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Personal essays are as much about the readers as the writers. While all the essays in this list demonstrate exceptional writing—each piece struck a distinct chord with the editor who chose it. For Seyward, it was an essay on grief. For Krista, a piece on community experience. Peter was drawn to video game writing (Red Dead Redemption 2!), Cheri to the immigrant experience and caring for loved ones, and Carolyn to the fear of missed opportunities as we age (and a vicious jungle tick).

We hope you find a piece to resonate with you as you read these beautiful personal stories.

Ahead of Time

Kamran Javadizadeh | The Yale Review | June 12, 2023 | 3,285 words  

Grief is unpredictable. Sometimes it stabs you, sometimes it suffocates you; when it isn’t making you weep or scream, it’s leaving you numb. Grief is also unfathomable: we cannot see, much less reach, the edges of the permanent absence of someone we love. “Grief may be the knowledge … that the future won’t be like the past,” Kamran Javadizadeh writes in this exquisite essay about the death of his sister, Bita. “Like water to the page, it spreads in all directions, it thins the surface, it touches what you cannot touch.” Javadizadeh reflects on his grief through the lens of poetry he encountered during the experience of losing Bita: a volume of Langston Hughes he located in their shared childhood bedroom; a copy of The Dead and the Living by Sharon Olds, filled with Bita’s notes from college; a Hafez verse that Bita texted to him one day. The best poetry is not unlike grief: it is vast, complex, elusive. And in reading verse, Javadizadeh shows, we can find lessons for mourning. I’ve thought about this essay countless times since I read it last summer, and I suspect I will reread it many times in the years to come. —SD

The Butchering

Jake Skeets | Emergence Magazine | June 22, 2023 | 3,901 words

Consider what it means to truly feel full—with a full stomach and a full heart—when your physical and spiritual hungers are satiated for a time. Diné poet Jake Skeets mulls these layers of resonance in his beautiful essay “The Butchering,” in which he prepares to kill a sheep for “the Kinaałda. . . .loosely translated as the Diné puberty ceremony.” For Skeets and members of his Indigenous community, story is wonderfully entangled with preparing the food that will nourish his family both physically and spiritually. Community members teach and learn interchangeably, switching roles naturally in a space of safety, free from shame. Skeets meditates on the open mindset needed to fully participate; sometimes he is a child, earning knowledge passed on from family and sometimes he is an uncle, offering an example for others. There’s a slowness to savor in Skeets’ writing, a gentle quickening you observe in the essay as he educates you on what it takes to sustain his community and their Indigenous way of life. “The next time I butcher I’ll have my own story to tell, my own memory to share, knowledge to offer. One more voice to add to the chorus on those nights when you’re out in the desert under the night sky, no sound for miles, just the moon and the ground beneath you, reminding you it’s all real. That and your full stomach. Generations heard through wind, the air, the stirring gleaming stars. All that knowledge, all that story, all that beauty,” he writes. Be sure to make time for this piece; it will ignite your sense of wonder and spark your curiosity, feeding you in a way that’s truly satisfying. —KS

We’re More Ghosts Than People

Hanif Abdurraqib | The Paris Review | October 16, 2023 | 3,922 words

Not long after I started at Longreads, I put together a reading list detailing some of my favorite pieces of video game writing over the previous decade. If people could enjoy reviews of movies they haven’t seen, I reasoned, then they could do the same with gaming criticism and journalism—even if they’d never held a controller. That conviction hasn’t wavered in the years since; however, this year brought a piece powerful enough to vault back through time and land on that list. Hanif Abdurraqib’s Paris Review essay (which also appears in the newly published collection Critical Hits) is nominally about the experience of playing Red Dead Redemption 2, Rockstar Games’ critically acclaimed title set in the American West in 1899. The word “nominally” carries more weight than usual, though. In Abdurraqib’s able hands, the game instead becomes a portal to grief and salvation, futility and loss. Some characters can’t be redeemed by virtue of their programming. Others can. The trajectory of the character of you is another story altogether. “If there is a place of judgment where I must stand and plead my case for a glorious and abundant afterlife, I hope that whoever hears me out is interested in nuances, but who’s to say,” Abdurraqib writes. “I don’t think about it, until I do.” As with the very best of arts writing, this meditation teases apart its medium’s limitations to find the universal truths and questions embedded within. No virtual revolver necessary. —PR

A Mother’s Exchange for Her Daughter’s Future

Jiayang Fan | The New Yorker | June 5, 2023 | 6,197 words

Jiayang Fan was 25 when her mother was diagnosed with ALS. She writes: “The child became the mother’s future, and the mother became the child’s present, taking up residence in her brain, blood, and bones.” This was the first personal piece Fan wrote after her mother’s death; it’s a devastating tale of the immigrant experience in America, of illness, of the intimate and complicated relationship between a mother and daughter. Fan’s descriptions of her bedridden mother range from exquisite to grim to satisfyingly peculiar. She is “shipwrecked in her own body,” with skin like “rice paper” that will inevitably tear. Even a line detailing how literal shit excretes out of her mother’s body—a “rivulet” down the “limp marble of her thigh”—manages to read beautifully. Fan writes with vulnerability about caring for an elderly loved one, love and sacrifice, the intertwining of two lives, and the story about them that’s ultimately written. I had to pause and collect myself a number of times as I thought about my own aging mother, and the decisions made over the course of our lives that have made us who we are. “One creature, disassembled into two bodies,” Fan writes of their shared life. This is extraordinary writing that hit me in a spot deep within. —CLR

How I Survived a Wedding in a Jungle That Tried to Eat Me Alive

Melissa Johnson | Outside | July 18, 2023 | 4,273 words

A key sentence in this essay goes as follows, “Behold my nightmare: a tick has bitten my vagina.” The incident—relayed with “the gravitas of Obi-Wan Kenobi describing the destruction of planet Alderaan”—occurs in 2017, while Melissa Johnson is enduring a five-day trek in northern Guatemala to attend the wedding of two ex-military women. (She reflects on how during the days of Trump America, the middle of the jungle felt a safer spot for such nuptials.) Johnson embarks on this quest fresh from harvesting her eggs. Single at the age of 39, she is not only wrestling ticks from her “holy garden” but with her fear of missing out on love and motherhood. Trudging along the soggy trails, Johnson dwells on her cloudy future with trepidation. But, by the time she is released from the jungle’s insect-infested innards, she has come to terms with the fact that she is an adventurer—someone comfortable with the unknown. This piece has many layers: an adventure story, a character study of people with names such as “Tent Dawg,” and a thoughtful take on aging and motherhood. It’s also just plain funny. I loved going through the jungle with Johnson, and I also loved the last sentence of her bio: She had a baby girl in March. —CW

The dark side of the seafood industry. The morality of mortality. Memory versus belief. The flying cowboys lighting up the skies of the West. The food-service secrets of a tableside firestarter. All that (and more!) in this week’s edition.

