting on a pair of headphones.

Intimate and expansive…Abdurraqib has a stunning ability to break apart the meaning of music and move it beyond an aesthetic. It is a way of existing, of surviving.

Abdurraqib…makes an implicit argument for a criticism that works toward connection. At the heart of Go Ahead in the Rain are questions about ourselves; it asks how and why we love artists, and what we can do with that love.

A poetic salute to what Abdurraqib considers to be the greatest rap group of all-time.

The book comes to life when [Abdurraqib] speaks from his own experiences…Although Go Ahead in the Rain is a no-brainer for devoted hip-hop heads (even those who think they've read all there is to know about the group), Abdurraqib's poetic homage to ATCQ (and hip-hop in general) will captivate casual music fans as well.

By looking at the short, brilliant, stop-and-go existence of the ensemble A Tribe Called Quest, Abdurraqib has written one of the great books about hip-hop, opening up its genesis, its construction, its evolution and one particular group's history with the clarity of the hold Visible V-8 toy.

[Go Ahead in the Rain] could create a lifelong fan of a book-lover who's never even heard of 'Bonita Applebum.'

Go Ahead in the Rain is both the promised love letter of its cover image and a remarkably helpful guide to Tribe neophytes. Those who know nothing will know slightly more, and will find a place to start. Those who grew up listening to these records...are likely to find joy and connection in Abdurraqib’s memories.

Fans of Abdurraqib’s writing will recognize his ability to seamlessly weave together stories about multiple, often disparate topics. Whether he’s reminiscing about his failed attempt to master the trumpet as a child, or geeking out over the history of sampling in hip-hop, or dissecting a 2011 Tribe documentary, each story serves the larger purpose: recounting the life of A Tribe Called Quest through a fan’s eyes.

[Abdurraqib] lyrically unspools the band's history. Hip-hop fans and non-hip-hop fans alike will find humor, wit, and astounding lyricism in this collection.

Few writers explore their subjects as lovingly as Hanif Abdurarqib, whose thoughtful, lyrical, insightful new book…should be required reading for everybody.

Go Ahead in the Rain transcends the usual fan book for its poetic prose as well as its insights into the wider context of the music.

Abdurraqib...manages to write about music by making his language a type of music. He pays homage to A Tribe Called Quest in the only way fitting, with flow and charm and emotional rawness.

Go Ahead in the Rain is a fan's narrative on A Tribe Called Quest that gives readers the language to imagine a better world.

The book pays attention to the larger changes in the culture, but its overall tenor is warm, immediate and intensely personal.

Abdurraqib deftly weaves the biographical, autobiographical and his own elegiac letter writing into just over 200 pages that not only chronicle Tribe's beats and rhymes, but their place and meaning both in his own life and the larger cultural sphere. The result is at once a comprehensive career overview and a riveting personal reflection.

With [Go Ahead in the Rain], Abdurraqib creates a lasting work with an ambitious scope. He obscures the line between social commentary, memoir, and biography. Most importantly, Abdurraqib constructs a worthy homage to one of hip-hops most innovative artists.

[Abdurraqib] allows us into his own history alongside the groundbreaking group, blending personal, musical, and cultural insights into something that truly resonates.

It's a dazzling act, watching Abdurraqib weave in and out of Tribe's fabled history, working outside of their historical narrative to more clearly contextualize it.

If you're a hip-hop head, you've got to get Hanif Abdurraqib's Go Ahead in the Rain…it's a beautiful meditation on the pioneering rap group and one of the rare books about hip-hop to be long-listed for a National Book Award.

I loved Go Ahead in the Rain because it's about what it means to take refuge in music and also what it means to break out of that refuge through music.

Hanif has a way of making you care deeply for the artists he's writing about…Drawing from his own experiences and peppered with personal letters to the members themselves, Hanif creates an immersive experience for readers to forge a connection to and love for hip-hop.

Abdurraqib identifies with Phife Dawg, and his letter to the late rapper is particularly moving. Go Ahead in the Rain is not comprehensive, but at times it is as moving as the music itself.

An encompassing, engrossing look at one influential group's fomentation and legacy.

Abdurraqib achingly, beautifully illustrates the evolution of Phife's role [in A Tribe Called Quest].

Abdurraqib…fills this book with jazz and memories of the great rap magazine The Source, childhood crushes and, of course, a warm history of a legendary group. It's that rare vivisection, the kind that cuts cleanly and deeply, but leaves the subject more alive than when we found him.

