The book begins, “In the beginning, from somewhere south of anywhere I come from, lips pressed the edge of a horn, and a horn was blown.” Abdurraqib knows how to make sound turn into music - like the horn-player, he turns breath into song. The first few paragraphs had the same effect as those horns on ‘Steve Biko’. It’s rare to come across as gripping an opening to a book of music criticism as the first chapter of Hanif Abdurraqib’s Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest. It was the first song of theirs I’d heard and now, after years of being a Tribe fan, every time I hear those blaring horns I’m a teenager again, walking to school, feeling like I was at the beginning of something great. When I first listened to ‘Steve Biko (Stir It Up)’ on A Tribe Called Quest’s Midnight Marauders, I knew I was onto something big.
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