1. The Crimes Behind the Seafood You Eat

Ian Urbina | The New Yorker | October 9, 2023 | 9,573 words

Where does your seafood come from? Who caught and handled it? The more I read about overfishing, illegal industry practices, and horrific work conditions, the more it stinks. Each year, China catches more than five billion pounds of seafood, much of it squid, through its distant-water fleet. These ships roam all over the world, often in unauthorized areas; analysts believe the country disguises some of them as fishing vessels when they’re in fact part of a “maritime militia” surveilling the sea, looking to expand control over contested waters. Onboard, workers are abused and held against their will. Ian Urbina, who runs The Outlaw Ocean Project, spent four years visiting the fleet’s ships and investigating their conditions. (To communicate with fishermen on ships that prohibited him on board, he tossed up plastic bottles, “weighed down with rice, containing a pen, cigarettes, hard candy, and interview questions.”) He also tracked where squid caught irresponsibly would end up: first to plants in China, some employing Xinjiang labor, and then continuing on to the very places we buy our seafood, like Costco and Safeway. This is a massive report on how China has become a fishing superpower, but Urbina also weaves within it an emotional, devastating story of an Indonesian worker who joined one of these ships in order to give his family a better life. Extraordinary reporting that’ll make you reconsider your next plate of calamari. —CLR

2. We’re More Ghosts Than People

Hanif Abdurraqib | The Paris Review | October 16, 2023 | 3,922 words

Looking back at the last few months of my selections for this newsletter, I realize that I prize writing that escapes the presuppositions of its genre—or, rather, writing that escapes your presuppositions of its genre. Take this essay from the great Hanif Abdurraqib. When you first find your way to it in The Paris Review, you might notice the rubric “On Games” and see a screenshot from the video game Red Dead Redemption 2, and decide then and there to keep browsing. Would I begrudge you that decision? Probably not. But I’d also know that you were unwittingly denying yourself something marvelous. From the very first sentence—”I don’t find myself investing much in the kingdom of heaven”—the piece thrums with a keen melancholy that never tips into sorrow or indulgence. When Abdurraqib writes about the futility and powerlessness of playing to save the doomed, he’s of course writing about something larger, and he has no hesitation in drawing the line for you: this is about real redemption. About the sins of youth and the circumstances that absolve them, or don’t. About the love we extend to others but not ourselves. About how we face our own ever-shortening lives. The word “spiritual” is a slippery one, used as it is to mediate our own discomfort with the unknowable, but there’s no better word to apply to this essay. Abdurraqib’s spirit shimmers here, its full spectrum diffracted through his 19th-century avatar; that it does so in the service of what some might flatten to “game writing” only proves my point. This is something special. —PR

3. Mere Belief

Sallie Tisdale | Harper’s Magazine | October 16, 2023 | 6,222 words

In my earliest memory, I’m peering under my uncle Raymond’s bedroom door. He lives with me and my parents in the second bedroom of the duplex we all share. My mom’s given me his mail and I’m flicking the envelopes under the door, watching them spin over the parquet floor and disappear from view after crossing a patch of bright sunlight. I am not yet 5 years old. This is an autobiographical memory, according to Sallie Tisdale and her fascinating piece on memoir and memory for Harper’s Magazine. As a memoirist, Tisdale trades in remembering, but this is no romanticized account of an unlimited well of perfect recall that fuels her writing. She looks at the science behind what we remember and how memories morph, shifting in shape and color in the liminal spaces of our brain, while she wrestles with the conundrum of her own evolving identity, and how what seems like fact can become blurred. “It is tempting to substitute today’s psychological truth for history. Memory is wet sand,” she writes. “This is what I want to interrogate: the slipperiness, the uncertainty.” Is there nothing more beautiful—and more human—than searching for truth in the blurry spaces of our memory? —KS

4. Winging It with the New Backcountry Barnstormers

Brad Rassler | Outside | October 18, 2023 | 10,300 words

Off-airport pilots. Strip baggers. Flyboys. The recreational bush pilots in this piece sport many names. But are these social media-savvy flyers bringing new people into an exciting sport or just “boys with pricey toys” who clog up the skies and take reckless risks? Brad Rassler is dedicated to his discovery mission—even braving some terrifying maneuvers while in the passenger seat of planes that weigh no more than a golf cart. I love meeting big characters, and this piece is jam-packed with them, all sporting varying amounts of facial hair, from “a thick soul patch ornamenting [a] chin” to “a ginger-brown beard that doesn’t quite attach to the mustache part.” (One lucky exception has a “handsome face smooth of whiskers but strong of jaw.”) You cannot fail to be impressed by such a range of beard-related eloquence. Culminating in a chaotic rally in the evocatively named Dead Cow Lakebed, Nevada, this feature is quite the ride. —CW

5. Confessions of a Tableside Flambéur

Adam Reiner | Eater | October 11, 2023 | 1,553 words

Adam Reiner’s short but sweet Eater piece on food as entertainment is perfectly satisfying. For three years Reiner worked as a captain at a Manhattan chophouse called The Grill, where he prepared food tableside, including Dover sole and Bananas Foster, the flaming pièce de résistance. Reiner serves more than stories of boorish patrons as seen from behind the gueridon. (The fancy trolley containing cooking ingredients and utensils.) He gives us a taste of food-as-performance at his restaurant and others, such as Papi Steak, where the $1,000 wagyu ribeye’s reveal is meat theater—complete with special effects that could rival Taylor Swift in concert. “The steak even has its own designated entrance music that blares in the dining room to announce its arrival,” he writes. Reiner also reveals the perils of performance, and the very real anxieties that go along with it. For every Bananas Foster or cherries jubilee, there’s always the potential that the flambé is a flop, “like striking a book of matches in the rain.” Steak entrances and fancy flaming bananas aside, it’s Reiner’s writing that will keep you coming back for more in a story that’s less about the food and more about his uneasy relationship with the distastefulness of restaurant showmanship. —KS

Audience Award

What was our readers’ favorite this week? Drumroll, please!

It has always been easier for me to convince myself that the sins I’ve been immersed in and the average time I might have left to make up for them simply don’t align. I’m a better person now than I have been in the past, though I’ve also dislodged myself from binaries of good and bad. If there is a place of judgment where I must stand and plead my case for a glorious and abundant afterlife, I hope that whoever hears me out is interested in nuances, but who’s to say. I don’t think about it, until I do. Until I get sick and wonder if I am sick with something beyond routine, or until I swerve out of the way of a car on the highway and feel the sweat begin to bead on my forehead. It’s all a question of how close I feel like I am to the end.

Here are five standout pieces we read this week. You can visit our editors’ picks or our Twitter feed to see what other recommendations you may have missed.

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1. The Art of Bidding, or How I Survived Federal Prison

Eric Borsuk | The Marshall Project | September 22, 2022 | 8,775 words

When Eric Borsuk was incarcerated in federal prison with two accomplices, the three friends used self-education to pass the time. They studied on a demanding schedule and evaluated assignments for one another. When an injustice within the so-called justice system separated them, Eric lost not only their companionship but his primary coping mechanism, forcing him to find a new way to protect his mental and physical health during the final five years of his sentence. In this incisive piece at The Marshall Project (published in partnership with VQR), Borsuk recounts how the justice system’s willful blindness and casual cruelty helped inspire him to write. American Animals, the memoir Borsuk wrote from his cell, became a major motion picture in 2018. —KS

2. Has The Zodiac Killer Mystery Been Solved (Again)?

Aaron Gell | Los Angeles Magazine | September 22, 2022 | 6,235 words

Bestselling novelist Jarett Kobek believes he’s uncovered the true identity of the Zodiac Killer. His research into the cultural references in the killer’s cryptic letters led him down a rabbit hole and, ultimately, to an eccentric man named Paul Doerr, who died in 2007. But Doerr’s daughter, Gloria, isn’t so sure — until Aaron Gell suggests that the two of them come together to meet. I’m in no way immersed in the subculture of cold-case websleuths, but Gell’s story hooked me from the start, and it was impossible not to picture the movie version of this piece in my head as I was reading. As Gell shows, the evidence against Doerr might be the strongest yet, especially after chilling conversations with Gloria about her father, her childhood, and their relationship. Even if Kobek is just another amateur detective making this claim, Gell’s piece demonstrates how easy it is to become obsessed with unsolved cases like these. —CLR

