I knew I would miss him when he was gone. I always did. But I thank you, particularly, for still living and writing. For the way you let the syllables dance around each other in the air when you read your poems. The way you let words hang above an audience and linger way up with the dimming lights in a room, until they fade and fade, and eventually fall away for good, a fresh memory.
TIP,
I once closed my fist and swung it across my older brother’s cheek. It was something my sister, older than both of us, demanded I do. I had to be about eleven, or maybe twelve. I don’t think I knew what I was doing. It is one thing to witness violence but another entirely to understand it for yourself by the swelling of pain that comes when your hand collides with someone else’s bones. Despite being only about a year older than I was, my brother was bigger and undoubtedly stronger than I was. He wasn’t necessarily a bully so much as I was constantly an annoyance. And yet, I found myself often on the losing end of fights. The logic, my sister said, was to assert some type of power over the larger, more dominant sibling in the room. And so, during a game of cards, I crashed a closed fist into my brother’s cheek and then ran and hid in a closet until he calmed down.
This didn’t change our relationship in any great measure, but it did grant me a brief bit of thrill. I know that feeling, and the desire to chase it. When you are the little brother, even if you are only younger by a handful of months, or only little by way of stature, you do what you must not to be entirely overshadowed.
My brother is still living, so I do not yet regret the times I was less than good to him. I will, and I know I will, but there isn’t any road to that for me yet. It might happen over years. We’ll both go gray in our beards and begin to lose the things that marked us as young. I can prepare, in due time, my long list of apologies for those things I cannot carry with me after he’s gone. There will be a discussion of the weight to these things—the things we keep inside ourselves when we lose someone close to us with whom we used to share a knowledge and history.
Or it might happen suddenly, as it did for you. Someone there in the night and gone in the morning before all can be resolved. When just enough has been resolved to work as you did once before, as brothers do.
In the years when you and Phife were not speaking, I looked at the old Source magazine cover from time to time. I hung it on my walls—first in a bedroom and then in a dorm room, and then, briefly, on the wall of an ill-fated apartment. It was a reminder of a very specific kind of heartbreak. You all were like family to me. So much like my brother and me. You, the one who seemed infallible—skilled at all things. Phife, the exciting but sometimes under-the-radar sidekick.
What I always loved about you both was the fact that you needed each other, regardless of whatever else came along. Yes, I did love the solo albums, Tip. There was no question they were going to be great. Your brand as a musician is that of someone who is too talented and too curious to be anything other than great when left to your own devices. And I know you were trying all things except to capture the magic of Tribe, but I will admit that I found a spark missing. You and Phife needed each other in the same way that Mick and Keith did or Simon and Garfunkel did. It is one thing to make magic, and another to make miracles. The magic can be conjured by anyone skilled enough to pull off a prolonged trick. But a miracle is something that seems as though it will never be seen again, no matter how skilled the people making it are. Phife allowed you the possibility for miracles. And I know. I know it was hard: to keep him focused and on task; to drag him off the streets or the subways. I know that all of these things take a toll, begin to feel as if you are holding up an entire group on your own while wondering what your individual ambitions might get you.
I know a bit about resentment, for I have been both the fist swinging at the cheek of someone I resented and the stinging cheek that cradled a jealous fist. I don’t know if Phife wanted to be like you so much as he wanted space to be himself. And no matter what else your relationship yielded, I’m glad that you afforded him that space, even when it seemed as if you weren’t. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been, to both fight for yourself and fight for your brother, when your brother didn’t seem to be fighting for himself.
It isn’t like the Low End days, Tip. The police killed Rodney King on a grainy video then. The camera shook, and one might have to look closely to see the body twitching on the ground. From afar, it looked as if the black batons were crashing into a single black mass. Now, there is death on video everywhere. Clear shots of it. From body or dashboard cams, or from cell phone videos shot on sidewalks. We are perhaps at the true low end now: the place where sound only exists to rattle this freshly tiled killing floor. There are more than enough things that I can’t let go of these days—my fear, my rage, my sadness. I haven’t got as much room for guilt as I used to, despite how it haunts and wishes to crawl out of me at each opening of my mouth around anyone I have once not loved as I should have.
There’s a thing with siblings that so many people without them don’t understand. How you can punch each other until the skin pulled over your ribs begins to bruise, and how that violence is also done out of a type of love. When I watched you and Phife on the documentary, I noticed it all right away. All you ever wanted was for him to survive, for him to get right. But you know how it is. We’re all the youngest somewhere, in some room. We’re all going to be the quiet, forgotten one who does the largest thing possible to stand out. You said it yourself, moments after he was gone, when I logged onto Twitter, looking for a sign that this all might be a joke, one more prank played by Malik. But there was your tweet:
He left me with the gift of unconditional love and brotherhood that will NEVER be lost with me . . . Ever
May we love our brothers, Tip. May we love them after they are gone, sure. But may we love them even when they fill us with rage, or even when we don’t speak to them for years, or even when we close our fists and our eyes and swing in their direction with all we have.
