In these candid moments, Abdurraqib’s fandom feels like participation rather than possession. “The worlds most at risk of collapsing are the ones we pull together ourselves, out of thin air, or thin ideas, but with dear friends,” he writes without bitterness.
To have a purpose was to be needed, and to be needed was to be slightly protected.” More than just a parallel, this idea that crews are products of survival and convenience then informs his acceptance of the Native Tongues’ eventual breakup.
“We weren’t cool, but people would come to us to find out what was cool,” he writes of his social group. Recounting the confidence boost he got from rolling with his (admittedly informal) high school crew, Abdurraqib grasps how easily the Native Tongues’ collaborations, tours, and friendships expanded into something bigger. Reclaiming Tribe’s retrofitted approach as his own, he writes, “I loved A Tribe Called Quest because I wore hand-me-down jeans to school, my clothes were sometimes too big, and I didn’t make eye contact when I spoke.”Ībdurraqib extends that idea of odd fits to his brief history of the Native Tongues, the short-lived collective including Tribe, De La Soul, and Jungle Brothers. He then segues into the resonance of Tribe’s jazz and funk samples, which were often from groups his parents’ generation would recognize: Sly Stone, Eric Dolphy, Weather Report. To illustrate Tribe’s rare cross-generational appeal, for instance, he recalls his parents deeming them one of the few rap acts that was “acceptable” to play at home. His relationship to Tribe is idiosyncratic and impassioned, yet always a portal into keener observations. The thrill of the collection, humbly subtitled “Notes to A Tribe Called Quest,” is how its broader narrative gains momentum as it curves inward into Abdurraqib’s life. A Tribe Called Quest is his muse and his lens into the past.
Whether he’s using the Sanford and Son joke buried within “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo” to illustrate how little East Coast rappers knew about the West Coast, or examining Q-Tip’s Mobb Deep collaborations to dwell on his many uses of jazz samples, Abdurraqib never misses a chance to be as panoramic as he is granular. He offers compact introductions to Wu-Tang Clan, Ice Cube, Queen Latifah, and anyone else who brushed shoulders with or influenced the group. Abdurraqib’s essays are accessible yet rich, threading various histories to situate Tribe’s place within rap, black music, and black culture. Moving linearly through Tribe’s catalog, Go Ahead in the Rain details how the group and hip-hop at large evolved throughout the 1990s.
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