front cover of Everyday Apocalypse
Everyday Apocalypse
Art, Empire, and the End of the World
David Dark
Vanderbilt University Press, 2025
Everyday Apocalypse recovers the root meaning of the term apocalypse (revelation) to use the concept as a lens through which art and other acts of creative nonviolence that often go unseen may be brought into focus. Interweaving an examination of popular culture with ancient insight and contemporary political awareness, Dark uses the concept of the apocalyptic to celebrate epiphanies about the world we live in and the meaning of human experience within it. Since its original publication in 2002, the book has become a deeply influential text among two generations of intellectual evangelical Christians who find themselves at odds with their families and communities over issues of politics and culture, particularly in the South.

This revised edition of the book includes a foreword by Hanif Abdurraqib, an extensive afterword, updates in light of the passage of time since its publication, and new insights from the author, whose outspokenness has placed him outside of circles in which he was once supported and celebrated.
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front cover of Go Ahead in the Rain
Go Ahead in the Rain
Notes to A Tribe Called Quest
By Hanif Abdurraqib
University of Texas Press, 2019

A New York Times Best Seller
2019 National Book Award Longlist, Nonfiction
2019 Kirkus Book Prize Finalist, Nonfiction
A February IndieNext Pick
Named A Most Anticipated Book of 2019 by Buzzfeed, Nylon, The A. V. Club, CBC Books, and The Rumpus, and a Winter's Most Anticipated Book by Vanity Fair and The Week
Starred Reviews: Kirkus and Booklist
"Warm, immediate and intensely personal."—New York Times

How does one pay homage to A Tribe Called Quest? The seminal rap group brought jazz into the genre, resurrecting timeless rhythms to create masterpieces such as The Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders. Seventeen years after their last album, they resurrected themselves with an intense, socially conscious record, We Got It from Here . . . Thank You 4 Your Service, which arrived when fans needed it most, in the aftermath of the 2016 election. Poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib digs into the group’s history and draws from his own experience to reflect on how its distinctive sound resonated among fans like himself. The result is as ambitious and genre-bending as the rap group itself.

Abdurraqib traces the Tribe's creative career, from their early days as part of the Afrocentric rap collective known as the Native Tongues, through their first three classic albums, to their eventual breakup and long hiatus. Their work is placed in the context of the broader rap landscape of the 1990s, one upended by sampling laws that forced a reinvention in production methods, the East Coast–West Coast rivalry that threatened to destroy the genre, and some record labels’ shift from focusing on groups to individual MCs. Throughout the narrative Abdurraqib connects the music and cultural history to their street-level impact. Whether he’s remembering The Source magazine cover announcing the Tribe’s 1998 breakup or writing personal letters to the group after bandmate Phife Dawg’s death, Abdurraqib seeks the deeper truths of A Tribe Called Quest; truths that—like the low end, the bass—are not simply heard in the head, but felt in the chest.

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