Well Marianne, it’s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine. And you know that I’ve always loved you for your beauty and your wisdom, but I don’t need to say anything more about that because you know all about that. But now, I just want to wish you a very good journey. Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you down the road.
Two days later, Marianne would be dead, dying in her sleep. But not before she was read Cohen’s letter out loud, and not before she could laugh and lift a hand when the part was read about how close he was behind her.
And, of course, he was. Like Marianne, Cohen would go in the dark calm of sleep. I know not what the final moments before death are like, but I hardly imagine they are always worth being awake for. Particularly if you’ve lived as long a life as Cohen, as Marianne. They both went calmly, after some ill had befallen them. If there is no way to make living forever appealing, let me say that I hope to live a full life loudly, and then slink off into death quietly, perhaps holding the also-sleeping hand of someone I have loved for so long that their emotional architecture has grown into mine.
I thought about Marianne first when I heard the news of Cohen. Specifically, I thought about what it is like to be tethered to someone or something for so long that their exit rolls out the red carpet for your own. It’s like if you love someone or something or someplace for long enough, they or it become embedded in your heart. And so their death becomes a small death of your own. Leonard Cohen loved a person enough to grow old as she grew old, and then loved her enough to want to follow her to what might be a better place.
I’d seen this happen enough—like with June Carter Cash and Johnny Cash—that I spent the months after Phife died wondering who loved him enough to go with him. If it would be Q-Tip, who hitched his star to Phife’s for so long that surely his passing left an immeasurable void. If it would be one of the other members of Tribe, or perhaps Phife’s mother, who spent a lifetime writing poems as gentle and generous as Cohen’s once were. But death didn’t echo into anyone else’s chamber, perhaps because everyone was still too young. Everyone had hearts still strong enough to survive whatever years came next. Perhaps because they all still had work to do, and Leonard Cohen had done his already. Leonard Cohen went to sleep on November 7, 2016, and never woke up to the darkness he was asking for.
I watched the country turn red on a television screen while sitting on a couch, and I imagine the historians years from now will try to convince the world that everyone knew this was coming. The US presidential election cycle always feels long, but this one—most prominently featuring Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton—felt exceptionally draining. It didn’t help that the year itself was mired in seemingly endless tragedies, particularly a summer that opened with a terrorist attack at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, which killed forty-nine people and wounded over fifty others. In July, on back-to-back days, police officers murdered two unarmed black men: Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. Philando Castile was murdered while reaching for a permit to show that he was allowed to carry the weapon he informed an officer that he had in his car. The officer shot Castile in the torso several times. His girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, live-streamed his death on Facebook. It was a jarring scene, Castile bleeding to death in his car’s driver’s seat while Reynolds asked the officer why he shot Castile in the first place. In all of the videos of black people dying that had begun to more prominently circle the internet, none of them had ever been broadcasted in real time. It is one thing to watch the life slip away from someone as they age, expecting them to go. But to watch death snatch a person while scrolling through a news feed littered with pictures of dogs or posts about vacation plans seemed too surreal. It felt as if the portrait of death could arrive at any time and turn your face to it right when you’d forgotten it.
Castile’s case got more attention, in part because of the unique nature of the filming and the general idea that his killing seemed very blatantly unjust—though the police officer, Jeronimo Yanez, was acquitted in June of 2017. I found myself more fascinated by Alton Sterling, who sold CDs. Sterling was what most neighborhoods would call “the CD Man,” and any neighborhood I spent my youth and adolescence in had one. Every high school in the Columbus Public Schools system had one. When I worked at the mall in my late teens and early twenties at a shoe store called Underground Station, the CD Man was named Tony and he’d come in every Thursday, because he knew that’s when the direct deposit hit for everyone in the mall. The CD Man sometimes has DVDs and sometimes has electronics and sometimes has free advice. The CDs and DVDs aren’t like the ones you can buy in stores—they’re burned copies, sometimes with cheaply printed-out album art on the cover. But for that, you get a deal: sometimes one CD is $7, but you could get two for $10, or three for $15. It was a blessing for those of us who were young and trying to hold on to what money we had, working jobs selling shoes or coffee or books in a mall for $8 an hour.
