Go Ahead in the Rain

by Hanif Abdurraqib

  Eventually, we stopped talking altogether. I saw one of them, recently, in a city where neither of us lived, moving through a hotel lobby. We embraced, stiffly. We mentioned something about keeping in touch in a way that didn’t seem true.

  I think, often, about love strictly as a matter of perspective. For some, it is something they are receiving from someone whom they might slowly be draining the life from.

  The Tribe Called Quest documentary is largely about friendship. Yes, it is also about the historical movements of the band, and the group’s early days. But mostly, it’s about a friendship that is no longer working. Ali and Jarobi are there, of course. But, much like all of A Tribe Called Quest’s story, they are secondary to what happens at the center of it. The most painful and fascinating things to watch are the tense moments: a backstage eruption between Q-Tip and Phife, shot on a shaky camera in the dark. The reasons for the tensions are often vague, which would perhaps lead a viewer to imagine that the two don’t even know why they’re mad at each other anymore, that they’ve just been mad at each other for so long that it’s the only thing they know how to do anymore.

  There’s something about this that is like love. The way we stay angry at family because we know that, in many cases, they’ll be the ones to welcome us back first if we need them to. I fight my dearest homies the loudest and longest because I know they’ll pick up my calls when I need them to. Anger is a type of geography. The ways out of it expand the more you love a person. The more forgiveness you might be willing to afford each other opens up new and unexpected roads. And so, for some, staying angry at someone you love is a reasonable option. To stay angry at someone you know will forgive your anger is a type of love, or at least it is a type of familiarity that can feel like love. It might be that Phife and Q-Tip were actually still angry, or it could be that they just needed the comfort of anger to see them through an otherwise difficult and trying reality in which they would otherwise be forced to love each other like they once did, in a past they might not have wanted to return to.

  It is also possible that the tension stemmed from more obvious places: Q-Tip’s perfectionism, played out over the band’s entire career, and the fact that he was always seen as the group’s star despite Phife’s immense talent and show-stealing performances. Or the way that some sections of Tribe albums would devolve into showcases for Q-Tip’s abilities, long meditations and boasts and production tricks that left Phife on the outside, slightly forgotten. Even when Phife came into his own, it is possible that the group still didn’t feel like his.

  The central fight in the documentary speaks to this entirely: It was sparked in a moment when Phife, weakened from dialysis treatments, puts an arm around Jarobi to hold him up. Tip attempts to energize the crowd, using Phife as a mascot. “Look alive, y’all!” he yells. “Look at Phife!”

  Phife, not amused by his illness being used as a point to hype up the crowd, refuses to speak to Tip backstage, before the physical altercation erupts.

  The documentary centers on the two of them, separately and together. When they’re apart, doing interviews, largely about each other, the emotional tone is different. Q-Tip is often defiant, telling the camera that he never asked for this, any of it. He never asked to be seen as the Almighty Abstract, and Phife just doesn’t understand. He’s also relentlessly cool, calm, and adjusted during his interviews, only flashing emotions briefly. Q-Tip, by that point, had been a solo artist in the public eye for so long that he’d almost built up a persona as armor. This doesn’t mean that he’s not as charming and unique as expected, but his interviews are almost a clinic in self-preservation.

  Phife, on the other hand, is open and vulnerable. His grievances are many. He comes close to weeping in several scenes, the ones where he talks about his health, or how unfair it was that he never got what he felt was his due, or the many contentious points he’d hit with Q-Tip. When he speaks of these moments, his voice sometimes trembles, like he is acknowledging for the first time that he and his longtime brother are no longer brothers. Phife’s battle with diabetes is highlighted here, making him even more of a sympathetic character. By the time the documentary was being shot, he was full-on in the midst of a search for a kidney donor. The way his illness is handled doesn’t feel exploitative, but it still manages to be deeply heartbreaking. Through it all, Phife operates in the documentary like he operated within the group: quick-witted and sharp; confident enough to lie about how confident he truly is; delivering comic lines with ease. In the middle of one rant, Phife goes on and on about refusing to play Tito to Q-Tip’s Michael, before taking an aside without skipping a beat and saying “No disrespect to Tito” in a way that is both earnest and hilarious.

