They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

  Additional praise for

  Hanif Abdurraqib

  “There are at least seventeen reasons why Hanif Abdurraqib is one of the most prolific cultural critics in the nation. Reading his latest book of essays reminded of reason #4. No writer alive writes first and last sentences like Hanif. When I initially read Hanif I didn’t realize how much his blistering first and last sentences were really inflected by the middles of his pieces. Middles. In this collection, like all his writing, Hanif guides us to the middle of the text, the music, the town, the culture(s), the nation. Once there, we see and hear details and notes we’ve never experienced. Neither bombastic, nor minimalist, the essays in this collection weave in and out of the margins, doing what only the greatest essays do: they become soulful, intellectual music I long to pause, rewind, play. Pause. Rewind. Play. Over and over again.”

  —Kiese Laymon

  “Music belongs to those who create it right up until the moment it doesn’t. When a song is released, it belongs to everyone at once and there are a lot of writers who get intent right. There are a lot of people who hear an artist screaming into the canyon and correctly diagnose what they were trying to get at, but it takes someone special to hear the echoes. It takes someone special to hear the life a song takes on beyond intent, the way that it reacts with people, not the thing it meant but the things it’ll come to mean to different people from different walks of life, all who will glean something unique, something personal but always something equally valuable from it. Abdurraqib has that gift and in this collection, he shows it off in a way that shines a light on just how much music belongs to everyone.”

  —Dan Campbell, Lead Singer of The Wonder Years and Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties

  HANIF ABDURRAQIB

  They Can’t Kill Us

  Until They Kill Us

  Essays

  CONTENTS

  I.

  Chance The Rapper’s Golden Year

  A Night In Bruce Springsteen’s America

  Carly Rae Jepsen Loves You Back

  The Night Prince Walked On Water

  ScHoolboy Q Wants White People To Say The Word

  The Weeknd And The Future Of Loveless Sex

  II.

  I Wasn’t Brought Here, I Was Born: Surviving Punk Rock Long Enough To Find Afropunk

  Under Half-Lit Fluorescents: The Wonder Years And The Great Suburban Narrative

  All Our Friends Are Famous

  The Return Of The Loneliest Boys In Town

  Brief Notes On Staying // No One Is Making Their Best Work When They Want To Die Searching For A New Kind Of Optimism

  Death Becomes You: My Chemical Romance And Ten

  Years Of The Black Parade

  Defiance, Ohio Is The Name Of A Band

  III.

  Fall Out Boy Forever

  IV.

  Ric Flair, Best Rapper Alive

  It Rained In Ohio On The Night Allen Iverson Hit Michael Jordan With A Crossover

  There Is The Picture Of Michael Jackson Kissing Whitney Houston On The Cheek

  Black Life On Film

  Tell ’Em All To Come And Get Me

  Burning That Which Will Not Save You: Wipe Me Down And The Ballad Of Baton Rouge

  Rumours And The Currency Of Heartbreak

  V.

  February 26, 2012

  On Kindness

  In The Summer Of 1997, Everyone Took To The Streets In Shiny Suits

  Nina Simone Was Very Black

  Blood Summer, In Three Parts.

  August 9, 2014

  Fear In Two Winters

  On Paris

  My First Police Stop

  Serena Williams And The Policing Of Imagined Arrogance

  They Will Speak Loudest of You After You’ve Gone

  Johnny Cash Never Shot A Man In Reno. Or, The Migos: Nice Kids From The Suburbs

  The Obama White House, A Brief Home For Rappers

  The White Rapper Joke

  On Future And Working Through What Hurts

  November 22, 2014

  Surviving On Small Joys

  VI.

  I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful, and that which is love. Therefore, since I have known all of these things, I have found them to be reason enough and I wish to live. Moreover, because this is so, I wish others to live for generations and generations and generations and generations.

  Lorraine Hansberry

  I cannot die because this is my universe

  Lil Uzi Vert

  Foreword

  I was probably a little over-eager when I asked Hanif Abdurraqib to form a Death Cab for Cutie cover band with me. “It could be called Movie Script Ending,” I said. Ever generous, his reply skirted the need for a yes or a no. “You strike me as someone who could front a band,” he said.

  Probably a little much. After all, we had only met in person once. We were mostly internet friends, part of the interwoven network of old buddies and mutual Twitter followers and quiet rivals that comprises a loose community of black poets of our generation. We had just, a little over a month prior, connected in person for the first time at a Memorial Day barbecue, where he told me quietly that he had an idea for an essay about how “Trap Queen” was an important love song and I told him that that sounded awfully good.

  So maybe I was overzealous with the cover band thing. But I was just so excited to feel a little less alone in the world, so enthused by his Facebook posts about the music I had loved so fiercely during my teen and college years, music that seemed to speak to the very center of my heart while it also made me feel impossibly lonely in rock venues and divey bars packed to the gills with white people. This is what I told him via voice text as I careened down the interstate one night, alone, euphoric to the point of delusion, listening to songs that made me feel full and feeling like he might understand that in a way others might not. I was sad, and I desired a chance to pivot my sadness into something like dancing, something like making people sing along. “This, too, is a response to grief,” he tells us. “Covering yourself in the spoils of your survival.”