Tony took requests, which was all I ever hit him for. I had my own CD-burning software at home, but it was often a hassle to get old discs from the library and burn them. I once requested that Tony bring me all of A Tribe Called Quest’s discography, because, at that point, I still only had them on cassette and this was the early 2000s, when cassettes were relics, and CDs weren’t far behind but still had currency in my car, with its custom-installed CD player that cost more than the car itself. He returned the next week with every Tribe album, in chronological order, with printed-out album art for each one and a handwritten tracklist on the back. He charged me $20 for the whole lot.
After I left my job at the mall, I’d see Tony from time to time on the block, selling CDs out of a plastic bag. We’d always say what’s up, and I’d ask him how business was going, and he’d tell me “slow, but I’m doing all right.” Until I stopped seeing him altogether around 2007 or so. I later heard that he’d gotten busted selling crack outside of where the old mall used to be. He’d gotten linked up with someone from out of town and was pushing all of their work for them. He got sentenced to ten years, I was told. CDs became less of a needed entity, and hustlers adapt to their environment.
Alton Sterling, though, just had CDs and DVDs. He sold them outside of the Triple S Food Mart. He was a neighborhood fixture, sitting outside the market with a table from the afternoon until the early morning, playing music and selling CDs and DVDs to people passing by. He kept his business going by being tuned in to the community and its needs, despite the fact that CDs, by 2016, were not the preferred medium for music listening, and DVD players were all but a thing of the past, relegated to the graveyard by streaming services. If someone wanted classical music or a DVD of a film from the 1960s, Sterling would track it down, sometimes within twenty-four hours. The neighborhood he sold in was dangerous, and worried his loved ones, in whose name he hustled. What people might not understand is that there is no mercy like the mercy that comes with being beloved in a violent place. If you are vital to the fabric of even the most violent place, that place will keep you alive for as long as it can, and Sterling was vital to the Triple S Food Mart and the people around it.
But he still carried a gun, because stories began floating around about other CD vendors being robbed in the area. And so when police were called to the Triple S Food Mart in response to a man threatening someone with a firearm, there was Alton Sterling.
Sure, after Sterling’s death, the store owner specified that it wasn’t Sterling who drove him to call the police. But when they arrived, he was there. Alton Sterling was large, both hard to miss and hard to control. I think often of how someone large and black is seen as a vessel for love or a vessel for fear, depending on who is doing the looking. When Sterling was tased and wrestled to the ground by police, his gun fell out of his waistband.
I don’t need to tell you how many b
ullets followed, or that the officers eventually walked free, or that the Triple S market no longer has a CD Man, or that Alton Sterling didn’t get to go home to the people who worried that a neighborhood would kill him instead of a country. Whenever there is a black person murdered at the hands of police and then also a video of it, there is a lot to process: anger, fear, resentment, anxiety. But with Sterling, I was also processing what happens when music is ripped from a community in that fashion; when the person you rely on for a soundtrack bleeds out on a street at thirty-seven years old, long before age might take them in a more peaceful fashion.
The map of the United States turned red on my television on November 8, 2016, and Leonard Cohen was dead but no one knew that yet, and Alton Sterling and Philando Castile were dead, and more mass shootings were happening seemingly every week, and I guess this is what a country can get away with when people consider themselves afraid. Donald Trump won the presidency. In coming hours and days and months, I will tell people that I knew it was going to happen, which is only half true. There is knowing, and then there is hoping against that knowing. Halfway through the election coverage—which I told myself I wasn’t going to watch in the first place—I decided, on a whim, to take a nap. Things were seemingly starting to break bad for Hillary Clinton, and I imagined that maybe if I fell asleep, I’d wake up in a better or newer country. When I did wake up, it was around two in the morning, and I stumbled into my living room to look at my phone, inundated with messages of anger, despair, and grief from friends, some of whom I hadn’t talked to in years. Most of them black, sending some generic but needed message of solidarity, drenched in a backdrop of fear. I didn’t turn on the television.
