They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

  The day before I crossed into New Jersey to watch Bruce Springsteen play, I found myself in Ferguson, Missouri, standing over Michael Brown’s memorial plaque. There was no notable reason for this trip. I’m not sure what I wanted to feel, other than closer to a sadness and rage that had become a very real part of my life. I was in St. Louis, and I think I wanted to return to a place where a city was still fighting to pull itself back together, against the backdrop of suffocating injustice that still hangs above it. The air feels different in Ferguson, too. Unlike New Jersey on the night of Bruce Springsteen’s homecoming, the air in Ferguson still feels heavy, thick with grief. Yet it is still a town of people who take their joy where they can get it, living because they must.

  There is a part of me that has always understood The River to be about this. Staring down the life you have left and claiming it as your own, living it to the best of your ability before the clock runs out. In “Jackson Cage,” a man dreams of a life more fulfilling than the one he has with the woman he loves in a New Jersey town, but he settles. He gives himself over to the fact that what he has will do, until he has nothing else. This, too, is the promise that has always been sold in Bruce Springsteen’s music. The ability to make the most out of your life, because it’s the only life you have.

  The technician in me has always loved watching how deftly Bruce Springsteen commands the E Street Band, and this night in New Jersey was no different. During “Sherry Darling,” it takes a mere turn of his head and a slight nod to pull sax player Jake Clemons to the front of the stage for a solo. During “Two Hearts,” Bruce leaves the stage to walk among the crowd, and Stevie Van Zandt slides directly into the hole Bruce left onstage. Not a note was missed, even as Bruce crowd-surfed and danced with members of the audience.

  What has always fascinated me most about The River is the start of Side 2. The way “Hungry Heart” bleeds into “Out in the Street,” two of the most upbeat songs on the album, but the two that I have always found the saddest, both explicitly and implicitly. In one, a man, overcome by dissatisfaction with the perceived American Dream, leaves his wife and children, never to return. In the other, there is a celebration of freedom from what we are to believe is a soul-crushing job. During “Out in the Street,” while most of the audience danced and clapped along to the lyrics about going in to work at a job you don’t love on Monday and dreaming of stripping out of your work clothes on Friday, I thought, as I do every time I hear the song, about living the Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. The machinery of a mundane week that wears one down until it becomes normal. The sharpness of an alarm rupturing the silence of sleep. The bagged lunch and forced joy with co-workers who are not-quite-friends. How that all feels different on a Friday, at the edge of a weekend, when anything is possible. During the second chorus of the song, a woman behind me tapped my shoulder, smiled, and yelled, “Come on! You gotta want to dance to this!”

  Here is where I tell you that this was a sold-out show, and as I looked around the swelling arena when I arrived, the only other black people I saw were performing labor in some capacity. The fact that I noticed this, I’m sure, would potentially seem absurd to many of the other people attending the concert. As the band launched into a killer extended version of “Cadillac Ranch,” I looked over to the steps and saw a young black man who had been vending popcorn and candy. He was sitting on a step, covered in sweat, and rubbing his right ankle. A man, presumably attempting to get back to his seat, yelled at him to move.

  In Bruce Springsteen’s music, not just in The River, I think about the romanticization of work and how that is reflected in America. Rather, for whom work is romantic, and for whom work is a necessary and sometimes painful burden of survival. One that comes with the shame of time spent away from loved ones, and a country that insists you aren’t working hard enough. In New Jersey, Springsteen’s songs are the same anthemic introspective paintings of a singular America: men do labor that is often hard, loading crates or working on a dock, and there is often a promised reward at the end of it all. A loving woman always waiting to run away with you, a dance with your name on it, a son who will grow up and take pride in the beautiful, sanctifying joy of work.

  I do not know what side of work the employees in the Prudential Center came down on that night, or any night. I know that I understand being black in America, and I have understood being poor in America. What I know comes with both of those things, often together, is work that is always present, the promise of more to come. Even in my decade-plus of loving Bruce Springsteen’s music, I have always known and accepted that the idea of hard, beautiful, romantic work is a dream sold a lot easier by someone who currently knows where their next meal will come from.

