RaveBOMBAls’s writing in My Pinup melds the critical with the autobiographical ... Als has perfected the difficult art of being a discerning fan. The sieve of fanaticism can only hold so much fantasy and pleasure; Als is wary of some of the star’s choices ... My Pinup is a small book, hypnotically facing inward, even as Als recounts seemingly grand encounters with Prince...and as he stipples the narrative with exegesis of Prince’s lyrics and structures the book around Prince as queer iconographer and trope of racial mixing. Far more than being a \'book about Prince,\' My Pinup chronicles what it feels like to shoulder the burden of desire through complexes of race, gender, and sexuality.
Hanif Abdurraqib
PositiveBookforumA risk of this kind of project is the nostalgia of the longtime fan (wasn’t everything better back then?) but Abdurraqib subjects the backward-looking myths that have sprung up around the group to critical scrutiny ... Abdurraqib brings specificity to what being a Tribe fan means by threading the path of the East Coast rap group with his own. Fluidly jumping around political and social context ... Across this historical landscape, Abdurraqib is writing to his brothers in an intimate voice that lends the book its vitality ... With its reflective prose and hesitant prose, the book is ultimately less a love letter than a lament, like roses strewn on a monument, an acknowledgement that even as we admit that the tensions between Q-Tip and Phife Dawg were complicated, even as we still grieve Phife Dawg’s death, Tribe’s time has come and gone ... Because the letters in Go Ahead in the Rain’s consist of one man lovingly addressing mostly other men, the book’s epistolary form exaggerates the homosociality that lives in rap’s veins. By way of Queen Latifah and Monie Love, Abdurraqib makes only a rushed nod to the question of black women’s role in hiphop. And yet, in another sense, his whole book is about gender: how people imagine who might be their brothers.