  The documentary is a measure of how different the two are, and perhaps how different they’ve always been. Q-Tip, guarded and deeply thoughtful, as if he can see everything he has to lose hanging on the edge of every word bouncing off his tongue. Phife, surprisingly open and eager, like the little brother who finally got enough people wanting to listen to him.

  But mostly, it is a documentary about friendship, and about the lengths we go to in order to keep our selfish pride intact, even if it means it’s all we have left. Even if the people we love maybe want to see some glimpse of it wash away. It is comforting to hold on to bitterness, because letting it go means you have nothing but the risk of not being welcomed back into the fold of friendship. In watching the documentary, one realizes that the main character isn’t the group itself. The main character is not Q-Tip or Phife, but it is the distance between them and their unwillingness to cross it toward each other, no matter how much a viewer roots for them to do so. They’re both stubborn and deeply sensitive in the film—Phife more than Tip at most points—but even in frustration, their friendship is painted so beautifully on screen it is worth rooting for its survival. To hell with the music, let the old friends hug and make up.

  In December of 2010, Q-Tip tweeted denouncing the film. “I am not in support of the Tribe Called Quest documentary,” he wrote in response to a leaked trailer. As film festivals approached, Q-Tip began calling himself an editor on the film and saying he wanted changes. On a radio show in mid-December 2010, he said:

  “I can’t really go too much into it but . . . people automatically assume I’m speaking just as the subject, that I’m not supporting it ’cause I ain’t like it. I’m a producer on the film, Tribe is a producer on the film. I’m speaking for the whole group . . . Different things need to be done edit-wise. The sentiment of the film is there, 80 percent is there, it’s just not done.”

  Q-Tip, again, was making himself large and speaking for the group at large. He was concerned that the film was being rushed for the festival circuit. When Sundance came, Phife was the only member of Tribe to show up for the film’s premiere. The rest sat it out. In March 2011, after the film was acquired by Sony, Q-Tip, Ali, and Jarobi went on MTV and aired out even more issues. They didn’t get enough creative control or production credits. They weren’t offered the money necessary to travel to Sundance for the film’s premiere.

  Rapaport was in full defense mode, laying out a business deal that he claimed benefited the Tribe both financially and from a creative control standpoint. He insisted that the group was just emotional about the film and the process that went into making it. He insisted that Tip, Ali, and Jarobi had only seen the movie on a computer screen, and once they saw it on the big screen, they’d be all right with it.

  The release was a mess, but the film was still released to critical acclaim. It is difficult to watch, but there’s enough roots and “real hip-hop” nostalgia in it to satisfy even the most critical of hip-hop heads. It is a documentary about friendship made by somebody who loves rap. The fact that it was pushed into the world with a high degree of difficulty speaks to the Tribe’s legacy. Of course it was never going to be easy.

  There is a scene that stands out like no other scene in the film. The most genuine and captivating moment comes in a shot toward the e
nd. Standing to the left of the camera is Q-Tip, and to the right is Phife. By this moment in the film, they’ve spent most of their time talking about how angry they are at the other one in separate interviews, and speaking tensely to each other in person. The shot takes place in a Manhattan studio while the two are rehearsing for a one-off reunion show. When their music begins playing over the speakers, almost instantly, they break into a completely synchronized dance, as if they are sharing a single body. Q-Tip looks over at Phife, says the words “like this,” and Phife follows, right on time. The camera stays on them, and they dance, tethered to each other as if they’ve never known any other option. As if they were always going to find a way.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Family Business

  MS. CHERYL BOYCE-TAYLOR,

  We are maybe each other, through two different mirrors. I know what it is to be a son and long for a living mother. You, a mother, now longing for a living son. When I heard the news, I do admit that I thought first of you. You are not obligated to believe this, of course, but I imagine there are ways in which specific types of loss make kin out of folks who are not kin. I had read the stories about how Malik was born with his kidneys half the size of a normal kidney—begging Him for mercy from the moment you brought him into the world. I had read the stories of how there was an older twin, Mikal, born into the world mere seconds before Malik was born, suffering from the same kidney afflictions. How he held on for eight hours before finally succumbing.