  I have been thinking a lot about the question of who gets to revel in their present with an eye still on their future, and who gets discussed as though nothing about them could be promising. The River, stripped down to its base, is a romantic story about a guy who has nothing, trying to make his life and loves work in a world that doesn’t always give him the breaks he thinks he deserves. Hanging above Mike Brown’s memorial was a small paper sign. It read, in all capital letters: “THEY CAN’T KILL US UNTIL THEY KILL US.”

  It seemed odd, at first, to see this statement over the memorial of a person who had been murdered and long buried. I think the consideration, though, was that when you come from a people born of a true oral tradition, you live lives even after you are no longer living a life. Mike Brown was flawed, but young enough to be romanticized in the way Springsteen’s romantics bleed all throughout The River, where mistakes are large and beautiful, and pointing to some much more spectacular end.

  What I understand about The River now that I didn’t before I saw it in New Jersey is that this is an album about coming to terms with the fact that you are going to eventually die, written by someone who seemed to have an understanding of the fact that he was going to live for a long time. It is an album of a specific type of optimism—one not afforded to everyone who listens to it. It is an album of men and women and families and the grand idea of surviving to enjoy it all. It is often fearless and forward-looking in its talk of both love and loss. There’s a conflict between dreams and reality, of course, but the reality is still always one of survival.

  As the final saxophone solo in “Drive All Night” kissed every corner of the Prudential Center and hundreds of cell phone flashlights cut through the dark of the arena, I realized that I am now the age Bruce Springsteen was when The River was released in 1980. I once thought that I saw the same version of adulthood that The River speaks of. One with conflict and celebration, but always living. It is 2016, and not watching the videos of black people murdered doesn’t mean that black people aren’t still being murdered. I try not to think about death—my own, or that of anyone I love—but I don’t consider the future in the way that The River seems to consider the future. I don’t fear what the future holds as much as I fear not being alive long enough to see it. It could have been the ghosts of Ferguson that I carried with me to New Jersey, or the sheer emotional exhaustion I felt as the last notes of “Wreck on the Highway” died out, but I felt like I fell in a different type of love with The River after seeing it in this way. What it must feel like to write an album like this. To listen to an album like this with different eyes on the world. What it must feel like to imagine that no one in America will be killed while a man sings a song about the promise of living.

  Carly Rae Jepsen Loves You Back

  “Is that weed? Who the fuck brings weed to a Carly Rae Jepsen concert?”

  This question is almost certainly rhetorical, yelled in my general direction during an in-between song silence by a man in a yellow polo shirt with the words “EVENT STAFF” plastered across the chest. He tilts his nose to the thick and hot air (which does carry with it the strong and unmistakable smell of weed), twists his face the way a child does when forcing down cough medicine, and shakes his head. He turns to me and again asks, “Seriously. Who brings weed t
o a show like this?” I shrug and laugh nervously, trying to gauge his interest in an actual answer. “A show like this” is an interesting measuring stick, as there’s no real way that an outsider would be able to look at the crowd and pinpoint exactly what type of act is playing. There are teenagers here, but there are also early-30s hipsters and black people in their 20s. I notice that the event staff person is still looking at me, searching my eyes for an answer, so I consider one. As I fix my mouth to respond with “pretty much everyone,” a playful synth drowns the silence. The thin silhouette of Carly Rae Jepsen cuts through the blue light of the stage. “All right,” she says, the light illuminating half of her face. “Let’s get lost.”