Easily one of the year's best books about music, a smart, thoughtful, deeply felt look at one of the best acts (not just hip-hop, but pop music in general) of all time.

Perhaps the first notable hip-hop book…to seamlessly blend memoir with sociocultural history…[Abdurraqib's] is a moving and wide-spanning vision, each story providing a kaleidoscopic view of one of the greatest acts to ever exist.

Go Ahead in the Rain is a Tribe song of positivity and persistence, an excellent illustration of the way that Abdurraqib both describes and mirrors the impact of his subject.

Part history and part love letter, [Go Ahead in the Rain is] a unique kind of music book that will have you revisiting Midnight Marauders ASAP.

The writing throughout this book is so sharp that I found myself reading and then immediately re-reading lines, amazed at their beauty and precision…Go Ahead in the Rain's tangential, hybrid form is a more accurate representation of the way memories attached to music often feel: non-linear, disjointed, but altogether emotionally vivid.

Lots of books tell us why an artist matters, but this is one that reminds us how special it is to find an artist that matters to us.

Abdurraqib mixes observations about the group with passages of personal retrospective and a rich description of Tribe's musical context.

A must-read for Tribe fans, Go Ahead in the Rain is also a love letter to the music of our youth, and how our relationship with those musicians can become such a vital part of ourselves as we move through life.

[T]his is a writerly talent worthy of our awe. One could argue writers are at their best when they use their insight to make sense of the world they observe. In a book about A Tribe Called Quest specifically—a group that attracted fans across race, gender, and generation gaps—Abdurraqib’s penchant for holding and showing so much simultaneously is a perfect fit.

Abdurraqib is a poet, and he writes with a precise, gorgeous rhythm that makes a reader want to linger on each line. (My copy of the book is dog-eared and highlighted into oblivion.) But what kills me the most is Abdurraqib's empathy—for the people who make the music that sustains us, and also for us, for being sustained.

Abdurraqib explores fandom, artistry, love, and pretty much everything else there is, with remarkable skill and generosity…there are a lot of great books on this list; this is my favorite.

Go Ahead in the Rain is a sparkling tribute to A Tribe Called Quest...Abdurraqib is an excellent guide through the cultural landscape that made (and unmade) Tribe, effortlessly weaving socio-cultural history, music criticism and personal anecdote in an accessible manner, to remind you if you had forgotten and convince you if you had been unaware of the band’s art and impact beyond their Lou Reed-sampling hit 'Can I Kick It'.

[T]his book is like an all-night hangout session with a really smart friend. Abdurraqib writes about A Tribe Called Quest as a fan, but also as a thinker with a finely tuned sense of what's at stake in their music. Brilliant.

[Go Ahead in the Rain] is yet another essential for your reading list, part music criticism, part appreciation and something else entirely.

[Abdurraqib] 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. His love for the group is infectious, even when it breaks his heart...[Abdurraqib writes] about music so beautifully and intelligently that readers are moved to love it, or reminded to love it more.

Go Ahead in the Rain is more than just an homage to A Tribe Called Quest…it's more like a reckoning. The result is a critical examination of the group—their message and history—as well as a musical memoir of sorts, and an exploration of the lasting impact music can have on the soul.

Abdurraqib’s stunning essays - especially his book-length homage Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest - have proven him one of his generation’s most essential cultural voices.

Abdurraqib explores and exposes the power of music, of art, to not just connect with people, but to connect people, to make movements, to inspire change and revolution, on levels both large and small. In powerful, poetic language, Abdurraqib makes clear the legacy of ATCQ, both the one the group called upon for their own creation and the one they left behind.

Go Ahead in the Rain…cunningly and lovingly weaves memoir and eloquently told music history into a compelling and absorbing tribute to the transformative power of music.

[Abdurraqib's] exploration of A Tribe Called Quest uses his love for the group to leverage remarkably sharp insights about the band and himself. Forthright without being solipsistic, the book is a marvel of criticism and self-examination.

Love letters to musicians are best kept private, one person’s fandom being another’s boredom. But Hanif Abdurraqib’s tribute to rap group A Tribe Called Quest is an exception: the poet and critic loops discursively around rap history, racial politics and memoir in the manner of the band’s easy-going but incisive songs.

Go Ahead in the Rain isn’t just a love letter to one of the greatest hip-hop groups ever—it’s also a brilliant poet unpacking his formative connections to the beats, the wordplay, and the jazz that set Tribe apart...Go Ahead in the Rain examines how young fandom evolves into something more like true adoration.

