![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Melding music history with personal essay, Abdurraqib recounts how the funky bass on the song “Excursions,” from Tribe’s second album, The Low End Theory, initiated him as a fan. In Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest, the poet and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib looks back to this period, the golden age of hip-hop from the mid-1980s to the early ’90s, when he discovered the music of A Tribe Called Quest as a teenager in Columbus, Ohio, and got his whoosh of brotherly sincerity, radical play, and afrocentric politics. But due to the ways the US music scene was influenced by gentrification and appropriation, evacuating hip-hop’s devotion to black culture and transforming rap into an industry synonymous with popular culture, the term now mostly denotes an attachment to the music of a particular period. Originally “hip-hophead” implied specific cultural and political commitments to the everyday survival of black people. But when you claim yourselfas a head-a sneakerhead, a Beatlehead, a hip-hophead-the suffix carries a somewhat uppity declaration of expertise, at once a boast and an assertion of membership in a particular culture or scene. It smacks of a compulsiveness that renders your activities illicit or, at the very least, will have you deemed a space-cadet. The suffix “-head” tends to mark a genre of name-calling. ![]()
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