  Watching Carly Rae Jepsen play E•MO•TION live is an hour-long clinic in vulnerability. It is a public display of affection, for the artist more than anyone in the audience. Jepsen is the most honest pop musician working, and for this, she may never be a star. But to dismiss her as a one-hit wonder is unfair: E•MO•TION, with its 1980s nostalgia and hazy shine, was never asking for hits. I have been in rooms where one-hit wonders have played, the ones who had a big single and spent an entire lifetime chasing another one. Semisonic, in a small bar, over a mumbling crowd, played “Closing Time” three times in the same set. Marcy Playground, slouching with disinterest to an encore, so that the bored crowd could finally hear them play “Sex and Candy.”

  This show is bigger than that. This is not Carly Rae Jepsen’s room. When I see her play a sold-out show at New York’s Terminal 5, no one is suffering through all the other songs in order to get to the one they heard on the radio. By the time Jepsen plays “Call Me Maybe” at the end of the night, it feels like it doesn’t fit—like a sweet dessert after we’re already full.

  Intimacy is generally not something that a concertgoer can opt out of at Terminal 5. A difficult venue to navigate, with limited quality views of the stage, the room quickly becomes a mass of bodies funneling to the same few spots before spending hours jostling for space. Drinks are spilled on pants, elbows are pressed into the soft spaces on other bodies—by accident at first, and then perhaps with a little more purpose. Everyone apologizes for their manipulation of space before settling into discomfort, pushed into a wall or the back of a stranger. It is, perhaps counterintuitively, the perfect venue for Jepsen to play through E•MO•TION, an album obsessed with the physical space we take up when we’re forced next to each other, both in romance and friendship. The feeling barrels toward you as the lights go down and the signature saxophone part from “Run Away With Me” blankets the eager crowd: anything is possible. Even in a city that makes you feel small, there is someone waiting to fall in love with you.

  Some will say that Jepsen’s appeal is that she seems like she could be one of your friends—someone who you could sit down with and truly open up to, someone who will laugh honestly at your jokes and sit through your Netflix marathons. She is often packaged this way: Carly Rae Jepsen, your friend with boy problems and big dreams. Your friend with two dance moves at her disposal, milking them so energetically to every beat that it becomes endearing, until there is no such thing as a “bad dancer” or a “good dancer,” just a set of unchained limbs answering a higher calling.

  All of this seems really great on the surface—a pop musician only an arm’s reach away. E•MO•TION has been critically adored, despite disappointing sales totals. None of its songs has lit the Billboard charts on fire. It occurs to me that maybe no one actually wants a pop star who could be their friend. It erases the boundary of spectacle. That’s what keeps so many of us drinking from the pop music well: the star who stops a room when they walk in, someone we can’t access, in a life that looks nothing like ours. E•MO•TION is too honest an album to pretend to be interested in spectacle. With her band behind her, Jepsen gets through three songs before speaking to the audience. When she finally speaks, it’s a rushed sentence or two before she launches into another song. In a white blazer and a head of messy dark hair, she looks like a modern artist’s vision of Pat Benatar, somehow both awkward and entirely at ease. Some musicians don’t carry on much interaction with their audience because they have no interest in it. With Jepsen, you get the sense that she is just so excited to play these songs that nothing else matters. She is the person handing you a gift at Christmas, tearing into the wrapping paper before you can start to, with an eagerness that says, “I made this gift for you, for all of you. And I want you to have it, while there’s still time to enjoy it.” It is hard for me to imagine anyone wanting an actual friend this close to them, asking them to feel everything.

  From a metaphorical standpoint, one of the worst things we do is compare love to war. We do this in times of actual war, without a thought about what it actually means. Mothers bury their children while a pop musician calls the bedroom a war zone and romance a field of battle—as if there is a graveyard for heartbreak alone. 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. It’s evident tonight, as she bounces along the stage, smiling while pulling off her two dance moves to every note of every song; as she abandons her blazer for a sleeveless tee, and then a cape, only for a song, before throwing it to the side; as her voice trembles with nervous excitement before bringing out Dev Hynes to play “All That” with her, both of them basking in the audience’s voracious response.

