Go Ahead in the Rain

Starred review from March 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.