Book Review: Go Ahead in the Rain by Hanif Abdurraqib

I swear I first found out about this book when Facebook for some reason kept serving me ads for sneakers, and some company did a collaboration with this book about the seminal rap group A Tribe Called Quest. Note: Not a collaboration with A Tribe Called Quest - a collaboration with a book about A Tribe Called Quest (further note: I just did a Google search to see if I could find the sneakers and came up empty so I may be completely misremembering the circumstances but I implore you this was real).

I've never been so happy for the indirect assistance of the Facebook algorithm - this book is a solid nine hot dogs out of ten that was hover around 10/10 for a good long while (its own success may have nicked it, since my only complaint was I didn't feel the ending was powerful enough).

First, to those who don't know, A Tribe Called Quest was a rap group from New York that started in the early nineties, broke up right before the turn of the century, and reunited with one last album right before the pandemic. Their sweet spot was the early nineties, where they were the first band to ever earn five-mic reviews from The Source for two consecutive albums (People's Instinctive Travels and The Low End Theory) and were part of a loosely-defined collective called Native Tongues that included acts like De La Soul and Busta Rhymes and prioritized Afrocentrism, jazz samples, and poetry (the collective only lasted about a year or so, but had a huge impact on the early work of all who belonged to it). The leader of the group was rapper and uber-producer Q Tip, who poured his heart and soul into every song and performance. But the heart of the group was fellow rapper and childhood friend Phife Dawg, who was the complete opposite of Tip (Phife only showed up when he needed to) yet kept stealing the shows. While it was great for the art, it led to serious friction in the group, and was a major contributor to their late nineties breakup. While the group did reunite a few times after the turn of the century and even put out one last album, it's not clear that Tip and Phife truly made amends before Phife's death a decade ago.

This is a pretty fascinating story on the surface. But that's not what makes this book great. What makes it great is Abdurraqib's writing. Abdurraqib is a poet first and foremost, and you can easily tell that by how he makes the sentences and paragraphs absolutely sing - this is pure writing at its finest. Not only that, but the format of the book is intriguing as well. He puts Tribe in the context of the African American musical experience - not to try to say they were the culmination of that experience by any means, but instead to show where they were along the timeline. He also provides much more context on the history of rap itself, what else was going on from the late eighties to today, and where Tribe fit in along the way. This is crucial to understanding the band, and highlights how they were one of the last bridges between East Coast and West Coast rap (the album Midnight Marauders features pictures on not only people like Chuck D, Biggie, and Ad Roc, but also Ice Cube, Snoop, and Dre).

Note: I saw a Tribe show in college in 1996. I owned the CD for People's Instinctive Travels and had definitely listened to The Low End Theory, both of which really lean into the jazz/poetry experience, but I don't think I ever heard Midnight Marauders or Beats, Rhymes, and Life, so I wasn't prepared for how high-energy the show was. Still a great concert.

That's the macro of the writing, but where the book really comes alive is at the micro level. Hanif Abdurraqib is a medium-cool African American kid growing up in Columbus, Ohio through the nineties. Abdurraquib reflects on why Tribe in particular spoke to him and what that means about both him and them. He also punctuates the book a few times with letters to the group (the one to Phife's mom after he dies is heartbreaking).

This is a fantastic book that I can't recommend enough - go read it now!