3. 14 Hours in The Queue To See Queen Elizabeth’s Coffin

Laurie Penny | British GQ | September 18, 2022 | 3,415 words

I was 13 when Princess Diana died. For weeks, her death was the dominant force in England — on every channel, every paper, every face. A soap opera stuck on a tragic loop. My mum took me to London to lay flowers at Buckingham Palace. I remember the plastic cellophane suffocating the dying blooms, glinting in the sun in an expanse that seemed to stretch forever. I remember it being silent. I had picked flowers from our garden, which were now a sad, wilted offering. I was embarrassed putting them down — partly by the flowers, partly by even being there. Looking back, I am still a little embarrassed; it was strange to be driven by this huge, incomprehensible, national grief. So I appreciated Laurie Penny’s awkwardness in joining “the Queue” to walk past Queen Elizabeth’s coffin, quick to explain she is “not here for the Queen; I’m here for the Queue” (and that she is being paid). People have quipped Brits have been practicing for this queue their whole lives, and Penny encounters great stoicism as people settle into “groups of around seven or 10, and we take turns keeping each other’s place.” Her group is the focus of this essay: An array of characters brought together simply by turning up at the same time, they bond over the 14-hour ordeal with true blitz spirit. I was particularly rooting for 84-year-old John and his wife, feeling horrified when, after 13 hours, an official tried to remove them for being too frail. Reading, I went from chuckling at Penny’s wit to feeling tearful. Not for the Queen — I would not have joined the queue without being paid either — but, as a British expat of 10 years, for missing being part of a nation of people who would willingly share such a bizarre experience. A beautiful essay that, for a brief moment, made me miserably, gut-wrenchingly homesick. —CW

4. The Magic of Summer Basketball

Hanif Abdurraqib | ESPN | September 28, 2022 | 8,314 words

If you’ve only read Hanif Abdurraqib’s peerless arts criticism and occasional profile work, you may not be aware how deeply he loves the game of basketball. (Or how stoically he shoulders his own pathos-filled Minnesota Timberwolves fandom.) But that love suffuses every word of his journey into the world of summer hoops leagues — those offseason battlegrounds where promising young draftees go up against hometown legends and NBA icons alike, in tiny jam-packed gyms that amplify the game’s visceral swells beyond imagination. This is more than a travelogue. It’s a paean to the forge of competitive pro-am basketball, a tradition that sharpens games and shapes folklore. “The court is home,” he writes of Columbus’ Kingdom Summer League. “It transcends the places you live, or have lived. If you were made in this city, you can come back and play in this city, and there will be people who remember you when you first made a name for yourself. In a city like Columbus, if you were great once on these courts, you can always exist in a space beyond fading memories.” —PR

5. I Do Not Keep a Diary

Will Rees | Astra Magazine | September 15, 2022 | 3,051 words

Will Rees doesn’t yet keep a diary, but he aspires to. Maybe. He carries a notebook and pen, ready for the precise set of planting conditions that would allow him to sow his thoughts and ideas. The notebook is well traveled. The cover is worn, yet the inside remains blank as he struggles with how to portray himself on the page, asking “How would I like to appear when it is only myself who is looking?” I loved this piece because I find it wholly relatable. Have you ever felt those sweet yet rare moments when you’re infused with possibility, that desire to make sense of your life and your experiences, to uncover meaning in how you spend your days? Have you ever aspired to get thoughts down before they evaporate, before that drop of inspiration or insight is gone forever? To take pride in yourself as a thinking person who makes reflection a habit? Don’t we all? —KS

In this deeply moving essay at The Baffler, Hanif Abdurraqib reflects on the protests of last summer and the ongoing fight for equality with a mix of grief and pride. As he considers those who protest systemic racism in America, he says “… yes, it is thrilling to see a generation that has harnessed their firsthand knowledge, their resources, their steadfast care for each other, and their rage, and channeled it into multilayered action.” But he yearns for a day when the time and energy and fortitude required to protest can be “freed up not only for other fights but for other endeavors that make newer uses of their time.”

What pushes people out into the street and what pushes them to organize might be sparked in a single moment, but before that moment, and often stretching on long after, is a series of small collapses caused by continual neglect.

A series of small collapses is how they come to be radicalized.

We were there because it was necessary that we be there. Because someone we loved was in the streets and they needed protection or care or simply someone else they knew to add to the long braid of someones blocking traffic and holding the line when cops descended with their sprays or their horses or their hands on their weapons.

The grief of this moment, this life, is torrential. More for some than others, of course. But in the midst of it, one small, distinct grief that I have been focused on is the grief that sits alongside the immense pride and excitement I feel watching young activists step fully into themselves and realize they are entirely unmoved by and unafraid of power. I had that inside of me when I was a teenager, and a lot of the people I lived with and hung around did too. But so few of us actually knew what to do with it. We knew we hated that cops were in our schools and in our neighborhoods—their primary function to inject fear into the day-to-day movements of largely marginalized kids from largely marginalized communities. But it didn’t seem like there was much to do with that rage except funnel it back into our own ecosystems, our own selves. We knew our anger but not our capacity to organize.

Read the essay

This week, we’re sharing stories from Clint Smith, Hanif Abdurraqib, Lise Olsen, Jaya Saxena, and Emma Carmichael.

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1. Stories of Slavery, From Those Who Survived It

Clint Smith | The Atlantic | February 9, 2021 | 29 minutes (7,250 words)

“The Federal Writers’ Project narratives provide an all-too-rare link to our past.”

2. Grief’s Anatomy

Hanif Abdurraqib | The Baffler | January 4, 2021 | 8 minutes (2,074 words)

“Hope awaits organizers like a trap.”

3. Undetected

Lise Olsen | Texas Observer | February 8, 2021 | 15 minutes (3,762 words)

“Prior to his arrest, local authorities had dismissed nearly all of those incidents as an unusual spike in natural deaths—a run of bad luck. But public records and interviews reveal that, time after time, investigators in Dallas made critical mistakes and overlooked or ignored signs of foul play.”

4. The Limits of the Lunchbox Moment

Jaya Saxena | Eater | Febuary 8, 2021 | 13 minutes (3,400 words)

“The story of being bullied in the cafeteria for one’s lunch is so ubiquitous that it’s attained a gloss of fictionality.”

5. Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird Are Goals

Emma Carmichael | GQ | February 9, 2021 | 21 minutes (5,324 words)

“Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe both had Hall of Fame–worthy careers before they met. But to reach new, boundary-obliterating levels of achievement on and off the field, they needed each other. And, as they tell Emma Carmichael, their work is just getting started.”

This week, we’re sharing stories from Barack Obama, Andrea Pitzer, Hannah Dreier, Ismail Muhammad, Niela Orr, Hanif Abdurraqib, Danielle A. Jackson, and Cassie Owens, and Karolina Waclawiak.

Note: the Top 5 Longreads of the week will return on August 14th, 2020.

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1. Barack Obama’s Eulogy for John Lewis

Barack Obama | The Atlantic | July 30, 2020 | 14 minutes (3,641 words)

“He, as much as anyone in our history, brought this country a little bit closer to our highest ideals.”

2. My Midlife Crisis as a Russian Sailor

Andrea Pitzer | Outside | July 27, 2020 | 28 minutes (7,025 words)

“For a book project about 16th-century polar explorer William Barents, Andrea Pitzer needed to reach the remote Arctic island where he and his men came to grief. She booked passage on an expeditionary boat out of Murmansk, then headed north on a trip marked by unforgettable scenery, unexpected loss, and wild magic that changed her life.”

3. The Worst-Case Scenario

Hannah Dreier | The Washington Post | July 24, 2020 | 16 minutes (4,240 words)

“A white police officer fresh from de-escalation training, a troubled black woman with a gun, and a crowd with cellphones ready to record.”

4. Black Talk, Black Feeling: Media Round Table

Niela Orr, Ismail Muhammad, Hanif Abdurraqib, Danielle A. Jackson, Cassie Owens
The Believer | July 29, 2020 | 37 minutes (9,261 words)

“So much of my work as a writer and editor is to make sure that Black people have the ability to write about more than just moments like the one we’re in right now, and a big disheartening thing for me has been to live through this moment and again see editors scrambling to get Black writers to write and then undoubtedly those same editors will vanish when those Black writers want to write about, I don’t know, ice cream or whatever the fuck.”

5. What My Mother Didn’t Talk About

Karolina Waclawiak | BuzzFeed | July 25, 2020 | 16 minutes (4,245 words)

“My mother and I were very close, but when she died last year there was still so much I didn’t know about her.”

Jonny Auping  | Longreads | February 2019 | 20 minutes (5,266 words)

Hanif Abdurraqib claims that he “wasn’t interested in writing the definitive book on A Tribe Called Quest.” What he produced instead was much more powerful. Abdurraqib’s recently released book, Go Ahead In the Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest, does provide a history of the revolutionary rap group, but more importantly it’s a memoir of listening and feeling, a deeply personal book unafraid to pair music criticism with intimate reflections.