MALIK,
I am mad on behalf of your leaving, largely because the Knicks never got it together for you. This is maybe not the time or place, as I am conversing with the you that is no longer here in the physical sense. But I wanted, more than anything, for the Knicks to provide you with some small relief before it was all said and done. The “it,” of course, is the “it” of your living, which came to an end before I expected. Before any of us did. Still, it was the run of empty years that most left me sad for you. The Melo years. In the photos of you late in your career, I remember you in the Knicks gear most: in the old NYK shirt on stage at Rock the Bells with Tip, or slouching in an interview with an oversized Oakley jersey. I wanted them to make it out of the first round of the playoffs at least. But maybe it all makes sense, doesn’t it? To root for what some might see as the lovable losers, stumbling over themselves on the way to near-misses and outright disasters. If one has no hopes at all, even the smallest bit of joy can be a relief.
It has been raining all day, and I am thinking about the water, Malik. I am thinking of the mixture of water and sugar, which is to say I am thinking about Kool-Aid. They will talk of what killed you and what has killed many black people before you as something simple. Sugar, a vice that one might consider easy to let go if a doctor says your life depends on letting it go. When you grew up in a family like mine—not the poorest family on the block but certainly not rich—Kool-Aid was a staple. The ingredients were accessible: all you needed was sugar and water. The actual drink was inexpensive in the time of my childhood. The small packs of powder made half a gallon of the drink, and only sold for a dime, ten for a dollar. In my house, when we went shopping every other Friday on payday, everyone got their own pick of Kool-Aid packets. My brother and I would get a handful each, him tropical punch and me black cherry. They were supposed to last us for the two weeks in between shopping trips, and often didn’t. The true test in my neighborhood, and in my household, was how sweet your Kool-Aid was. Unlike other drink
s that one might purchase premade and already packaged in a container, Kool-Aid was at the mercy of the preparer’s hands. Kool-Aid instructions call for one cup of sugar per packet, but specifies “more or less to taste.” A friend’s mother once joked about that specific instruction. She threw her head back and laughed in her kitchen and said that Kool-Aid put that there for black folks, while she blindly poured another scoop of sugar into the dark red water while she stirred.
I became attached to the taste, or the feeling, or being able to dictate my own sweetness with my own money. The summer Beats, Rhymes and Life came out, I biked long and hard through the streets of my neighborhood with headphones on and a CD player in my pocket, your verse in “The Hop” dancing off my tongue with the taste of dark red sugar water, the part where you rhyme “Word is bond I am the baddest / And all you honies out there, word is bond, you know my status.” Over winter break in 1993, I sat in the back of a car driven by my oldest brother, stomach weighed down with sugar from candy, while Midnight Marauders bled from the speakers, and I dipped back into my packet of Fun Dip, a candy that was literally colored sugar that was eaten with a makeshift spoon that was also pretty much sugar, while you rapped “My man Al B. Sure, he’s in effect mode / Used to have a crush on Dawn from En Vogue / It’s not like honey dip would wanna get with me” in “Oh My God.” When The Love Movement came out in the fall of 1998, I sat in headphones on the back of a school bus, eating one of the Little Debbie snacks that you could still get out of the school vending machine for just fifty cents while listening to “Busta’s Lament,” where you rapped “So what’s the deal Captain / if it’s time for some action / Watch me roll with hon, try to push her back.”
And on the day I read of your death, I had my hand in a bowl of candy that I had purchased a few days earlier from a shop in Mystic, Connecticut, where I went specifically for the candy, on the way to Providence, Rhode Island. I went because I knew they had the candy I loved, and I was driven to spend my own money to dictate my own sweetness once again. And when I saw the news of your dying, I was biting into a cherry sour and letting the sugar coat my teeth, and I was reaching for more, and they will say that you died because you loved sugar too much to stop letting it kill you, but some things we cling to because we come from people who clung to them.
And, Malik, I hope black children are still riding bikes with the taste of Kool-Aid dancing off their tongues. Today, on the day you are gone, I hope every bodega and every corner store gave away Kool-Aid by the cup. I hope kids went to stores with their parents’ money and walked out with pocketfuls of candy. I want candy thrown from the cliffs. I want candy to rattle off of my roof now instead of the water from the sky while your verses play. I want my people to take better care of themselves, but I wanted a day for us to revel in what you loved, if only for a moment. I read about how much soda you drank, how much fried and sweet food you popped even when the clock hung over your head, and I want better health for us all. But let us put our sugar down tomorrow. Let us return to our doctors and receive the bad news of our undoing some other time. Let us go to the gym, but not on this day. I wish people would have drowned the streets in sugar before dancing in them. I wish people would have put sugar on that which was already sweet. I wish every verse of yours I could remember mentioned honey or something else sweet. Today there is a sweetness on my tongue that feels as though it may never leave.
