On and in Hanif Abdurraqib's Music Writing

An excerpt from poet and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib's forthcoming book, Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest (University of Texas Press, 2019), is up at Vulture. The first chronicle of the band, Go Ahead is also a "love letter." An excerpt of the excerpt, on locking a "listener into a commitment" with the cassette tape:

The value of the tape was also the crafting of a mixtape. I am from an era when we learned not to waste songs. If you are creating a cassette that you must listen to all the way through, and you are crafting it with your own hands and your own ideas, then it is on you not to waste sounds and to structure a tape with feeling. No skippable songs meant that I wouldn’t have to take my thick gloves off during the chill of a Midwest winter to hit fast-forward on a Walkman, hoping that I would stop a song just in time. No skippable songs meant that when the older, cooler kids on my bus ride to school asked what I was listening to in my headphones, armed with an onslaught of jokes if my shit wasn’t on point, I could hand my headphones over, give them a brief listen of something that would pass quality control, and keep myself safe from humiliation for another day.

Read more at Vulture. Abdurraqib's full collection of music journalism, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (Two Dollar Radio, 2017) was also reviewed this weekend at The Guardian. "There is a breathlessness to his writing, as if each essay exists in one rush, a thought that builds and builds before bursting with compassion," writes Nikesh Shukla.