A Tribe Called Quest debuted in 1990 with the album People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, an eclectic layering of samples produced by the group’s de facto leader, Q-Tip, and rhymed over with quirky stories and confident punch lines. Their first three albums, all released by 1993, are considered hip-hop canon and three of the most influential albums of the past 30 years across any genre.

A Tribe Called Quest’s 2016 comeback album seemed destined to debut amidst doomed circumstances. Phife Dawg, the group’s swaggering and quick-witted lyricist, had died of diabetes between the making of the album and it’s release. Three days before the album came out Donald Trump won a shocking presidential election. No singles had been released prior to We’ve Got it From Here…Thank You 4 Your Service, but it turned out to be powerful response to the politics of the time, a prophetic pushback against inequality, as well as a statement of the group’s place in popular culture. Pitchfork called the album, “the first time in their career that the entire group was at their peak.”

You could argue that Go Ahead In the Rain is the type of dream project that anyone who has ever felt immense fandom — or even love — for a particular music would want to write. It’s a tribute to a group, and who doesn’t enjoy explaining why their favorite should also be your favorite? But Abdurraqib earns the authority to actually pull it off, not just through his elegant writing but also by having the courage to use Tribe’s music to examine his own place in the world and reckon with what he discovered.

Abdurraqib took the time to speak with Longreads about the dynamics of fandom, the relationship between Q-Tip and Phife Dawg, and the current state of music.

Jonny Auping: When did you know that you wanted to write something significant or even book-length about A Tribe Called Quest?

Hanif Abdurraqib: I think that the first bit of interest that I had was shortly after Phife died. I was in a school giving a talk. The talk kind of turned to Phife’s death and life and work, and I realized a lot of them did not know who A Tribe Called Quest was. Not just that they didn’t have a passing interest; legitimately didn’t know who they were as a group.

Then I began to think about how a thing that I struggle with, with older rap fans, is there’s sometimes more of an investment in shaming folks than there is in offering a narrative that people can latch onto and find their own way to the music that they maybe don’t know. I kind of wanted to offer that. I’m not an expert on the group. I’m a fan of the group. I wanted to make that divide clear with the book. It’s kind of a book from a fan’s perspective.

When you say shaming you mean older rap fans shaming young rap fans about not being educated about the music before them?

Right. From an early point, knowledge about music is something that’s easy to weaponize. Your music knowledge is a way to place yourself above those who don’t have the same music knowledge as you. That, for me, has not worked as a way to guide me to better or more interesting music. I’ve begun to think of ways that my own work has perhaps added to that and not benefited folks in not showing them a path to the music that they may like but don’t know they’ve had an ear for the whole time.

This book was kind of working in service of that and trying to find a way to articulate a love for this group that I’ve had for an entire lifetime at this point, and maybe open up some doorways for other folks.

A good critical practice for me has been to determine the stakes by inserting myself into the piece so that the stakes are not only high but also personal.

When you had that idea to educate people about Tribe in a way that’s not condescending, were you slowly putting together the ideas for a book proposal or was it just ideas accumulating in your head?

It was mostly an accumulation of ideas. What happened was I worked at MTV News and from early 2016 to early 2017 I had written this series of pieces about A Tribe Called Quest. I wrote a eulogy-type thing for Phife. I wrote a thing about the album coming out and the SNL performance and then I wrote a thing about the Grammy performance. That had created a body of work with a thread through it that felt substantial. So when University of Texas Press asked me if I wanted to write a book about A Tribe Called Quest it was because I already had this small body of work that felt like it could have expanded further out.

With some distance it’s clear that there’s structure to this book, but as a reader you don’t know what’s going to come with each chapter. Certain chapters are deeply personal, some are pretty historical when it comes to the context of the music, and some really examine the art behind it. I know every chapter has some of all of those things, but when you were outlining this book did you consciously map out places for all those elements or did a lot of that figure itself out in the writing process?

I wish I could find the original proposal document because in the mapping out of the book, the chapters were nothing like what the chapters ended up being, because much like an A Tribe Called Quest song or album, the writing process for me was to begin in one place and find a better avenue to another place and deciding I had to get there by any means I could find, be it extensive research or finding a personal narrative to thread it. I wanted the book to feel like I was pulling a bunch of samples together, like I was creating one harmonious sound.

Good personal writing — and there are bits of this book that feel like a memoir — that kind of writing, when it’s good, feels effortless, which is how this reads. Do you find it difficult writing about yourself?

I am someone who writes primarily about things I am passionate about, be it music or popular culture. I’m ruminating on ideas around life, death, joy, and survival — all these are things I’m either passionate or curious about. So the stakes are high for me. A good critical practice for me has been to determine the stakes by inserting myself into the piece so that the stakes are not only high but also personal. That, again, is difficult because we’re talking about being honest with yourself about what you want to get out of the work you’re doing. But for me, I find no other way to write about the things that I’m passionate about other than to at least have myself be adjacent to them in order to determine the worthiness of the stakes.

When you dig into these albums specifically, the language of your writing takes on a tone of music criticism, but it comes through the lens of this very personal connection and appreciation of the work. Would you characterize your work in writing this book to be as a music critic?

Well, sure, or at least a critic. I think the book, for me, felt like more of a critical look at fandom and kind of an unraveling of fandom and consumption. I was talking to someone recently about an artist they loved who released an album recently that they did not enjoy. I thought there was something really powerful in a person saying they didn’t enjoy this thing by this artist that they have a great deal of affection for. I think that is a fascinating bit of critical engagement, especially in a moment now when fans imagine themselves to be tasked with unconditional love for every single creation and every single movement from an artist they have affection for.

I wanted to unravel some of that in the book — what it is to have such a strong connection to a group of people who make art that you then imagine that you’re not consuming the art, you’re consuming the people. How do the differences in fandom shift when you decide you’re consuming a person and not a person’s creation? What does that look like in terms of the self and the autonomy that the self has when you are tethering yourself to a person beyond what they create? And I’m not saying any of that is right or wrong, but I did write with that examination in mind and thinking about my relationship to that in terms of A Tribe Called Quest and my life that I’ve lived as a fan of theirs from a young age to now. And how both of our lives have changed. My life has changed. And this book wouldn’t be as interesting to me or maybe not worth pursuing if not for the final album that came out in 2016, because that felt like it created a closure that allowed for a narrative arc, not just for the group but for my life with the group.

The book, for me, felt like more of a critical look at fandom and kind of an unraveling of fandom and consumption … what it is to have such a strong connection to a group of people who make art that you then imagine that you’re not consuming the art, you’re consuming the people.

There are portions of this book in which you write notes to each member of the group. Writing a letter to a living person and writing a letter to someone who has passed away are two different things. Did the process of writing to Q-Tip seem different than the process of writing to Phife Dawg knowing that Q-Tip might read your letter and Phife isn’t around to read it?

Not entirely. Largely because I wrote those letters not with the feeling or sentiment that they would or could be read by the group, but I wrote them to get the questions that had haunted my interior out and into the world. But I think what made writing those letters in general really healing and fascinating for me was the understanding that there was no burden on the members of this group to read those letters. There was no burden on the members of this group to answer anything that I was putting out into the world. It might seem weird or foolish to say this, but I didn’t write the book for the group to read it. I’m fine if the living members of the group do read it of course, but I wasn’t drawn to the book with the hopes that it would be read by members of A Tribe Called Quest because I wasn’t interested in writing the definitive book on A Tribe Called Quest. The living members and the people close to the living members get the final say on the story of the group. I was trying to write the definitive book on a single arc of fandom and how it can kind of balloon beyond the music. So each letter was written with the sentiment that it would go unanswered and with that in mind, they all kind of felt the same.

Maybe this is just me projecting my own vanity as a writer, but it’s hard for me to believe someone could write a book like this and not fall into the habit of imagining the subjects reading it. Were you able to push that thought away or did that never really become prevalent for you?