I do not wish you to be reduced to a cautionary tale in the moments after your death. I know it will happen. Already, there are people on the internet, reminding black men to get their health together and all of that. I understand. But to me, you were a titan first. A literary figure of the highest order, who drew a bridge between popular culture and lyrical wizardry with a type of belligerence and fearlessness. You, inventor of the smooth punch line, not like the ones tumbling clumsily out of pens and speakers now. You did punch-line rap the way it should have been done: less like a witty pun, more like a matter-of-fact statement; something you truly believed, not something you were using to score points. I always wanted to be the only one in the room to get the last line of your bars. It always felt like unlocking a puzzle.
I know The Love Movement was not easy. It is a belabored album, and it sounds every bit of it. But I love it more than I love anything else, Malik. I could hear you and Tip looking for exits in every track—the sound of a group that maybe made one album too many but still had some magic left. But I love it because of how brightly your star shined while trying to fight off the inevitable morning. On “His Name Is Mutty Ranks,” there you were. Alone, for two minutes, doing what you did.
“For God so loved the world he said Phife, ask your preacher / Love to toot my own Horne, similar to Lena.”
Those two minutes are how I will remember you, Malik, today and always. I wanted so much more for you after the Tribe’s split. I wanted you to be adored, appreciated beyond belief. I wanted you to release iconic solo albums, sell out shows, and make it to the top of the mountain again. Alone this time, so there could be no debate about your greatness.
In the days after you were buried, I heard that you and Tip had been working on an album. The Tribe had been planning a comeback for a year. You were going to surprise us all. But there you were, dying too soon, and shaking the surprise out early. Always making the group bend to your singular pace.
It seemed, in the gloom of an already-long year, that this is how fairy tales end. This is the way to make yourself endless, after already making yourself immortal. It is still spring, and the album won’t be here until fall. A whole world seems eager and excited to unfold in front of us between now and then. It seemed we’d get to hear your living voice one last time, before it was lost to nostalgia forever.
Malik, I am sorry that we did not gather roses for you when you could still clutch the petals in your hands and feel the softness of them stick with you for ages, the way so many of your verses stuck to our tongues with the sweetness we allowed ourselves sometimes, days after we first heard them. Malik, Phife Dawg, Five Foot Assassin, you towered over an era of incredible riches. You, creator of another narrative. Patron saint of the punch line. You, who got the party started and stuck around long enough to get the last laugh. Malik, we will remember you when a rapper tries to be clever and fails; when a crowd cheers at a half-hearted rhyme. We will suck our teeth at club DJs, and take the long way home. We will press play on anything that bears your name, and let you fill a room, or a car, or the space on an empty train. We will remember how you did it once with so much ease. On point. All the time, on point.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Common Ground
The fact that Leonard Cohen was dead didn’t help matters. He fell in his home on November 7, 2016, and then died in his sleep. No one knew that he was dead for three days. His family didn’t alert the world until the tenth, when the world had already shifted into a place that felt darker. Darkness is what Leonard Cohen asked of our preferences in the title of his final album, You Want It Darker, which was released mere weeks before his fall. It was the kind of album you make when you know you’re going to die. The song “Leaving the Table” opens with the lines “I’m leaving the table / I’m out of the game,” and to a close listener, they might say that is when they knew that “the game” was the Big Game, the one we’re all playing until we aren’t anymore.
Leonard Cohen recorded You Want It Darker in the living room of his home, because he could barely move anymore. After a rigorous tour schedule in the late 2000s and early 2010s, he started to suffer from spine fractures. There is some mercy, I imagine, in living a life long enough to know when death is coming for you. To be obsessed with mortality at age eighty-two reads a lot more romantically than it does in your late twenties, which is how old Cohen was when he met Marianne Ihlen in Greece, shortly after Ihlen had returned to her native Norway to find out that her husband had abandoned her. I take issue with the word “muse” when it is attached to a woman who is written about extensively by a man—as if she
serves no other purpose. Ihlen and Cohen built a small life together, at least as much of a life as one can from afar, through various infidelities and across oceans. When Cohen traded writing poems for recording songs, a photo of Marianne appeared on the back cover of his second album, Songs from a Room. In the photo, Marianne is sitting at a desk in a bedroom, fingers on a typewriter, wearing only a towel.
As his career as a singer-songwriter took off, Cohen’s relationship with Marianne started to dissolve. Cohen wrote songs about her: “Bird on the Wire,” “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye,” and “So Long, Marianne,” the latter a slow pour of heartbreak that stretches out long and dark. This is how someone becomes known only by what their love has inspired in the heart of someone else, I suppose. Cohen and Marianne stayed in touch, writing letters and visiting each other when possible.
In July of 2016, Cohen got an email from a close friend of Marianne’s informing him that Marianne wasn’t well. It was cancer, he was told. Marianne had been diagnosed earlier that month. When she and Cohen spoke then, she didn’t tell him that she was sick, near death. She was eighty-one then, and her relationship with Cohen had spanned over five decades. She only had a few days of life left, so Cohen stopped working on his album about death and mercy and wrote her back immediately. He wrote:
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