You wouldn’t consider the 40-odd towns in the Upper Valley to be a core hip-hop constituency. We could count the hip-hop-cognizant but only-here-for-four-years students at Dartmouth College, but the group at the heart of this Enthusiasm’s subject, Hanif Abdurraqib's 2019 book Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest, completed its glorious rise and still-on-top drop a decade before most of those student bodies came into this world.
Still, there is one improbable, all-but-erased connection between the Upper Valley and the Queens-based Tribe: Once upon a time, Webster Hall—that big, grey, columned memorial facing the northeast corner of Dartmouth's Green—was a vessel empty of intended purpose. Too small to host Commencements, a relic of lecture-based instruction, by the early 1990s the dusty, cobwebbed hall had been stripped of its seats, all but abandoned. A perfect place, in other words, to party. Students breathed now-and-then life into the big room with far-from-official cultural events. Including one astonishing night's appearance by A Tribe Called Quest.
It seemed—and still seems—like a dream, that apparition of charismatic, cutting-edge talent in an academic mausoleum, but it really happened.* Q-Tip, Phife Dawg, Jarobi White and DJ Ali Shaheed Mohammed shook Webster Hall, which probably hadn't felt such Afrocentric positivity since Booker T. Washington accepted an honorary degree there back in 1908.
But location, demographics, and time are no match for the sempiternal power of good music. We resurrect performances past with a swipe and a tap. If you didn't know and love A Tribe Called Quest back in the group's late '80s and early '90s glory days, you and your Spotify can listen along to Abdurraqib's celebration of a group that broke sound barriers, expanding hip-hop's sampling vocabulary, creating jazz-heavy audio textures that honored heritage through the new*.*
Go Ahead in the Rain is a cultural history of the Queens-based group, of the back-forth brilliance of childhood friends and all-but-brothers Q-Tip and Phife, and of the beats, sounds, and above all the messages they crafted in collaboration with co-rapper White and sound constructor Mohammed.
Poet and culture critic Abdurraqib begins his brief, thought-rapt book of "notes" with an invocation of jazz's roots in West African music, in the trauma of slavery and the existential necessity of making music. A few pages later, he is the adolescent would-be jazz trumpeter upifted by "Excursions," the first song on ATCQ's 1991 album, The Low End Theory. With its Art Blakey sample's slow, swinging bass line, "Excursions" spoke for The Low End's commitment to "almost being a jazz album" and wholly being A Tribe Called Quest's repurposing of "a long line of sound that our parents, and perhaps their parents were in love with."
Chapters of Go Ahead in the Rain are notes written to the artists, responding to the inspiration and, sometimes, the sorrow communicated album by album through the Tribe's career. In others, Abdurraqib connects the Tribe's history and achievements to American histories musical, social, legal, and spiritual, educating us in subjects ranging from the era's fierce hip-hop rivalries to the existential dilemma of sampling vs. intellectual property.
Abdurraqib is a wondrous guide to the Tribe's times, acute in his listening and looking, intuitively alert to unexpected connections across genres and influences. His labor of love reminds us that sampling—the recycling that A Tribe Called Quest elevated as homage—is, above all, an act of remembering.
*Webster's liminal past is impossible to picture today, with the hall inhabited by the spotless glass-cube building-within-a of Rauner Library.
William Craig teaches writing at Dartmouth and founded the Meetinghouse Readings in Canaan. The author of Yankee Come Home: On The Road from Guantanamo to San Juan Hill*, he was a longtime writer and editor for the* Valley News and the creator of Upper Valley Image*. His fiction, criticism, and journalism have appeared most recently in* Gulf Coast and The Boston Globe*.*