  Malik was your only, and I was my mother’s youngest. My mother wrote, as you wrote and still write. I like to think that I learned to write first from her, though she didn’t teach me English in my earliest youth. It was Arabic that I first learned, writing along the page in a direction I would later fight to unlearn—from the right to the left. I think there is a very particular mercy in being born to a woman who writes, or at least to a woman who sees a world worth writing about.

  I am a poet, like you. I came to your work as I came to so much work in the world of poetry: watching, admiring from afar. I first sat on the floor in a crowded New York room in some year when I had traveled to the city maybe listening to your son’s raps, as I often did. There was something about the rhythm he held in his voice and the slow crawl of funk layering the instrumentals that made me feel like I was truly in the city. There was always something about the way A Tribe Called Quest negotiated the noise around them, almost becoming it, until everything was awash with a sound you desired.

  From the floor of the crowded New York art studio or coffee shop or narrow bar, I could only hear your poems, but not see you. I craned my neck to see early on, but the crowd was drawn so close to you that I accepted my fate, and leaned into the brick that was propping me up. I heard, from murmurs in the back, that you were wearing a Tribe Called Quest T-shirt underneath a slick blazer. Ms. Taylor, I think it might have been better this way, for me to clearly see what you are doing in your work, which I must say is transformational. You are transforming the space.

  I love most how you milked the ending of each syllable and let it sing in the air a bit longer. There is a way to read a poem, and then there is a way to allow the poem to exit the body and be read by everyone in the room. The way you, with impeccable rhythm, hung each bit of language from the lights in that room and let me see them, even with my eyes closed. There are beats that happen in between the breaks of words that I think most poets don’t tend to understand. There is a way for a reader to manipulate silence so that it is no longer silence but something drawing a listener toward a brief and breathless anticipation that, too, is a type of beat. We know how to read our poems, if nothing else. I say we and mean black people, sure. People who have, at some point, clapped on the two and the four. But you, especially, are carrying songs to the people. I found myself, in the back of your reading, humming lowly, as if receiving a spiritual. And I suppose I was, though I didn’t know it until now, when reflecting on the moment of that encounter and realizing how healed I was.

  I have never been to the town in Trinidad where you come from, Arima. I have read that it is situated between bright red hills. What I love about you is how you fiercely write yourself into your poems and, in doing so, write the reader toward you. I love how richly you integrate Calypso—the social and political aspects of it along with the musical elements of it. I read a part of your poem “A Woman Speaks” out loud to myself often, when trying to figure out how to make language dance with its companions:

  Now and then I sit quiet cup ah coffee in meh hand

  listen hear de words hiss sing

  draw magic in dem breath

  rest crimson in de damp gauze of girlhood

  dem words weave faded straw into colorful baskets

  they hang heart and lungs

  teeth and bone

  meh head almost fall off de side ah meh face

  an fall fall on meh dauter womb

  dem words loop poems ’round moon neck

  and if yuh hear dem hear dem write

  dem down yes we

  ah write ah write dem down

  It’s all a song at the end of the day, isn’t it? I was at an open mic in the days after Malik passed, and an older black woman came to the microphone and asked everyone to close their eyes. She started into a poem of yours, in respect for your loss. It was such an honor to have you in the room then. The woman was a mother, she said. I imagine she understood a mother’s loss, and didn’t want your name to be alone or buried. She read “Devouring the Light, 1968”—my favorite of yours. I recited a few lines along:

  The day they killed Martin

  we could not return to New York City

  our visiting senior class stuck in Huntsville

  streets blazed with suffering in that small

  Alabama town

  in the dull shroud of morning

  the whole world went crazy

  devouring whatever light

  that lit our half-cracked windows.

