Then, out of the Miami rain in 2007, rose Prince. He could have played through a list of his hits that night, and we would have all been satisfied. He did play some, of course: a rendition of “Baby, I’m a Star” where he steps to the edge of the stage, pauses, and tells the crowd, “Somebody take my picture with all this rain.” But the surprise at the bottom of the box—the unexpected bonus tacked onto a paycheck—was the way “All Along the Watchtower” bled into the Foo Fighters’s “Best of You” right after that. The true joy in this for me, both at the time and every time I’ve watched it since, is the mastery and confidence with which he played these songs. Even when Prince wasn’t explicitly telling them, “I can do this shit better than you,” I imagine that most other musicians had to know it was entirely true. And there, for a moment, he reminded us. Prince, for all of his stoic mystery, never gave up on the element of surprise.
The crown jewel, of course, is what ended the performance: a glowing, towering performance of “Purple Rain.” That moment forced me to imagine a world in which this was the Super Bowl itself. I saw all of the players, coaches, and cheerleaders bowing at the feet of Prince and going home, letting football take the rest of the night off in a show of respect. There are times when the night pushes against the clock and time slows down: when you lock eyes across the room with someone who you think you could love. When a football is thrown down a field and into an end zone where a mass of bodies await its descent. When Prince leans into a microphone and generously asks, “Can I play this guitar?” as if there could be anything other than one million affirmative answers. A sheet blowing up from the front of the stage until Prince is only a silhouette making beautiful noise. There is no moment like this one in any other halftime show, before it or since. Prince, only a shadow, putting his hands to an instrument and coaxing out a song within a song. And of course there was still rain, beads of it covering the camera lens from every angle, drops of it covering the faces of people in the front row, and still none of it visible on Prince himself. And of course there were two doves scattering themselves above Prince’s head when the sheet came down and he was whole, in front of us again, walking back to the mic and asking, “Y’all wanna sing tonight?”
Yes, Prince. This is the one we know all of the words to. Throw the microphone to the ground and walk away. We don’t need you now like we did in that moment, but we will remember it always. Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life. Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to cast away another hero on the face of a flood that began on a Miami night in 2007 and never stopped. Dearly beloved, when the sky opens up, anywhere, I will think of how Prince made a storm bend to his will. How the rain never touches those who it knows were sent into it for a higher purpose. Dearly beloved, I will walk into the next storm and leave my umbrella hanging on the door. Please join me.
ScHoolboy Q Wants White People To Say The Word
“Nigga” at his concerts. His desire is not passive, either. It isn’t that he doesn’t mind if white people say it, he wants to witness the word spoken into existence. “When the beat drops, I’ll expect y’all to say it,” he says in a radio interview. “It’s not like I’m asking them to go out in the world and say it, but if they paid for a show and put food on my family’s table, I’m not going to be up there saying the word alone.”
It’s interesting, when framed this way. It’s an exchange for him, it seems. If you can afford entry to his shows, and you’ve offered him a way to work himself into a distance from that which he raps about, you have earned a pass, in his eyes, to fit his language over your tongue. No matter what it is.
In the fall of 2013 in California, ScHoolboy Q has instructed his DJ to stop the music before going into his last two songs. He leans over the stage, looking a bit exhausted. He takes this time to directly speak to the crowd, much of it white, encouraging them to say “nigga” during his last two songs. He assures them that they don’t need to be uncomfortable, as he’d noticed them being earlier in the show. Ain’t nobody here gonna get in your face about the shit, he promises. It’s all about having a good time. And so he launches into “Yay Yay,” the first single from his third album, Oxymoron. The song is, more or less, a detailed accounting of Q growing up on Figg Street. When he gets to the lyrics “I’m a drug dealing nigga / cause them grades ain’t get me paid” the silence that would normally sit at the utterance of the word was filled in by one hundred eager voices.
The problem is that everyone wants to talk about language entirely independent of any violence that the existence of that language has accumulated over time. If, for example, a word can be hurled through the air while a boot comes down on a face, that part of the word’s lineage has to be accounted for. Any language that is a potential precursor to bloodletting has a small history that it can’t be pulled apart from. All black parents I know, particularly those of some Southern origin, have a story about the first time they were called a nigger, deliberately, and with some measure of anger behind the word. There is often running involved, or at least the story has a tone of the teller of it understanding that they might not have lived to do the telling if not for some stroke of luck.
For all of the debate over it, these stories make the reclaiming of the slightly modified “nigger” a political act. This is also, I imagine, why so many white people have an obsession with who can say it, when they can say it, and all of the circumstances in today’s America where it might be all right to say it. It is one thing to watch a people take a weapon out of your hands, but it is another to fashion it into something else entirely, something that doesn’t resemble a weapon at all. And it is even another thing to then see the newly-fashioned once-weapon scattered into a lexicon that denies you immediate access. I think of this when, on the news, there is another long debate about who can say any variation of “nigger” and when. The argument is often one of equality: no one should be able to utter a word that all people cannot utter. People who are not black often cite the word’s ugly history as the reason why no one should say it, but also in a defense of non-black people being able to say the word without repercussions, or in defense of why a black person who speaks the word shouldn’t be taken seriously by any establishment they are trying to live safely within.