  Because, you see, Hanif Abdurraqib is something between an empath and an illusionist. Among the thousands who have read his work, I am confident that I am not alone when I say that Hanif lured me in with a magic trick—by apparently knowing the textures of my relationship to songs and athletes and places that I love. He knows our secrets. He has an uncanny ability to write about music and the world around it as though he was sitting there on the couch with you in your grandma’s basement, listening to her old vinyl, or he was in that car with you and your high school friend who would later become your boyfriend, singing until you were hoarse, or he was on the bus with you when you sat in the back with your headphones on trying to look a lot harder and meaner than you really were. He seems to know all about that summer, that breakup, that mix she made you that you lost when someone broke into your car later that year.

  It is an album of return and escape and return and escape again. It feels, in tone and tension, like coming home for a summer after your first year of college, having tasted another existence and wanting more, but instead sleeping in your childhood room. Home is where the heart begins, but not where the heart stays. The heart scatters across states, and has nothing left after what home takes from it.

  —

  At moments in the show, I felt like I was exiting my current body and watching myself from through my younger eyes, wondering if this is what it was always going to come to. Returning to the balm for an old wound, ashamed that I once decided to wear it.

  —

  Kendrick Lamar says “God got Us” and the Us c
rawls out of the speaker and wraps its arms around the black people in the room. The way a good preacher might say “We” in a black church and the congregation hums. The way I say “My people” and My People know who they are even if we’ve never met, or even if we’ve never spoken, or even if all we have is the shared lineage of coming from a people who came from a people who came from a people who didn’t intend to come here but built the here once they arrived.

  But then, like any good magician, he pivots. Sure, he found the card you chose and that’s impressive, but then you realize he’s turned the whole deck into the queen of hearts and that’s so much more remarkable. And all of a sudden you’re drawn into an irresistible account of some artist whose work you never cared about, maybe someone whose work you even hated or always thought was kinda stupid, or just ignored altogether, and you realize how foolish you’ve been. A while ago we showed up for lunch with a group of friends, and our fellow poet Jose Olivarez invited his brother to join us. Pedro showed up proudly sporting a Carly Rae Jepson shirt paired with a chain and crisp Nikes, and explained that Hanif had been the one to put him on. Indeed, his passion for CRJ is legion, and I confess that for a while I thought it was an ornate joke (because People Like Me, People Like Us, don’t listen to Carly Rae Jepson) until I actually put on Emotion and when it was over, found myself putting it on again, and hitting repeat.

  We’ve run out of ways to weaponize sadness, and so it becomes an actual weapon. A buffet of sad and bitter songs rains down from the pop charts for years, keeping us tethered to whatever sadness we could dress ourselves in when nothing else fit. Jepsen is trying to unlock the hard door, the one with all of the other feelings behind it.

  This is what he does. His work asks not, as much criticism does, what is happening here, but rather, what does this work mean? What is it doing in the world?

  This is a book about life and death—in particular, though not exclusively, about black life, and black death. In our era, the election of the first black president this gruesome nation had ever seen, and the unavoidable broadcasts of black people murdered have twisted into a sick double helix such that they all decided to pay attention to us again. That means that we have been living and reading and writing in an era when blackness and the spectacle of our irreconcilable, uncomfortable, formative presence in this country, and all the implications of that spectacle, is in full view in a way that is by no means unprecedented but sure is awfully loud. There is lots to say and lots of people are saying it, some distinctly and some less so. Amidst it all, it can be hard for those of us who are having our second coming of age within the din of a violent country to determine where our voices fit. In that context, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us—in its very title honoring death and life regarding each other in inward-facing mirrors, a memorial of a memorial of our brother slain—manages against all odds to be really something special. Consider this moment, when Hanif retells the tale of Jordan and Iverson in a way that is really the tale of the constraints placed on the black body, on who is allowed to move freely and who is allowed to mourn, and how—narrated, in the end, through a boy attempting an Iversonian crossover alone on a wet court.

  You will believe that I once wore bagg y jeans that dragged the ground until the bottoms of them split into small white flags of surrender and you will also believe that I dreamed of having enough money to buy my way into the kind of infamy that came with surviving any kind of proximity to poverty. You will believe, then, that I remember all of this by the way the ball felt in my hands as I stood on the court alone the next day, pulling the wet ball from one hand to the next and feeling the water spin off of it. You will believe that I only imagined the defender I was breezing past, and pushing my way to the foul line. And even as I missed shot after shot after shot, I still cheered. Alone in the wet aftermath of a night where I first saw the player I imagined myself becoming. A shot, finally finding the bottom of the net, and my hand, still extended, to an audience of no one.

  Freedom. And its inverse (as David Stern made us see when Iverson’s cornrows became a minor crime), constraint. Abdurraqib indicts the country doing the police work of this constraint—not through a direct admonition, but through the kind of quietly damning observation we Midwesterners so excel at.

