Review: Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest, by Hanif Abdurraqib
2021; Wiley; Volume: 33; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1525/jpms.2021.33.1.166
ISSN1533-1598
Autores Tópico(s)Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies
ResumoChildhood listening choices rarely stand up to adult scrutiny.My Milli Vanilli phase, for example, was regrettable-not because the music was bad, not even because it wasn't theirs, but due to the simple zeal of my fandom.Complete with bedroom posters and questionable clothing choices, that too-long moment in time was, at once, an effort at individuality and blending-in.As a Black working-class kid in the 1980s and 90s Midwest, I was in desperate need of something to believe in.The factories that employed my uncles and aunties were closing while prisons proliferated.State aid was rolled back as the cost of living increased.Add to this the cultural isolation of that geography.Much of our popular culture was imported from the coasts (and, later, the South) but even with that it was selective.I experienced a radio with little interest in New Edition or Anita Baker and before we claimed Common Sense, Kanye West, and Eminem.If you were in the know, you knew.If not, you had a constant stream of hair bands, teen pop, and, if lucky, those few that I'd still choose today, such as Prince or Hall and Oates.Music writer and poet Hanif Abdurraqib is also from the Midwest-Columbus, Ohio, to be precise-and of the "era when we learned not to waste songs" (108).He may have had the occasion to listen as I listened had it not been for his incredible curiosity, which covered the gamut from the jazz of his home to the new popular forms that were as complicated, or at least as dangerous, as those horns and keys.Hip hop was a mainstay in his Walkman, a quickly aging technology that his class position would not allow him to abandon.Mixtapes and bootlegs helped him to curate not only a listening experience for himself but also for others, and in doing so he found space to be."My crews and crews like mine were at home, watching sitcoms and cartoons, or dubbing tapes from the radio," he writes."This, too, was a feature of survival.We weren't cool, but people would come to us to find out what was cool" (36, emphasis in original).Assisting him in the pursuit of cool was the Queens-based crew A Tribe Called Quest (ATCQ).Originally composed of emcee and primary producer Q-Tip (Kamaal Ibn Fareed), emcee Phife Dawg (Malik Izaak Taylor), DJ and producer Ali Shaheed Muhammed, and hypeman and emcee Jarobi White, ATCQ now appears in the sightlines of hip hop as if they've always been there.In Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest Abdurraqib provides a plot for this possibility by bringing ATCQ with him
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