There’s also the story about the love between Leonard Cohen and Marianne, who inspired several of his songs. As is a retelling of the police shooting of Alton Sterling, a black man who sold CDs outside a grocery store in Louisiana. The origin story of Jet magazine is included here. The book also includes fascinating details and haunting anecdotes from history and current events. Woven in are Abdurraqib’s personal recollections of first encountering and falling in love with Tribe’s music, often told as letters written to members of the group. Also contained here is the backstory about how Q-Tip, Phife, Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Jarobi came together, how they crafted their three iconic albums, how things started to fall apart on the two albums before their breakup, and how they reunited for one last hurrah before tragedy struck. Abdurraqib does this brilliantly and beautifully in ‘Go Ahead in the Rain.’ The book traces A Tribe Called Quest’s lineage, and that of rap music generally, back through the history of the black experience in America starting with slavery, as you’ll see in the excerpt below.
They understand that the way to write about music is to hardly write about it at all, to focus instead on the emotions and memories songs evoke, and to connect music to moments that are bigger than the songs themselves. The only writers I’ve found who understand how to write about music are Lester Bangs and Hanif Abdurraqib, because they get it.
It makes me crazy when Haruki Murakami does this it feels like he’s doing more to show off his musical taste than to advance the story. And when songs are mentioned in a novel, it feels awkward. It just doesn’t work when a music critic tries to describe what a song sounds like. Most writing about music is bad, and I hate it.
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