But at all points, the writing remains deeply personal, Abdurraqib finds his own place within Tribe’s story as someone who had their pictures on his wall, someone who would burn their CDs and sell them at school. Abdurraqib gives us all the historical context we need - with a knack for anecdote, he covers the birth of Hip Hop, the East-West rivalry, and discusses other musicians from Dr Dre to Leonard Cohen. A lesser writer would dwell on historical facts, writing the lives of the band members with scholarly accuracy. Sampling creates a lineage - listening to an album like The Low End Theory, or reading a book like Go Ahead In The Rain, is travelling down a path of rhythm that stretches back decades.Ībdurraqib goes back decades into his own life - we see the rise of the band through the eyes of one of their young fans. “In the mind of Q-Tip,” sampling is a “science”- it’s “breathing life into someone who doesn’t have life anymore.” I first heard of Tribe years after they’d broken up through modern rappers sampling their songs, and in turn, it was Tribe samples that got me listening to Jazz. He goes on: “in the beginning before the beginning, there were drums, and hymns, and a people carried here from another here, and a language stripped and a new one learned.” Abdurraqib traces back “the paths of rhythm”, aligning A Tribe Called Quest with “the tradition, generally rooted in one-line melodies and call-and-response.” He links the past with the present, like a producer mixing an old sample into a new song.Ībdurraqib gives the “art of the sample” the critical attention it deserves. The book begins, “In the beginning, from somewhere south of anywhere I come from, lips pressed the edge of a horn, and a horn was blown.”

Abdurraqib knows how to make sound turn into music - like the horn-player, he turns breath into song. The first few paragraphs had the same effect as those horns on ‘Steve Biko’. It’s rare to come across as gripping an opening to a book of music criticism as the first chapter of Hanif Abdurraqib’s Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest.

It was the first song of theirs I’d heard and now, after years of being a Tribe fan, every time I hear those blaring horns I’m a teenager again, walking to school, feeling like I was at the beginning of something great. When I first listened to ‘Steve Biko (Stir It Up)’ on A Tribe Called Quest’s Midnight Marauders, I knew I was onto something big.

Go ahead in the rain hanif abdurraqib