Review by Booklist Review
Abdurraqib's profile of A Tribe Called Quest (ATCQ) is much more than a musical biography; it's also a deeply personal tribute to the classic hip-hop group, some of which takes shape in open letters to Q-Tip and the other members of the crew. Although the origins of ATCQ and their bitter breakup is a story loaded with drama on its own (it was the subject of a documentary in 2011), exploring the group's history is only a part of what Abdurraqib (They Can't Kill Us until They Kill Us, 2017) does here. The book comes to life when he speaks from his own experiences: discovering ATCQ's early albums growing up and how he was impacted by other classics of the genre in the 1980s and '90s; how being a dedicated music fan in his youth was critical in shaping his peer group ( not entirely uncool but who were also decidedly not the cool kids ); and his undying love of the cassette format. 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.--Carlos Orellana Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Poet Abdurraqib follows up his collection of music criticism They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us with an impassioned, incisive biography cum memoir arguing for hip-hop's importance to the black youth of his generation. Abdurraqib focuses on A Tribe Called Quest, a group that broke out from Queens, N.Y., in 1990. Noting the band's wide-ranging samples--Art Blakey, Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone--he explains that "The Tribe was one of the first groups to repurpose a long line of sound that our parents, and perhaps their parents, were in love with." He describes his experience trying to find himself as a seventh-grader in Ohio listening to hip-hop on a Walkman and appreciating the band's willingness to tread "a thin line of weirdness." In high school, he got by with a crew of friends whose quick wit and music knowledge gave them enough social cred to keep out of fights. Abdurraqib builds a nuanced portrait of the band and their scene in New York, culminating in a touching series of chapters framed as letters to Q-Tip, the group's founding MC; Phife Dog, "the five-foot assassin with the roughneck business," who died from diabetes in 2016; and Phife's mother, the poet Cheryl Boyce-Taylor. This is a standout volume on hip-hop. (Feb.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Memoir meets cultural criticism in this bittersweet appreciation of hip-hop visionaries A Tribe Called Quest.Poet and essayist Abdurraqib (They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, 2017, etc.) 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 writerand certainly not this writerwithout their inspiration. In recent years, the author found himself with students as young as he once was who, as contemporary hip-hop fans, "had never heard of A Tribe Called Quest, and then, later, only knew them as a phoenix, risen from the ashes." There was a 17-year interval between albums, and by the time what appears to be the last one was released in 2016, friendships had frayed and a crucial collaborator had died. This is a history of how two boyhood friends, Q-Tip and Phife Dawg, teamed up (though the former overshadowed the latter), how they differed from each other, and how they needed each other. Some of the book takes the form of letters from Abdurraqib to each of them and to others. Elsewhere, the author chronicles the progression of rap and how the way that Dr. Dre challenged Q-Tip was similar to the way that the Beatles pushed Brian Wilson, as well as how the East-West synergy later turned vicious and dangerous. "It is much easier to determine when rap music became political and significantly more difficult to pinpoint when it became dangerous," writes Abdurraqib toward the beginning of the book, a somewhat inexplicable pronouncement that he proceeds to explicate and elucidate over the rest.Even those who know little about the music will learn much of significance here, perhaps learning how to love it in the process. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