It never became prevalent at all. I will say that I thought most about Cheryl Boyce-Taylor [Phife Dawg’s mother] reading the book. Just on a logistical level, we used some of her poems in the book so we had to get permissions from her. But beyond that, I felt that I personally had the most touchable relationship with Cheryl Boyce-Taylor because, not only is she a poet and we have some mutual folks in the same circle, but even more importantly than that, to have to grapple with a very specific type of loss is something I understand well. I write in the book that she is a mother who lost a son. I am a son who lost a mother. I think that the thing that I thought about the most was her reaction to the book if she were to read it. I also thought about wanting to honor the full life of her son in a way that would make her proud.

There’s a sentence you wrote that stuck with me. You wrote, “Jazz was created by people obsessed with survival at a time that did not want them to survive.” A Tribe Called Quest obviously came around at a different time, but they drew heavily on jazz in their production. Do you think that same sentiment applied to them?

Yes, but I also think it’s worth mentioning that sometimes a sample is just a sample. Sometimes someone just thinks something sounds good and wants to perform over it in service of themselves. But for me, with A Tribe Called Quest, it was easy to imagine that so much of their use of jazz was simply trying to drag to the forefront the music they first fell in love with in hopes that someone else might fall in love with it, too.

When you read stories about the way Q-Tip was producing and the really rigorous efforts that it took to get the pause tapes to work right and for him to just dig into the crates to find records to get one correct sound, that’s kind of a labor of love and a labor of lineage, a labor that’s interested in carrying on sounds of people before you so that the people after you might also find those sounds. I think that’s more fascinating to me when it comes to Tribe’s music because I think all samples have a purpose, but to sample with purpose is different than kind of just pulling a danceable beat and rapping over it. The end result of both of those samplings can still be someone younger going back and digging in crates and finding an old song, but A Tribe Called Quest, and a lot of musicians — I wrote about The Bomb Squad and Havoc from Mobb Deep and the Native Tongues — some of that sampling was so layered. When I was a kid I was so fascinated in reading liner notes, and to read those A Tribe Called Quest liner notes was to be taken down a rabbit hole of music that you could maybe find in your house in your parent’s record collection.

I’ve lived as a fan of theirs from a young age to now… Both of our lives have changed. My life has changed… The final album that came out in 2016… felt like it created a closure that allowed for a narrative arc, not just for the group but for my life with the group.

You begin chapter two discussing how and when music can become political. When I think of music from that era, a group like Public Enemy was probably more overtly political than Tribe. If someone were to listen to the album It Takes a Nations of Millions by Public Enemy then you’re sort of transported to a march or a protest. You’ve got Chuck D ahead of you with a megaphone. If I were to try to extend that metaphor to A Tribe Called Quest, I think putting on a Tribe album is more like being in a car on the way to that march or protest. Maybe you’re talking about the march. Maybe you’re just talking about music or girls. It’s tougher to pin down. I guess my question is how consciously political do you think their music was?

I think it was very political, but I think they also existed in an era of the fiercely and overtly political. We’ve Got It From Here…Thank You 4 Your Service was a political album, but it was in some ways no more contemplatively political than their old work. It was just angrier. It was an explicitly angrier album than any that had come before it. It was easier to define the political movements of that album for an outsider because it was steeped in a type of righteous rage and a type of grief.

But I think that the great political notions in A Tribe Called Quest in their early phases were, if nothing else, to widen the lens of what America considered acceptable blackness to be. I think that movement in itself was political in what it attempted to afford the American imagination. Whether or not America responded to that was not up to the creators but up to the country itself.

But also I think it’s worth saying that the construction of The Low End Theory was also political, right? The landscape that The Low End Theory was released into was inherently political. Q-Tip talked a lot about the “Low End” being his view on America’s relationship to blackness. He was talking about Rodney King. So The Low End Theory, too, was a political album, but I think for a lot of people, they didn’t read A Tribe Called Quest as political until the 2016 record came out because of the coincidences in its release. It was released the week of the election. It was on its face very angry and explicit about that anger. There were unapologetic themes of resistance and dissent, not just in the album but in some performances. But that didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s not like Q-Tip or Jarobi or Ali Shaheed Muhammad woke up in 2016 and decided to be political. They were kind of arcing and hinting towards the politics of expression in their earlier work.

When I think about comeback albums by great acts of the past, in any genre, I think they can tend to be pretty forgettable. I feel like there can be a level of vanity or entitlement that’s kind of transparent, as if [the artists think] their resumes just warrant our time. How did Tribe make such a perfect album in 2016 when their heyday was the early nineties?

Their heyday was the early nineties, sure, but they had always been making music, at least to my ears, that sounded futuristic or like it could exist in a distant future. So it makes sense to me that they released an album in 2016 that sounded right at home, but using some of the same techniques that they always used. They used sparse soundscapes laced with heavy percussion. All these things are not out of the norm for what they were doing.

It also bears worth mentioning that Q-Tip was never particularly removed from the hip-hop landscape even when Tribe was not active. Q-Tip kind of always had a pulse on hip-hop and was kind of a sound director, directing sound for folks who needed him around. They were always somewhat chameleons. Because of the great production skills within the group and because of the dexterity of Phife as a lyricist and someone who was definitely ahead of his time in the way he presented punch lines in his rhymes, it makes sense that they create a very up-to-date album because they had always been able to shift with the landscape. The thing that benefits you when you’ve reinvented the wheel or been the pace-setter for the genre is that you’re so far ahead of everyone else that by the time they catch up to you, you’ve already taken in all the tricks you know they’re going to do.

Like they had been making music for this time all the way back then and the scene just caught up to them.

After the election, I — as someone who is both black and a writer, like a lot of my peers — people looked to us and said, “What do we do now?” or “We need you now more than ever, writers or creators who are marginalized” but the thing with A Tribe Called Quest and this album is that in their whole body of work it shows that people have been doing this the whole time. They have been writing and creating towards a direction that tells America the worst of what is possible. For a long time. The fact that people did not pay attention until what they imagined was too late is a prime example of the exchange in America between artist and consumer.

Nothing states it more than the Tribe Called Quest song “Space Program,” [and the subsequent song “We The People”] which has the chants of “all you Mexicans must go, all you black folks must go, etc.” The fact that that song existed in the week that the election happened and echoes the entire electoral cycle says a lot about how the exhausted and marginalized artist has always been able to see the future for better or worse.

Creators who are marginalized … have been writing and creating towards a direction that tells America the worst of what is possible. For a long time. The fact that people did not pay attention until what they imagined was too late is a prime example of the exchange in America between artist and consumer.

I listened to that song on the way over here. What impressed me so much about that album — talking about comeback albums, I spoke of them sometimes having entitlement that you can hear in them, but this one didn’t feel like they needed our record sales or our approval. It felt like we needed them and they somehow delivered. I think when people are anxious or worried or frustrated they wish that they could go on Youtube and find a four-minute video that could take away their anxiety or make you feel better for however long. Those first two songs they really do have that effect. They speak extremely powerfully and truthfully, but they do it with a sort of confidence that is very calming.

Absolutely. I think there is no better start to a Tribe record than the start to that record. It’s honest and confident and haunting and deserved.

You highlight Q-Tip as the visionary behind Tribe. His musical innovation and his ambition really dictated their sound. You mentioned that he even had to drag Phife Dawg to the studio at times. For someone as talented as Q-Tip, why do you think he found it so important to be a part of this specific group and tether the first decade of his musical identity to A Tribe Called Quest — and to Phife Dawg — rather than try to have the type of solo career who someone like Kanye West, who was clearly influenced by him, would later have?

I don’t have a firm answer of course, but Q-Tip did have some solo success. His solo albums are either pretty good or very good.

I don’t know if a solo Q-Tip really would have flourished in the early days. Though some could argue that the first Tribe album is really a solo Q-Tip album because of how little Phife is on it. But Q-Tip — and I tried to express this in the book as best as possible — for me, Q-Tip was pushed by the other members of the group to constantly re-invent and constantly find ways to keep up with the creative push and pull of the rap landscape of the time. I think what Phife was able to do lyrically and creatively kept Q-Tip on his toes, not only as a producer but as someone who had to show up as a rapper.

