Pays attention to the larger changes in the culture, but its overall tenor is warm, immediate and intensely personal ... Readers looking for a biography of the group will find some of the basics here, but it’s how Abdurraqib filters the information—absorbing it, refracting it through his own distinctive lens—that gives this compact book its power ... This lush and generous book is a call to pay proper respects—not just to a sound but to a feeling.
Riveting and poetic ... Adburraqib’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. He is a grown man, a cultural critic, an Important Voice, but he’s also an awkward kid huddled in the back seat of the school bus, that 'Beats, Rhymes and Life' cassette wearing out his Walkman. He brings everything to the game, whether a cosmic vignette about Leonard Cohen or an unexpected curveball that somehow morphs into connective tissue ... The beauty of being both a true fan and a professional is that you can embrace even the low points and yet analyze with pinpoint accuracy when your heroes have fallen short. And as you search for the perfect ending, you’ll realize there seldom is one.
In his two previous books... Abdurraqib demonstrated his expertise at compressing massive emotions into minimal space. Here, he takes that skill up yet another notch. He 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 does not shy from his sadness over the group's breakup or Phife Dawg's death, but Go Ahead in the Rain is not a sad book. Instead, it's steeped in gratitude and joy ... Without fail or hesitation, [Abdurraqib] invites the reader into the text. Even his deepest dives into history and technique have a come-with-me spirit ... I have been listening to A Tribe Called Quest my whole musically conscious life, and yet Go Ahead in the Rain made their records sound new ... This comes from deepened knowledge and understanding, but it also comes from absorbing Abdurraqib's love, which reinvigorated my own. This, too, is a way of reaching for the future: to write about music so beautifully and intelligently that readers are moved to love it, or reminded to love it more.
... lives up to its title ... I’m convinced that few people in the world can write about music with as much love and intimacy as Abdurraqib does. The manner in which Abdurraqib writes about A Tribe Called Quest’s 30-year career, from their first album to their very last music video is akin to devotion, elevating ATCQ to Godly status ... moves beyond the confines of its subject. It is a book about America. It is a book about survival. It is a book that looks at all of the ways in which music interacts with the world ... It is this side by side—the personal and the musical—that makes this book so striking ... intimate and expansive ... Abdurraquib does not talk about rap, but rather is in conversation with it, often, spilling out from the body, from the heart ... To read this book is to appreciate a musical legacy. It is to understand the breadth of a musical genre ... Abdurraqib is a writer who lays everything out ... a book that complicates the meaning of art and stretches out understanding of music.
Much more than a musical biography; it’s also a deeply personal tribute to the classic hip-hop group ... The book comes to life when he 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.
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 ... [Abdurraquib's] own prose often falls into a kind of flow and rhythm that recalls his subject .. There’s little doubt that rap fans will love Go Ahead in the Rain, but even those not familiar with the genre or the group may find themselves entranced by Abdurraqib’s book.
A 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.
Considering the book is a slight 200 pages, it’s a feat that Abdurraqib fits inasmuch as he does ... While knowing the music of A Tribe Called Quest certainly aids in enjoyment—as does having at least a peripheral knowledge of hip-hop—it isn’t required. 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.
Part biography, part autobiography, part historical narrative, and part collection of letters—most addressed from Abdurraqib to individual members of the group—the book sees Tribe through Abdurraqib’s eyes ... while the book is a deeply personal, moving meditation on the entire group, I found it most poignant as a tribute to the late Phife Dawg, the '5-Foot Assassin,' to whom the book is dedicated ... Abdurraqib writes to Phife as if he had been a slightly inscrutable yet easygoing friend whose psyche could have used some prodding—someone with whom he could break down great rap songs, rant about the latest Knicks game, and get into how it feels to be the overlooked member of your family or your crew of friend ... Abdurraqib achingly, beautifully illustrates the evolution of Phife’s role [in A Tribe Called Quest] ... As Abdurraqib proves here, there wasn’t much for Phife outside of Tribe, but Tribe was nothing without him.