I stayed in bed the next morning. No one I knew had heard any of the Tribe Called Quest album that was promising to be released in just two days, on Friday, November 11. The group hadn’t released any singles ahead of the album, and outside of a press run after Phife’s death announcing the album, they had been pretty silent about it altogether. I called in favors, I asked even the most reliable sources I knew, and no one had heard the album. On Thursday, I had to drive to Philadelphia to prepare to read poems in a room of people. Thursday morning, I’d heard Leonard Cohen was dead. I didn’t know he’d been dead for days. I thought it was the election that did him in.
We Got It from Here . . . Thank You 4 Your Service was released a few moments before midnight on Thursday, November 10, 2016. In Philadelphia, everyone wanted to talk about politics. In the grocery stores, at the gas stations, in line at Popeyes. Pennsylvania went red, much to the dismay of Philly, a decidedly blue area. It is hard to describe the tone of the country now, looking back. All I remember is seeing some of the country triumphant and an entirely other half of the country dejected, wondering how they would live through it all. The calls for resistance and organizing came a few months later, but in the immediate aftermath, there was a haze over everything, one that I imagine will be difficult to explain to people who weren’t living in it. I casually asked folks on the street how they were and got long, honest answers.
I read poems that Thursday night in a small room packed to the walls. People were sitting on the floor and on top of the bar. The organizers of the reading told me that the crowd usually wasn’t as big as it was, but they imagined that people needed to hear poetry that night. Some, sad about Cohen; all, sad about our country’s new predicament, which was our country’s old predicament, or our country’s forever predicament. At the end of the night, unsure what else to do, I found a Leonard Cohen poem on my phone. One I liked and remembered well. The poem “Do Not Forget Old Friends” is short, a poem about bidding an inevitable farewell, and it maybe fit the mood, but maybe didn’t.
Do not forget old friends
you knew long before I met you
the times I know nothing about
being someone
who lives by himself
and only visits you on a raid.
“The Space Program” is the song that opens We Got It from Here, and it opens with a sample from the 1974 blaxploitation film Willie Dynamite.
I’mma deal with a bigger insult, man
The heat, the heat, the heat, the heat
It’s comin’ down hard
We’ve got to get our shit together
The scene is from Willie—pimp and title character—at a meeting where he is attempting to organize the other pimps against the police presence cracking down on them, rather than fighting among themselves for turf that was equally threatened by all of the same issues. But that’s not where the album starts. One might think the album starts with Q-Tip and Phife Dawg’s voices coming into harmony right after the sampled monologue, rapping “Gotta get it together / gotta get it together for sisters / for mothers and fathers and dead niggas,” but the album doesn’t start there, either.
At the opening of verse one. Q-Tip, his voice unraveled from his dead brother’s, raps:
Word to Phifer / Gonna bring it to the overlord . . . That’s when the album starts.
During my first year in college, a kid on my dorm floor kept a small tape recorder next to his bed. On it was a recording of his grandmother, simply talking. It was unspectacular to everyone but him, of course. College freshmen did things like this in the days before FaceTime or Skype, when you often had to share a phone with three other people in a single room, and privacy was rare. The reality, though, was that his grandmother was gone and this was all he had left. She had died the spring before, so he held on to her voice, speaking of the mundane. I think about this often, perhaps always. By that I mean that I am always thinking about how we keep our ghosts close to us—how we store them and pull them out of our closets when we most need their memories—how, if we’re lucky, we have a new echo to mix in with the old.
My favorite story about Q-Tip is the one where, in 1991, when A Tribe Called Quest were coming off of their stunning and critically acclaimed debut album, People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, an interviewer asked him if he was afraid of a sophomore jinx. Q-Tip scoffed, “‘Sophomore jinx’? What the fuck is that? I’m going to make The Low End Theory.” This is the best Q-Tip story, the one that has defined the most formative aspect of his sprawling vision: an eye toward the work, without ever glancing over his shoulder. Even if it is never explicitly spoken, most musical groups, across genres, are sold to us with a single genius in the center; everyone else in the group just adds to the canvas after the visionary has his or her turn at it. This person is also the group’s propeller, pushing them past whatever boundaries they thought they’d hit. The Beach Boys had Brian Wilson. TLC had Left Eye. A Tribe Called Quest has had Q-Tip. They’ve always had Q-Tip, even when it seemed impossible for him to keep going.