Revisiting the albums critically to write this book, what I heard so often was, as the albums went on, Q-Tip became a better rapper. He found better pockets. He honed in on his skills as a whimsical, clever narrator. He began to use his voice more as an instrumental tool in harmony with the samples he was using. I think that was because he felt a permission to elevate his rhyme skills because he had to rhyme with Phife as Phife became more and more present on those records. You could tell Q-Tip was pushed more and more.

How do you think Q-Tip knew Phife Dawg would be what he became when he wasn’t all that present in that first album? Do you think he saw those abilities or it was something about his personality?

I think a part of it was that they were just long-time pals. Sometimes it’s the romantics of the perfect pairing where one person finds another person and sees all they can be, but sometimes it’s just your longtime friend who you’ve messed around with for a lot of years, and you are creating something and want them to be along for the ride. That kind of sparks the magic.

There’s no greater testament to the endurance of Tribe than the very simple fact that Q-Tip and Phife were friends who seemed to love each other a great deal. That is why the group was able to endure even through the layered frustrations they had with each other. I think that is more a testament to Tribe’s magic than anything else; the idea that these two were brothers who adored each other greatly and who fought to preserve what they could of their relationship. To do that is hard, I think, when the relationship is one that the entire world has access to, and a relationship that an entire livelihood relies on.

Who does Q-Tip make music for?

I think all the time about how easy it is to convince yourself that you’re weird when you’re a kid who’s just slightly different than the other kids you’re around. As a kid, I probably wasn’t all that much of an outsider, but I imagined myself as such because my brother was very cool, and I could see how he moved through the world, and I did not move through the world like that. I was an outsider, and no one in the world was like I was. Of course that was not true, but that’s how I imagined myself.

A Tribe Called Quest really spoke to me because of that. They felt very odd and they felt very comfortable in their oddness. Their performances of their oddities became very cool. Their performances were so rich and so pointed and so smart that it had no choice but to become cool.

I felt like Q-Tip and A Tribe Called Quest were making music for me: the uncool who had dreams of being cool.

Have you met Q-Tip?

No, I’ve seen A Tribe Called Quest live before, but I’ve never met Q-Tip. I’ve been in the same room as him once, but we did not meet.

Is he someone you want to meet?

Maybe, yeah. It’s not on a list or anything, but I think often about the ways that fans and writers and creators or just people who love art in any form can give their roses to people who they have been moved by while those people are still here. So if nothing else, I hope this book serves as that, but it would also be great to tell Q-Tip how much I appreciate what he’s offered to my life by way of his work.

Getting back to sampling, you wrote “the art of sampling is the art of breathing life into something that doesn’t have life anymore.” But you also discuss how the copyright laws have changed since Tribe’s first three albums, which relied heavily on multiple samples per song. Have those restrictions hurt hip hop and pop music in anyway?

It’s hard to quantify it. I think of someone like Pete Rock, who had his whole career shifted by the changes in those sampling rules and kind of lost access to his most creative spirit. I think in hip-hop it’s hurt because some producers were so great at stringing together symphonies almost entirely out of samples. It seems foolish to me that those producers should have to learn new skills, but I also believe in the idea that to sample someone there should be some payment to the original creator.

I think adjustments have been made. It’s not like sampling is obsolete. People still sample. Some of the songs on the first three Tribe albums had like 17 songs sampled on them. We’re not getting that anymore, and I think there’s some excitement that goes away because of that. I’ve been thrilled to see how production has shifted over the years, particularly from the year 2000 to now, how production techniques have sort of sped up at a rate that would not exist if the reliance were still on layering a bunch of samples on top of each other. So that has allowed production to evolve at a greater rate, so that’s great. I do wonder what could have been for that golden era of hip-hop if those rules had not been inserted.

I think often about the ways that fans and writers and creators or just people who love art in any form can give their roses to people who they have been moved by while those people are still here.

You wrote in the latter part of the book, “Genre is going to be a thing of the past soon anyway. It’s all going to be pop music before too long.” What would you attribute that to and why would you say that’s truer than it was 20 years ago?

I mean, pop music is a construct, right? But it’s the construct from which all other music constructs originally sprout. I’m not saying pop is the original genre. I’m saying pop became the defining genre due to constructs around what popular music was and who popular music was for. We’re talking about the popular music landscape. I’m not talking about genre going away in the underground musical scenes or the indie scenes or what have you.

R&B began to bend towards pop a long time ago. Rap began to bend to pop music sonically. I’m talking about hooks and an idea of what can be palatable for a wider audience. So again, the construct is responding to the audience. Rappers are thinking on how they can cater to both a quote-unquote “urban” audience and people who take their kids to soccer practice and drive home to the suburbs. It’s all serving this idea of what music can look like on the charts and how that can benefit the artist. As long as that’s a primary vehicle for creation or ideas, everything is going to bend towards pop. Or everything is going to leave the hands of the artists who created it and instantly be manufactured into something that is palatable for the pop charts. So just, sonically I think a lot of genres are bending towards serving the construct of American pop iconography. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. And I could be wrong. I think it’s worth revisiting in maybe 20 years. It just feels to me like that’s where we’re going.

Is there anyone in hip-hop right now who resonates with you in a similar way as A Tribe Called Quest did?

Sure. I think often about how much I like Vince Staples for his whimsical narration style. Exile and Blu. Denzel Curry. Noname I think is fascinating because, for all the talk of how voices and instruments can blend into musical accompaniment, I think Noname has figured a way to really use the voice well as kind of a bandleader. Her voice leads the music and doesn’t blend into the music. It’s the driving sonic force of the songs and the instruments follow.

So all those folks, and more, I think are having similar impacts on me as Tribe did when I was young.

* * *

Jonny Auping is a freelance writer based in Dallas, Texas. His work has been featured in Texas Monthly, The New Yorker, VICE, New York Magazine, Slate, and McSweeney’s.

Editor: Dana Snitzky

Hanif Abdurraqib | Go Ahead in the Rain | University of Texas Press | February 2019 | 17 minutes (3,425 words)

In the beginning, from somewhere south of anywhere I come from, lips pressed the edge of a horn, and a horn was blown. In the beginning before the beginning, there were drums, and hymns, and a people carried here from another here, and a language stripped and a new one learned, with the songs to go with it. When slaves were carried to America, stolen from places like West Africa and the greater Congo River, with them came a musical tradition. The tradition, generally rooted in one-line melodies and call-and-response, existed to allow the rhythms within the music to reflect African speech patterns—in part so that everyone who had a voice could join in on the music making, which made music a community act instead of an exclusive one.

Once in America, where the slaves were sent to work in America’s South, this ethos was blended with the harmonic style of the Baptist church. Black slaves learned hymns, blended them with their own musical stylings that had been passed down through generations, and thus, the spiritual was born. In the early nineteenth century, free black musicians began picking up and playing European stringed instruments, particularly violin. It started as a joke—to mimic European dance music during black cakewalk dances.

But even the mimicry sounded sweet, and so the children of slaves made what sweet sounds they could and stole a small and precious thing after having a large and precious history stolen from them. But before this, when slaves were first brought to North America in the early 1600s, slaves from the West African coast would use drums to communicate with each other, sending rhythmic messages that could not be decoded by Europeans. In this way, slaves, whose family members were often held captive in different spaces, could still enter into distant but meaningful conversations with one another. In 1740, the slave codes were enacted, first in South Carolina. Among other things, drums were outlawed for all slaves. Slave Code of South Carolina, Article 36 reads: “And . . . it is absolutely necessary to the safety of this Province, that all due care be taken to restrain . . . Negroes and other slaves . . . [from the] using or keeping of drums, horns, or other loud instruments, which may call together or give sign or notice to one another of their wicked designs and purposes.”