  This is the difficult work: convincing a room full of people to set their sadness aside and, for a night, bring out whatever joy remains underneath—in a world where there is so much grief to be had, leading the people to water and letting them drink from your cupped hands. Inside Terminal 5, under the spell of Carly Rae Jepsen, love is simply love. It is not war. It is not something you are thrown into and forced to survive. It is something you experience, and if you’re lucky enough, time slows down. It is not as fashionable as our precious American anguish, our feelings that eclipse all else. But, then again, there is a time to throw all else aside and see if maybe dancing will bring us back to life, packed so tightly in a room of strangers that everyone becomes one whole body, shaking free whatever is holding it down.

  Sometime around the third song of Jepsen’s set, I started to notice people kissing. One couple first, and then another, and then another. This continued for the remainder of the show. I never looked long, usually just a glance after nearby movement caught my eye. A couple directly in front of me, occupying the same small bit of wall that I was forced to occupy, began kissing each other passionately during “Warm Blood,” while Jepsen held the microphone stand with both hands and whispered, “I would throw in the towel for you, boy / ’Cause you lift me up and catch me when I’m falling for you,” into the mic. The couple pushed back into me, one of them stepping on my shoes. They broke their embrace long enough for one of them to mouth the words “Sorry, dude” to me.

  I smiled and gave an understanding nod that was not seen, as they were already falling back into each other. I considered how often there is shame attached to loving anyone publicly. The shame, of course, comes on a sliding scale, depending on who you are and who you love. How often I hear people complain about things like engagement photos, couples being tender with each other in public, or someone who can’t stop talking about someone they love. How often I first think of who may be watching before I lean in to give someone I love a really good kiss in a crowded store. Here, that shame falls to dust. It is something beyond the smoke that lingers above our heads that does this—turning a person’s face to the face of someone they love, and kissing the way we do in our homes, with the curtains drawn.

  The Night Prince Walked On Water

  “I remember [broadcast producer] Don [Mischer] said, ‘Put me on the phone with Prince.’ Don says, ‘Now, I want you to know it’s raining.’ And Prince is li
ke, ‘Yes, it’s raining.’ [Don said], ‘And are you okay?’ and Prince is like, ‘Can you make it rain harder?’”

  —Bruce Rodgers, production designer of the Super Bowl XLI Halftime Show

  And of course there was rain, as if summoned by the man himself. The elements favor some of us more than others. When we speak of Prince in Miami, at halftime of Super Bowl XLI, let us first speak of how nothing that fell from the sky appeared to touch him. How his hair stayed as perfect as it was upon his arrival, wrapped tight in a bandanna. All of my friends leaned close to the TV on that night and wondered how someone could play that hard, that furiously, in the midst of a storm. This was Prince, on a stage slick with rain, walking on actual water. There are moments when those we believe to be immortal show us why that belief exists. I will only remember Super Bowl XLI by what happened at halftime. Nothing before, and nothing after.

  Prince is gone now, and nothing seems fair. He seemed magic and permanent—the one who would outlive each of us, floating on immortality as a small gift for what he’d given for so long. Prince didn’t just arrive one time, but many. His career was that of endless arrivals and re-arrivals, and so it makes sense, upon the news of his death, that he would once again return. That seems unlikely as I write this now, reminiscing on another moment where he arrived, several times in one night, to deliver a show inside of a show. To, once again, eclipse something seemingly greater than himself.

  Many of us accept football’s violence, and the culture it breeds, because the game itself promises great rewards—a spectacular play, or the sight of men performing supreme acts of athleticism, at the very edge of impossible. Before Super Bowl XLI, it never occurred to me that a halftime show could exist that would upstage the spectacle on the field. There had been attempts, but often clumsy ones: the awkward cluster of Jessica Simpson, P. Diddy, Justin Timberlake, Nelly, and Kid Rock in 2004; The Rolling Stones, in 2006, looking like they were fulfilling a long-held-off errand, like going to the DMV. Griping about the Super Bowl halftime show had become a sport itself, a bit of glee that could be had by everyone, even casual football watchers.