It’s the Saturday night after the album’s release, and on the television, Q-Tip’s shoulders look as heavy as I’ve ever seen them. Over his left shoulder on the Saturday Night Live stage is the face of Phife Dawg, Malik, his dearly departed brother, cocreator, sometimes rival. He is at the tail end of “The Space Program,” shouting into his microphone: “Let’s make something happen, let’s make something happen, let’s make something happen!” When the song finally winds down, Q-Tip turns to walk off the stage and is embraced by Busta Rhymes—the kind of hug that someone gives to another person they have walked through battle with. Jarobi joins the hug, and then Consequence, while Phife looks down on them, both literally and in any spiritual way that one could hope for.
There they are, after a hellish week, the almighty Tribe Called Quest, not through with us yet. Q-Tip’s shoulders fall and his left arm, even in the embrace, goes slack, like it is anticipating having to hold someone else.
The fascinating thing about We Got It from Here . . . Thank You 4 Your Service, is how it sat, sonically, within the 2016 hip-hop landscape. Sure, perhaps the answer is that A Tribe Called Quest were always ahead of their time, making music that sounded futuristic yet still touchable. But even considering that, it was stunning to hear how
much of the album felt like a slightly updated version of the same brilliant sound that A Tribe Called Quest crafted in the 1990s—a fresh download of everything, but newer and cleaner. They didn’t sound bitter about the genre, or jaded about its evolution. They are architects, after all—builders who don’t bow to the land but know how to make the land bow to them. It was still percussion- and jazz-leaning intricacies. It was still the occasional surprising guitar or horn, coming out of nowhere to glue a song together. And, yes, it was still Q-Tip’s breathless, run-on sentence flow, the words bleeding into each other until the language itself becomes an instrument. And, yes, there was Phife here, too. Maybe it’s just how much I needed them to still be young, but I don’t think anyone sounded older. Phife, still on his toes, shit-talking and praising in the same breath: “You clowns be bum sauce / Speak my name, it’s curtains / Hamdulillah, my crew’s back to workin’,” and you can tell he means it.
The verses of the dead are a funny thing. I want, more than anything, to put a seashell to my ear and hear not the ocean but the voices of everyone I once loved who are now gone. Listening to Phife’s brilliance on this album was both stunning and heartbreaking in that way—you press stop on a voice and the voice is truly stopped, but sometimes it’s not. Also, because of his minimal solo output over the years, and because history sometimes paints him only as Q-Tip’s sideman, it was easy to forget the things Phife did so well in his prime. He’s still as punchy and clever as he always was, delightfully tongue-in-cheek (“Fourth grade reading level but he knows how to rap” on “Whateva Will Be”) and still drops the occasional up-to-date sports reference (“Status, Chris Paul and John Wall in the league” on “Dis Generation”). It’s a late reminder of what drew so many of us to Phife in the first place. A reminder that is more potent now, of course, but one that echoes long after the music ends.
It’s impossible to speak of this album without also speaking of the time it arrived in. The second song, “We the People . . .” is powered by its mocking, scathing hook: “All you Black folks, you must go / All you Mexicans, you must go / And all you poor folks, you must go / Muslims and gays / Boy, we hate your ways / So all you bad folks, you must go . . .” It’s the voice of America turned in on itself, the voice that many of us pretended was at a distance until it was a consistent and low drone, until it had begun activating the most violent among us, from the highest office in the country. It’s jarring, to hear a sentiment made that plain in a week when the country vomited on its own shirt and then looked around and asked who made the mess. It says what we’ve known all along, even as people now wring their hands, eager for the “new” art that marginalized people will create: Black folks have been creating with their backs against the wall for years, telling the future, speaking what is coming to the masses that aren’t eager to hear it until what’s coming actually arrives, looming over them.
Go Ahead in the Rain Page 15