My mother thought it to be an ugly word with an ugly history, and so I grew up imagining the word as only ugly. When singing along to rap music, snuck into headphones, I would self-censor the word, feeling my mother over my shoulder. It never felt right coming out of my mouth, because all I associated it with were stories of violence, and then debates around how it could be used to do harm, or offer someone even more space than they already had. It was impossible, then, for me to imagine it as a word of love, or a word speaking to a unique bond.
In a 1995 interview, Wu-Tang Clan member Raekwon is asked about why the Wu-Tang Clan has been able to succeed as a group where other groups have failed. He responds, “It’s about love. Love the niggas you’re rolling with. Love them.”
In ’02 me and my nigga Troy were the only two black people on the floor of our college dorm & we used to kick it but not all like that because wasn’t too many other niggas on campus & we didn’t all like being seen together at once because someone would inevitably have some jokes about the NAACP of Bexley, Ohio, or some shit & we would have to pretend to laugh because wasn’t none of us trying to get kicked out of some college that we were all there to play sports for & Troy was the first one in his family to finish high school & one night he told me his daddy used to play football in Mississippi before he got kicked off the team for fighting some fans that called him a nigger & Troy said the coaches told his daddy that he was too much of a liability to the team & so now Troy was at this school playing football & living out his daddy’s dreams & on the anniversary of Biggie’s death we was playing Biggie’s music real loud on the speakers in the dorm community room & we let it spill out into our dorm hallway because we both grew up rapping this shit through headphones &
eventually more bodies piled into the room & they were mostly white kids who we made friends with because when you’re all piled on top of each other in the same building there ain’t much else to do & the song “Niggas Bleed” came on the playlist & Biggie raps “N****s bleed just like us” at least that’s what I wanted to hear when I looked around the room but everyone who rapped it in the room filled in the blanks & then again & then again & sometimes louder & I don’t know who the “us” was supposed to be in the rhyme anymore & when the song died down there was still Eric who was from Findlay, Ohio & who pitched for the baseball team & he sung the words “Niggas bleed just like us” one last time & I looked over at Troy & his hand was in a fist & it was trembling & I wonder if in that moment he was thinking about what his father couldn’t survive
Most of my white friends never knew what to make out of Gym Class Heroes, and white critics didn’t either. They were an odd bunch who came along at an odd time in an odd genre. Decidedly a rap group, they were fronted by Travis McCoy, a black, lanky, tattooed art nerd with a punk rock lineage. To brand Gym Class Heroes as rap-rock isn’t exactly accurate in the traditional sense: sludgy, chunky guitars and bass backing someone doing a rapping/screaming hybrid as vocals. They were, instead, an earlier version of what so many live rap acts look like today: subtle and live instrumentation behind an MC. McCoy was, by no means, the best rapper. In the band’s early days, he was often too reliant on punchlines and bad puns, and coasted off of his charm more than any actual ability. Still, they were the official rap darlings of emo’s third wave.
This, I thought, was always interesting. I saw them at one of the early Warped Tours they were on, which they entered with all of the right credentials. Pete Wentz co-signed them, and then eventually actually signed them to his record label, Decaydance. They had a catchy song, an album with decent buzz, and they looked the part. The problem was that, when they were pushed into these circles, they stood out so sorely, and in the worst ways possible. The pop punk kids who might enjoy rap as a forbidden fruit couldn’t get into Gym Class Heroes. Travis McCoy was rapping about what emo singers sang about. The Four Ls: Longing, Love, Loss, Loneliness. It wasn’t the rap that most of my white friends at the time were most excited about, the commercial hits with a taste of danger nestled inside. Travis McCoy, for two whole albums, never says the word “Nigga.”
I am, of course, not saying that this is why white fans and critics had a hard time embracing Gym Class Heroes in 2005. I’m not saying that their lack of proximity to what these people might have seen as “traditional” rap music was their undoing, even as critics would veil their reviews in things like “something feels off” or “they just aren’t speaking to what I think they should be speaking to.”
But it is entirely true that an appeal that music offers us is a way to escape our understanding of the world. It is working within a food chain of sorts, particularly in rap music. A rapper boasts about a life that they may be close to living, but not entirely living, giving a listener a chance to rap along those words and briefly, even though it is not real, get closer to that image of a life separate from their own. I have done it my whole life, using lyrics that actually do not reflect my life as a signal for a life that seems briefly more exciting. I suppose no one wants to hear a rapper, of all people, rap exclusively about something that we could get from a collective of sad boys who can sound sad singing sadness.
But I imagine this as a problem with how black people sit in the imagination of people who are not black, and not entirely a content or genre issue. We often see black people, more than any other demographic, restricted to what versions of themselves can be briefly loved and then discarded. The rapper with chains and a past worth a dangerous fantasy, but not worth considering as something that makes them full and human. The problem with Gym Class Heroes, and Travis McCoy particularly, is that they were outside of the current era of black weirdness that has been accepted in more mainstream spaces as a type of visible and understood blackness. By the time their wave came along, they had already ridden a lesser one. This, too, is a failure of imagination.