  In your son’s lyrics, I hear the rhythmic bounce between patois in his flows. The dance between punch line, politics, and boast. I see the Calypso in that, too. Like his verse in Whitey Don’s “Artical”:

  Everytime yuh see mi licked mushitup dancehall

  Mc’s big or small, mi nuh afraid it dem all

  The boyz, dem are jealous cuz see how I’m rock

  I try comb voice to represent non’stop

  Idiot bwoy, idiot bwoy, idiot bwoy step to side

  And in enough room, feature all in my ride

  It seems, Ms. Taylor, that we are nothing if not for our histories, and so much of mine is tied up in the business of ghosts. I don’t want to burden anyone, but I consider anyone who has lost someone my kin, because I think we are all faced with the same central question of how we go on. How we live the life that best reflects the people who aren’t here and are still counting on us.

  A mother is never supposed to bury a son, I think. I don’t know who makes that rule, as if linear time is the only direction we all have to follow. But something about it seems particularly wrong. A cynic might say that it all depends on the length of life—who had the most fulfilling years and who didn’t. But I am not a cynic.

  I don’t believe much in any natural order. I buried my mother, but at least I was young. I don’t remember the day much, but for the dirt that remained on my good pair of dress pants. My family didn’t have a lot of money growing up, and I didn’t have many reasons to get dressed for nice occasions, and so I only had about one good pair of dress pants. A pair that, I imagine, was passed down from one of my two older brothers. My mother was skilled with sewing—she would sometimes sew together outfits I would wear to school. And so it was nothing to shorten a pair of pants for her youngest child who didn’t seem like he would grow past the paltry height he was given already. I cherished the pants, I think, because being young and poor, I maybe clung to what I was told was a nice thing.

  I didn’t dig much of the grave—maybe none, if I recall. I do rec
all kicking the dirt around it, though. It seemed so odd to me at the time, to have a living person to hold a mere three days earlier, now having dirt heaved atop their body. Sometime during the kicking I got a dark stain of wet dirt on my pants. I remember staring at it on the ride home, and then while sitting on my bed after the funeral. I remember thinking that I had betrayed the fabric, this item that my mother had worked so hard on for me to wear and feel nice, or briefly wealthy. Focusing on the stain and mourning the pants, I think, allowed me to mourn the greater loss. I was mourning something that my mother had poured her heart into for me, because I was her son. And so, this is how I remember mourning my mother: by way of soiling something that she crafted for me with her bare hands. The stain came out after two washes, though I often wished it hadn’t.

  I am wondering what, if anything, you held in your hands after Malik died. What you still might hold in your hands today. I know it is different to lose a person who was distinctly yours but also everyone’s. What is that feeling? Is it better or worse? To have a loss be something you are mourning in a singular way, which is not the way everyone else is mourning, though perhaps they think it is. On the day I heard the news, I first sat down on my couch and then instinctively checked every corner of the internet I could, hoping it wasn’t true. Death is such a reckless and unexpected visitor, waiting to make a mess of our past, present, and future in equal measures.

  I am not here asking for a reliving of the moment, but I am here, instead, to say thank you for raising a writer. I was raised by a woman who wrote, and I don’t know if that means anything other than the fact that I saw language as a way to get free at an early age. She wrote a book that she didn’t live long enough to finish. I have all of the books you’ve written, stacked outside of my bookcase, which has long since run out of room. I am saying that I love words, and I have long appreciated what you do with them. And all of this time I was listening to Malik rap, I was hearing your fingerprints. You raised a literary figure—someone who knew his way around verse and punch line and clever turn of phrase. At the heart of his writing and yours was the same driving force: themes of the vast black interior—hair texture, and skin color, inner and outer strife, and the small joys that must be unlocked to survive it all.