The slave codes spread across plantations, first to the Carolinas, and then Georgia, and then the rest of the United States. Wherever there were slaves or their descendants, drums were torn from the spaces they occupied.

The thing about percussion, which remains true today as children still pound fists on lunch tables to stretch a simple beat into something greater, is that all it takes is a surface and rhythm—a closed fist or an open palm and something merciful enough to be trampled upon. Without drums, slaves would make beats on washboards, available furniture, even their own bodies, finding the hollow and forgiving spots with the most echo. They would stomp and holler. The voice, too, is its own type of percussion—particularly when it is used to rattle the sky on a hot day, when there is endless work resting at your feet. The work is also an instrument—the way the wood can be chopped is a percussion and the march to the work is a percussion and the weary chants, when laid close enough to one another, can be a percussion.

When they took the drums of slaves, the slaves simply found new drums in everything, and this is how African rhythms were retained and passed down, held close by those who knew what it was to have a culture ripped from them.

Jazz, then, is a music born out of necessity. When slavery was abolished in 1865, many former slaves went into entertainment with all they had: the music knowledge they’d kept as a means of staying alive, blended with what other black musicians had learned along the way. By the end of the nineteenth century, ragtime was born, and from ragtime sprang the blues, and somewhere in the middle appeared Charles “Buddy” Bolden, who played what would become jazz, who mixed ragtime and the blues together and improvised with his band in the early 1900s down south in New Orleans before he got drunk and fell unconscious at the New Orleans Labor Day Parade in 1906 and never recovered.

When they took the drums of slaves, the slaves simply found new drums in everything, and this is how African rhythms were retained and passed down, held close by those who knew what it was to have a culture ripped from them.

Buddy Bolden, a cornet player from New Orleans, is as much a myth as anything. He built his band by learning how to mix instruments from local New Orleans bands that played blues and ragtime separately but never together. From 1900 to 1906, he was the king of a new sound, before alcohol rendered him largely incapable of keeping up with the demand to make new music. No sound recording of Buddy Bolden exists. In 1907, he was overtaken by what is now known as schizophrenia. Buddy Bolden heard voices and was locked away in a New Orleans asylum for twenty-four years until he died, buried in an unmarked grave in a pauper’s graveyard.

It can be said that the entire story of jazz is actually a story about what can urgently be passed down to someone else before a person expires. Jazz was created by a people obsessed with their survival in a time that did not want them to survive, and so it is a genre of myths—of fantasy and dreaming, of drumming on whatever you must and making noise in any way you can, before the ability to make noise is taken from you, or until the noise is an echo in your own head that won’t rest.

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In the beginning, I played the trumpet as a boy because in a picture I saw from a time I can’t remember, Miles Davis was slouched in a black leather chair in a white suit, the jacket unbuttoned and gold chains resting across his black skin. In his left hand, he held a bloodred horn, his name engraved on the side of it in gold. I saw Miles Davis and I decided that he was cool. I first loved what I understood as jazz because the coolness inside it was an unspoken act. I was a shy and nervous kid, wracked with anxiety before I understood what anxiety was. I was desperate for a way to wear silence in a way that looked and felt cool to anyone in my presence.

My father played instruments, several of them well, but not well enough to strike out and start a band. He played drums, clarinet, keyboard, and, later, an alto saxophone. Some evenings, if the day had been particularly long, he would retreat to the basement and put on old jazz records: John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, Miles Davis. I imagine it was the lack of spoken language in the music that drew him to it—the understanding that not all silence is silence. I would, at times, sit at the top of the steps and listen, building my own language from the sounds.

And so, in the beginning, I played the trumpet as a boy to bridge a gap between my father and me. This gap wasn’t particularly tense or rooted in any conflict, but that somehow made it more difficult to navigate. When there is nothing to point to as an excuse for distance, the distance looms larger, more difficult to push.

At the music store, I picked out a used silver trumpet, much to my father’s delight. I was heading into the sixth grade, eager to find new ways to fit in and hoping a musical skill would be my entry point. I started taking lessons with Dr. Robert Parish, a music teacher who taught on the east side of Columbus, Ohio. He had already trained both my father and my older brother, and he was thrilled to take me on.

It was never the reading of the music that turned me off—I loved the intricacies of the notes from a young age. As someone who found joy in reading, to read and unravel notes of music was a pleasure for me. To translate them into actual sound, however, was a discouraging practice. Like many young people who get an idea, I quickly became disinterested once I realized that practicing the trumpet cut into the time I could have spent outside with my friends. My father had me set aside an hour a day—a reasonable request, but one that I constantly found loopholes in. I would wait until right before my father made it home before I started playing, blowing out the last few notes of “Autumn Leaves” as he walked in the door, in hopes that it would convince him that I’d put in my time. This worked until, of course, Dr. Parish realized I wasn’t getting any better over time. It became obvious that I wasn’t practicing at home.

And so, in the beginning, I played the trumpet as a boy to bridge a gap between my father and me.

Yet, I joined my middle school jazz band, hoping that I could sneak an easy grade onto my report card by hiding behind the more skilled players assembled there. The teacher was a white man. I carried my beaten-up trumpet case to school with me every day, the smell of valve oil permeating through the school bus on the days I’d clean the trumpet in the morning. Cleaning it was my favorite part—to restore it back to its original self, briefly seeing my face in the silver. It was in these moments that I most felt like Miles Davis, leaned back in his leather chair, holding his shiny horn, knowing he was the master of it.

For the best jazz players, the instrument is an extension of the body. I never allowed myself to understand this part. The trumpet was a beautiful instrument to me, and I did not imagine myself to be beautiful. To hold it was to hold something that still felt foreign. To press my lips to it felt like a reckless and unearned intimacy. Thus, the trumpet was always an unnatural experience for me, even though I tried to make it part of me for longer than I should have. It was less about what I wanted, and more about what I felt I deserved.

In seventh grade jazz band, I struggled to grasp my solos, missing notes and squeaking out weak notes that should have been loud, boastful, and brilliant. The teacher, in year two of having me as a student, suggested that I try another instrument. His reasoning was simple: my lips were simply too big to play the trumpet.

In the moment, this was a blessing for me to hear. Finally, a reason for my failure to make this beautiful instrument bend to my will. I went home and excitedly told my father the news: I could no longer play trumpet because my lips were too big to play it well. My father immediately flew into a subdued but palpable rage. Having been alive for so long, used to workplaces and spaces where navigating racist microaggressions was a part of an everyday routine, he saw to the heart of the issue. The next day, he demanded a meeting with the teacher.

Before dragging me to the school, he shuffled around the house compiling a stack of records: trumpet players Louis Armstrong, Lee Morgan, Wynton Marsalis, Donald Byrd, Freddie Hubbard, and sax player Eric Dolphy, all black. When we arrived, without sitting, he spread all of the records out on the teacher’s desk. He’d point to the back covers of the albums, some of them showing portraits of the musicians with no instruments attached to their faces. “Look at these lips,” he’d say, hitting the back of an album with his palm. “You think these lips are too big to play trumpet?” And there were Eric Dolphy’s full lips, staring back, answering the question on their own. Or Louis Armstrong, whose lips were even fuller than my own, grinning knowingly into the room’s silence. The teacher was stunned, surely not expecting a student’s father to ask him to answer for a racist slight. But, for me, the damage had already been done. Underneath my relief to imagine myself done with the trumpet was shame. For so long, I had considered myself undeserving of such a beautiful instrument. To hear it made plain—to be told that my body was, indeed, not made for it—was first comforting and then deflating. Yes, of course, I remember thinking. Of course I am not worthy of this glorious machine.

As I look back now, I know that for my father, this was something greater. I imagine that he, too, knew that my trumpet playing was a lost cause. He’d heard me failing at it, and I suspect that he knew I was sneaking the timing of my practices to appease him. My father wanted to defend me against the teacher’s slight, I’m sure. But even beyond that, he wanted to defend a history that he knew and understood. He wanted to defend the sounds that got him through his long days and the language that he could walk into easier than most others. This is the thing about history and people who come from a people who have had it taken from them. They know if they don’t protect what they can, there will be nothing to pass on to their children. Even when their children can’t get through a simple jazz standard.

