I had never seen the performance he was describing, but he provided the images to conjure it and the presence to bring me deep into its folds.Īfter the reading, I went home and found a grainy version of the video on YouTube. His words careened towards joy before falling off the cliff into the realities of survival, and grief, and the salvation of being close enough to feel the heat radiating off another person’s body. Abdurraqib had the crowd wrapped around his finger during the reading, transforming the energy of the room into that of a party among your closest friends. The unpublished work he shared was about Whitney Houston’s performance at the 1988 Grammys, where she sang I Wanna Dance With Somebody in slippery heels and the stiff body of someone who can’t actually dance. At a crowded summertime edition of a Brooklyn reading series, he read excerpts from his 2017 book They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, as well as, luckily for us, an essay from his forthcoming collection They Don’t Dance No’ Mo’.

Throughout the narrative Abdurraqib connects the music and cultural history to their street-level impact.My most memorable encounter with Hanif Abdurraqib’s work was hearing him read it out loud. Their work is placed in the context of the broader rap landscape of the 1990s, one upended by sampling laws that forced a reinvention in production methods, the East Coast – West Coast rivalry that threatened to destroy the genre, and some record labels' shift from focusing on groups to individual MCs. Abdurraqib traces the Tribe's creative career, from their early days as part of the Afrocentric rap collective known as the Native Tongues, through their first three classic albums, to their eventual breakup and long hiatus. The result is as ambitious and genre-bending as the rap group itself. Poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib digs into the group's history and draws from his own experience to reflect on how its distinctive sound resonated among fans like himself. Thank You 4 Your Service, which arrived when fans needed it most, in the aftermath of the 2016 election. Seventeen years after their last album, they resurrected themselves with an intense, socially conscious record, We Got It from Here.

How does one pay homage to A Tribe Called Quest? The seminal rap group brought jazz into the genre, resurrecting timeless rhythms to create masterpieces such as The Low End Theoryand Midnight Marauders.

Go ahead in the rain hanif abdurraqib