The poet and critic’s love letter to his favorite hip-hop crew is a deeply moving journal of fandom, death, grief, and growing up.

Abdurraqib's writing is so generously thoughtful...He makes everything feel relevant, and he doesn’t swerve into the more self-congratulatory music writing that dives so far into the weeds without reserving room for the joy and heartache that springs from the music.

Go Ahead in the Rain…seems to push the whole genre of music writing forward.

[Abdurraqib] weaves an astoundingly compelling narrative…[Go Ahead in the Rain] is, without a doubt, an artistic statement of beauty.

The vantage from which [Abdurraqib] dissects Tribe's legacy is rooted in the heritage of black music and delivered from the present cultural moment, making Go Ahead in the Rain, much like Tribe's music, capable of remaining relevant for decades to come.

[Aburraqib is] a lovely curator and chronicler of all things A Tribe Called Quest. We are reminded that the soul of the group was always one to be shared, then and now, between Hanif and me, through speakers in art rooms and headphones on bus rides, to anyone willing to hear.

If you're a hip-hop fan, you need to get it…a brilliant piece of music writing.

Abdurraqib's book doesn't attempt an arm's length, scholarly approach to analyzing the group and its music; instead, Abdurraqib speaks from his own experiences, often in the form of questioning or appreciative open letters to members of the band. It's a bold conceit, but if the book loses a bit of reserved objectivity in the process, it gains much more: an emotional grounding for why the group was so important to the author, and, by extension, why their music should matter to readers, too.

"Go Ahead in the Rain is both the promised love letter of its cover image and a remarkably helpful guide to Tribe neophytes. Those who know nothing will know slightly more, and will find a place to start. Those who grew up listening to these records...are likely to find joy and connection in Abdurraqib’s memories."

"Love letters to musicians are best kept private, one person's fandom being another's boredom. But Hanif Abdurraqib's tribute to rap group A Tribe Called Quest is an exception: the poet and critic loops discursively around rap history, racial politics and memoir in the manner of the band's easy-going but incisive songs."

"Abdurraqib achingly, beautifully illustrates the evolution of Phife's role [in A Tribe Called Quest]."

"Riveting and poetic…Abdurraqib's gift is his ability to flip from a wide angle to a zoom with ease. He is a five-tool writer, slipping out of the timeline to deliver vivid, memoiristic splashes as well as letters he's crafted to directly address the central players, dead and living."

Narrator Ron Butler delivers a history of the early 1990s hip-hop scene, along with excerpts from love letters from the author to the members of the legendary group A Tribe Called Quest. Butler’s delivery of the more academic aspects of the audiobook are clipped and professional—at times he sounds as if he is reading straight from a dissertation. But when he narrates the personal content from the author, he interjects more emotion. Amid those parts he finds more success in the charged moments than the tender scenes of a high school kid discovering a band that will change everything for him. The vocal contrast between the narrative and the deeply personal letters to Tribe leave the listener a bit jolted—but exceptionally well informed. R.K.H. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

★ 2018-12-09

Memoir meets cultural criticism in this bittersweet appreciation of hip-hop visionaries A Tribe Called Quest.

Poet and essayist Abdurraqib (They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, 2017, etc.) avoids the temptation to oversell his subject while maintaining a tricky structural balance. He somehow does full justice to the musical achievements of Q-Tip and his crew, to the influence of the musical world on this singular group, and to how deeply the experience permeated the young fan who might not have become a writer—and certainly not this writer—without their inspiration. In recent years, the author found himself with students as young as he once was who, as contemporary hip-hop fans, "had never heard of A Tribe Called Quest, and then, later, only knew them as a phoenix, risen from the ashes." There was a 17-year interval between albums, and by the time what appears to be the last one was released in 2016, friendships had frayed and a crucial collaborator had died. This is a history of how two boyhood friends, Q-Tip and Phife Dawg, teamed up (though the former overshadowed the latter), how they differed from each other, and how they needed each other. Some of the book takes the form of letters from Abdurraqib to each of them and to others. Elsewhere, the author chronicles the progression of rap and how the way that Dr. Dre challenged Q-Tip was similar to the way that the Beatles pushed Brian Wilson, as well as how the East-West synergy later turned vicious and dangerous. "It is much easier to determine when rap music became political and significantly more difficult to pinpoint when it became dangerous," writes Abdurraqib toward the beginning of the book, a somewhat inexplicable pronouncement that he proceeds to explicate and elucidate over the rest.

Even those who know little about the music will learn much of significance here, perhaps learning how to love it in the process.