This was all during the time of the Walkman, or if you had money—which my family didn’t—the early days of the Discman. In my headphones, most days, I played the albums of A Tribe Called Quest, the rap group from Queens, New York. Rap in my household oscillated between taboo and acceptable, depending on the year or the mood my parents were in, or if they’d decided to give up altogether and leave their four children to their own musical devices. Still, no matter what vibe they were on, the early albums of A Tribe Called Quest were acceptable to play in the house. It isn’t so much that my parents listened to them actively, but the sound of their songs felt like something acceptable—warm and vital.

The first song of The Low End Theory, A Tribe Called Quest’s second album, is “Excursions.” The spine of the song is a slow galloping bassline, a jazz sample from Art Blakey and the Jazz Messenger’s “A Chant for Bu.” I played that song the most during my brief flirtation with undertaking jazz music. It seemed an entire world away from anything on the first Tribe album, 1990’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, which was a vital introduction to the group’s ethos but didn’t resonate as thoroughly in Columbus, Ohio, in the summer months after it came out. That album had a jazzlike pace and feel to it, but The Low End Theory was the one that absorbed itself in the music, committing itself to almost being a jazz album.

This is the thing about history and people who come from a people who have had it taken from them. They know if they don’t protect what they can, there will be nothing to pass on to their children.

“Excursions” is the first rap song I knew that could sound good in almost any situation: in headphones, in the background on any night with a thick and heavy moon hanging above your head, in a car with the windows rolled down on a hot day. The relationship with bass in rap music, to that point, had been more computerized than instrumental. As an introduction to the shape of rap to come, here was A Tribe Called Quest, on their sophomore album, repurposing a bass guitar that was once played with someone’s hands dancing across the strings.

In the beginning, both after and before a new series of beginnings, there was a rap group from Queens composed of Q-Tip, the Abstract, with his nasally and introspective flow—a world builder with a deft touch and endless vision; Phife Dawg, Five-Foot Assassin, with his penchant for wordplay and punch lines; Ali Shaheed Muhammad; and Jarobi White, the brains and the backbone of the group.

What made A Tribe Called Quest special is that if one looks closely enough, it is possible to believe that they were sent here directly by some wild-dreaming ancestors, straight from another era. They felt like old souls, even when they were young. When I put my trumpet into its case for the last time, and tucked it into a closet somewhere, I played The Low End Theory for months on end, wondering if I’d ever stop. This was the jazz I had been looking for: an album that blended horns and funk the same way Bolden blended ragtime and blues and was seamless in its execution. The Low End Theory sampled Dolphy, Sly Stone, Weather Report, Julian Cannonball Adderley, and Jimi Hendrix, among others. The Tribe was one of the first groups to repurpose a long line of sound that our parents, and perhaps their parents, were in love with. There is a type of mercy in this honoring: a long reach backward toward something magical, in hopes that an unspeakable distance, perhaps between a parent and a child, can slowly become closer.

I loved A Tribe Called Quest because I wore hand-me-down jeans to school, my clothes were sometimes too big, and I didn’t make eye contact when I spoke, so I was decidedly weird. They, too, were walking a thin line of weirdness: just weird enough to stand out from their peers, but not so weird that it seemed to be contrived. The jazz, in some ways, made them cool. They wore baggy sweatshirts in music videos with all of their friends. Early on, particularly for their first two albums, it didn’t seem like they were angling for anything other than their own moment: a chance to recall some of the musical archives that they once held close, with very little interest in a relationship to the mainstream. Perhaps, they knew that the closer they carried their unique relationship with that sound to the light, the more chance it had to be taken away.

What made A Tribe Called Quest special is that if one looks closely enough, it is possible to believe that they were sent here directly by some wild-dreaming ancestors, straight from another era.

Tucked into the middle of The Low End Theory is the second single, “Jazz (We’ve Got).” I remember the music video, seeping from the television late on a Saturday night during Yo! MTV Raps. Everyone talks about the end of the video, when the music video and song transition to “Buggin’ Out” and the enduring image of Phife Dawg and Q-Tip with miniature white cups over their eyes, giving off the odd impression of cartoonish and large bulging discs in the place of their normal-sized eyes. But the first part of the video, the bulk of it, is the most enduring. The group walks around New York City in a haze of black and white, rapping in simplistic fashion about the nuances of jazz music. It is an easy relic of a time past when watched now, and it was easy to dismiss in the moment. When discussing the single on the school bus, the older kids would dismissively wave their hands and say things like “I’m not listening to this shit! This the kinda shit old people like!”

And perhaps that is true. A Tribe Called Quest made rap music for our parents and theirs but left the door open wide enough for anyone to sneak through. Anyone with rhythm or anyone who knew how to find it before the bass high-stepped itself across a dance floor. Q-Tip, in the first verse of “Jazz,” sums it up evenly: “I don’t really mind if it’s over your head / ’Cause the job of resurrectors is to wake up the dead.”

So this is the story of A Tribe Called Quest, proficient in many arts but none greater than the art of resurrections—a group that faced the past until the present became too enticing for them to ignore. Of how I found myself beautiful enough for jazz music, but only in their image and nowhere else. Of how, in the Midwest, their songs first did not play out of passing cars but then played everywhere. Of how you can be both uncool and desirable all at once. Here, a story begins even before jazz. Like all black stories in America, it begins first with what a people did to amend their loss in light of what they no longer had at their disposal. With an open palm against a chest, or a closed fist against a washboard, or a voice, echoing into a vast and oppressive sky, or an album teeming with homages—here is the story of how, even without our drums, we still find a way to speak to each other across any distance placed between us.

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Excerpted from Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest, by Hanif Abdurraqib. Copyright © 2019 by Hanif Abdurraquib. Reprinted by permission of Abdurraqib.

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His essays and music criticsm have appeared in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, and his previous books are They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us and The Crown Ain’t Worth Much. His next book, They Don’t Dance No’ Mo’, is due out in 2020 by Random House.

Longreads Editor: Aaron Gilbreath

For BuzzFeed Reader, poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib considers how holding on to the observance of Ramadan, despite an adulthood spent veering from other aspects of his faith, has been a grounding force in a busy, thoroughly modern life.

I don’t know why Ramadan is the act of faith which has endured for me. I hardly refer to myself as a practicing Muslim these days, but I am still very invested in the rigor of Ramadan. And I suppose that might be it — the rigor is the act I still chase after. A part of this is routine — even when I stopped praying in my early twenties, I found myself still adhering to the commemoration of the holy month. But a part of it, I imagine, is like the home-run hitter who comes to the plate with the bases loaded and his team down by four, swinging for the fences and trying to get it all back at once.

I know the ways in which I fail in the face of my beliefs, and yet I wish to consider myself forgiven once each year, when I wake up early to pray and have a small meal with the sun breaking over the horizon. When I abstain from food and drink and still take a long run. I suppose it has never stopped being a performance, but when I engage in Ramadan now, I feel closer to my faith than I did before. I am performing it for no one but myself, in most instances. I am often traveling, or secluded during the month. My non-Muslim friends and peers rarely know I’m fasting, or often forget. To go about it in solitude is my preferred mode now, when nothing else matters but the monthlong journey back to some emotional center I’ve thought myself to be lacking. When the month ends, I don’t return to a dedicated spiritual practice, and my life resumes as it normally does all other 11 months of the year. But for as many days as it takes the crescent moon to unsheathe itself, I remember all of the old prayers I skipped. I remind myself how to talk to a holy entity. I don’t eat, sure, but the not eating has become the easy part, particularly as I’ve aged. To find the humility to imagine yourself as small in the face of something larger than you is the hard part, and for me, that has little to do with not eating, and more to do with the knowing that you could eat, at any time. That you have the ability and privilege to fill yourself, and you still choose not to. I do this in the name of a faith that I am uncertain of, and haven’t always felt at home in, and that makes the act both more complicated and more fulfilling.

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