What ScHoolboy Q is doing at his shows is, in some ways, giving a permission to something that would likely occur even if a permission wasn’t granted. He is allowing it to be done louder, and more comfortably. As the demographics of rap fans shift, and the things those fans have access to shifts, a thing that I have a problem with is the population of the rap show. ScHoolboy Q is not alone, but as a rap artist gets bigger, and their ticket prices become higher, their audiences become whiter. It’s a question of who can afford the show, which in the case of ScHoolboy Q, becomes a question of who can afford to be comfortable saying a word that comes with a violence they’ll never know. I wonder, sometimes, if the trade-off is worth it. If my desire to see young black artists “make it” is worth my desire to watch them bowing to the comfort of others in this way. People who may, for a moment, put food on a table for their family, but would also not always fight for that family’s right to not hear a word that, out of the wrong mouth, can still be a weapon.
ScHoolboy Q can certainly do whatever he wants and doesn’t need my permission. When, in another interview, he says, “it’s not like these white people are racist, they’re at a rap show,” I understand that this is all rooted in what I have convinced myself of for years: that a closeness for, or even a love for culture, puts you so far into it that you can embody all aspects without harm. That love is the great equalizer, even if there is blood underneath a word that no longer belongs to you. For this, I feel for ScHoolboy Q when he says that he is not encouraging these white fans to use the word outside of the concert venue. I feel for him, and I envy his optimism.
I consider, today, the importance of black men loving each other in public. Of black people, in general, loving themselves in public. I think back to the pointed response that Raekwon gave in 1995, and how it changed not only my view of the word “nigga,” but also my view of how men loving each other deeply could open up an entire dialogue around the goals and emotional connectivity of a people. I am not saying that I toss the word about in every setting I am in, or even that I think of it as the only affectionate word I can attach to my people. But the truth is that I am comfortable here, under the swallowing moonlight, throwing an arm around my niggas and laughing loud into an uncontainable night, regardless of what trouble our sound might bring. This is a particular type of love. The type that has survived history and the weapons formed against the body and all of its lineage. The type that has turned the weapon back in on itself and now, that which welcomes violence can also welcome two arms, spread apart in a wide and waiting hug. I am comfortable here, shouting at my niggas across a card table with a hand full of cards during a spades game at its tense climax. I want to imagine that I can keep at least these moments to myself and not have them given back over to other mouths. I want to believe that they’re still for us, even if I can see the lie every time the word jumps off of my own tongue.
The Weeknd And The Future Of Loveless Sex
Projected behind the Weeknd on stage in Seattle, two women wearing smeared makeup and little else are rolling around on a bed, frantically kissing each other. It is a mess of hands and naked skin, with some soft groans sprinkled in. Being that this is an all-ages show, the parents, undoubtedly dragged here by their eager children without knowing what to expect, are either shuttling their children toward the exits or staring in shock with the rest of us, mouths open. The Weeknd, unbothered by the commotion, begins to launch into the song “Kiss Land,” the title track from the album he is touring on the back of tonight. As the song goes on, the pornography projected behind him becomes increasingly graphic. He sings the lyrics to the song out over the film’s sounds of passion: “This ain’t nothing to relate to / even if you tried / you tried / you tried.” It occurs to me, in the moment, that a lot of kids are going to have a story about how they went to a concert and ended up sitting through a pornographic film with their parents. It is both
funny for me, here alone as an adult, and not funny at all, thinking back to my younger years. As the song reaches its climax, so does the film, cutting out right as one woman prepares to go down on the other. When the screen goes dark, the echoes of intimate moaning remain, shaking off of every wall in the theater. It seems exorbitant when it all ends. A pointless, uncomfortable exercise from an artist who believes vanity means no stone of excess can be left unturned.
The Weeknd, real name Abel Tesfaye, sings about sex. The kind of sex you have if you aren’t interested in love, but perhaps interested in warmth. The kind of sex you have when you’re lonely, or rich, or both. When the desire for a body outweighs the desire for a name. He’s made a career off of this, songs about drug-fueled conquests laced with intervals of paranoid boasting and small cautionary tales. Two years before the Seattle concert, in 2011, the Toronto native released three mixtapes: House of Balloons in the spring, Thursday in the summer, and Echoes of Silence in the winter. It was a chilling musical onslaught. The songs were dark and claustrophobic. In the world of The Weeknd, there was rarely a woman worth trusting, unless they were high, or naked, or both. Even here, he would skirt the line between sexual exuberance and chilling inappropriateness. “The only girls that we fuck with seem to have 20 different pills in ’em,” he sings on “Loft Music.” In “High For This,” the first song on House of Balloons, and the song that introduced The Weeknd to the world outside of Canada, he sings about convincing a woman to take a pill before intercourse. “It’s all consensual,” he said in an interview. “The tone is dark, but it’s consensual. Everyone is just trying to have a good time.”
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