If Abdurraquib stopped there, with his thoughts and feelings about Tribe, Go Ahead in the Rain would be a fine book. But he doesn’t. He goes deep into ’90s hip-hop, perhaps the genre’s most fertile era ... Go Ahead in the Rain packs a lot into its 206 pages.
In framing a Tribe Called Quest as underdogs, Mr. Abdurraqib gets at what made them great. More specifically, in Go Ahead in the Rain, the author gets at what made a Tribe Called Quest great to him when he was a kid struggling to find his place and his voice ... Mr. Abdurraqib offers a level of historical understanding that only a passionate fan could deliver. He astutely contextualizes a Tribe Called Quest’s position on Hip-Hop’s shifting terrain at any given moment in their run and writes insightfully on little-discussed aspects of the group’s history ... For all his mastery of the subject, Mr. Abdurraqib writes to tell his own story. He covers a lot of ground, but his real achievement is in the erasure of distance between artist and audience.
Fandom aside, this book is on point. In Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest, Abdurraqib blends his talents as both culture critic and personal essayist ... 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.
When Hanif Abdurraqib writes about music, he writes about its potential to bridge generations and peers, and he builds his narratives from the seeds of his own feelings ... The pleasure of Abdurraqib’s writing — whether the subject is Whitney Houston or Q-Tip — emanates from the singular way he experiences music. He can take one note and extrapolate an entire psychic history, both of his own world and the world of the musician. He also, literally, feels music with a level of detail and sensitivity far beyond the average listener ... [Abdurraqib] takes detours several times throughout Go Ahead in the Rain, using moments in the history of A Tribe Called Quest as openings into his own personal memoir or the cultural saga of Black America. It is an active and enthralling way of telling a history; no story is a closed loop, and the narrative’s center shifts with each new point of entry ... A Tribe Called Quest, then, is a tour de force subject for the writer, because their story is as compelling as Abdurraqib’s way of telling it. A Tribe Called Quest’s music and Abdurraqib’s writing are hands lifting the foot of the other up to the highest echelons of storytelling. Abdurraqib is a poetic and sonic writer, so reading his work is also an act of listening and feeling his timing.
... Abdurraqib is blessed with a keen eye for a particularly telling fact, and what seems like digression invariably turns out to make a wider point about music or culture ... amid the personal reminiscences and the writing styled as personal letters to the band’s members, Abdurraqib is both perceptive and sharp, with a frequently bold and an intriguingly atypical viewpoint ... in writing a book that could make even a naysayer want to hear their music as a matter of urgency, Abdurraqib has provided a perfect epitaph.
Indeed, Go Ahead in the Rain is all over the place and with great ease ... What holds all the desperate elements together is Abdurraqib himself. Go Ahead in the Rain is a musical memoir in which the narrator comes of age and becomes a man ... Abdurraqib is insightful about sibling rivals, cool, un-cool, and the gap between the two ... At times, [Abdurraqib] can be deep.
[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 ... In these candid moments, Abdurraqib’s fandom feels like participation rather than possession. He evokes his Tribe so that we may find our own ... While Abdurraqib’s chronicle of Tribe isn’t definitive, it is a compelling angle from which to consider the group’s legacy ... I had my own connections to these songs, but I was beginning to hear A Tribe Called Quest through Abdurraqib’s ears. It felt like love.
One of the many feats Abdurraqib’s writing accomplishes is a deft threading of topics that, at first glance, are disconnected ... Abdurraqib excels at taking intimate moments and connecting them to larger social structures and phenomena. He’s great at making you watch both hands. On its own, this is a writerly talent worthy of our awe ... . Abdurraqib’s music criticism is as strong as it is because of his insight and observational skills—and he’s clearly put the research work in too. But the work is even more powerful because if you strive to write about music, you ultimately strive to write about people, and Hanif is really fucking good at writing about people.
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 without their inspiration ... Even those who know little about the music will learn much of significance here, perhaps learning how to love it in the process.