  The daughter of a black man murdered on camera by police records an ad for a presidential candidate and the white people who support the candidate are so moved by her retelling of a life without her father. And I do imagine that it must be something, to be able to decide at what volume, tone, and tenor you will allow black people to enter your life, for praise or for scolding.

  In many of the essays in this book, the crowd—whether the crowd at a tiny punk club or the crowd gathered in protest at JFK airport—also becomes a character, an audience, an imagined chorus to the comedy or tragedy Abdurraqib is witnessing. Implicitly, he reminds us of the magic of live music and human interaction in an era when on-demand streaming means that many of us lack any physicality whatsoever in our listening lives. I think it was 2010 when I sold all my CDs to a store I’m pretty sure is closed on a street that is now unrecognizable to me. For a writer who came of age in small Midwestern punk, emo, and hardcore shows, bodies are paramount—the ambitious and the listless alike packed in a room, sweating on each other, the safety pin from someone’s ripped jeans come undone and stabbing you in the back of the shoulder, your bigger or taller friend keeping you from getting your head stomped in the pit. Bodies and the glory and inconvenience of bodies. Music, Abdurraqib reminds us, is something that is not only received but happens, takes place in a place where people are.

  Our parents’ generation of black folks are known to greet each other with the koan-like tautology everything is everything. “How you doin brother?” “Man, listen. Everything is everything.” “Everything is everything.” In They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, everything is quite literally everything. Race is music is love is America is death is rebirth is brotherhood is growing up is a mother is music is music is music is music. Everything is everything. Abdurraqib makes you realize that the music you listen to isn’t about People Like Us, because it turns out all of us are People Like Us. All of us are frightened and heartbroken and ecstatic and mourning and in love and driving fast down the interstate, and we are blessed enough to live in a time when there are plenty of artists adept to holding that mirror. Last month when I sat on the floor with my seven-year-old cousin, playing checkers, she started singing a Carly Rae Jepsen song to herself in an earnest voice I’d never heard before: I really really really really like you. I pulled the song up and we sang it together, and for the moment that was our highway.

  Hanif would probably laugh at this because I don’t think he counts himself as any sort of optimist, but this book makes me almost believe in things I thought I’d given up on. I might even dance again, daring to move my legs across this wasted land.

  —Eve L. Ewing

  They Can’t Kill Us

  Until They Kill Us

  I can’t afford love.

  The Weeknd

  I.

  When Marvin Gaye sang the National Anthem at the 1983 NBA All-Star Game, he knew he was going to die soon.

  If you are in Columbus, Ohio, on July 3rd of any year, you will likely drag yourself downtown with a blanket in the middle of the day, when the sun is still at its highest and most hungry. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a space at Huntington Park, where our beloved Triple-A baseball team, the Columbus Clippers, delivered back-to-back titles in 2010 and 2011. When night comes, you’ll fall back into someone’s arms, or be the arms that someone falls back into. And you’ll roll your eyes when “Born in the U.S.A.” plays while fireworks fly screaming into the sky, tucking all its darkness into their pockets.

  There are days when the places we’re from turn into every other place in America. I still go to watch fireworks, or I still go to watch the brief burst of brightness glow on the faces of black children, some of them have made it downtown, miles away
from the forgotten corners of the city they’ve been pushed to. Some of them smiling and pointing upwards, still too young to know of America’s hunt for their flesh. How it wears the blood of their ancestors on its teeth.

  Change The Rapper’s Golden Year

  This, more than anything, is about everything and everyone that didn’t get swallowed by the vicious and yawning maw of 2016, and all that it consumed upon its violent rattling which echoed into the year after it and will surely echo into the year after that one. This, more than anything, is about how there is sometimes only one single clear and clean surface on which to dance, and sometimes it only fits you and no one else. This is about hope, sure, but not in the way that it is often packaged as an antithesis to that which is burning. It was an endless year that was sometimes hot and sometimes unbearable, and I sometimes threw open my windows and let music flood into the streets and I sometimes watched people glance up with a knowing smile, the way we do when a sermon calls us home, or calls us back to something better or away from somewhere worse.

  I haven’t been to church in years but I am of a people who know how to preach. Chance The Rapper has probably been to church more recently than I have, or at least he understands the gospel better than I ever will. By which I mean the gospel is, in many ways, whatever gets people into the door to receive whatever blessings you have to offer. Everyone I knew needed blessings in 2016. The world, it seemed, was reaching yet another breaking point in a long line of breaking points. An endless election barreled forward, a xenophobic bigot leading the charge. Deadly attacks seemed to be a monthly occurrence, anchored by the Pulse nightclub massacre—the deadliest attack in our country’s history. There were funerals I missed, and funerals I didn’t. People I loved walked out of doors they didn’t walk back through. The summer was cloaked in blood and fear, with more in the fall. If you believe, as I do, that a blessing is a brief breath to take in that doesn’t taste of whatever is holding you under; say I Speak To God In Public and mean more than just in his house, or mean more than just next to people who also might speak to God in public, or say God and mean whatever has kept you alive when so many other things have failed to.