They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

  The prone body of this black boy, unnoticed and consumed by noise, and moving feet. Already forgotten.

  It was jarring. Another example of how expendable the black body can be when in the way of needs that are greater than it, the range of those needs changing by the hour, or second. It was another image of black fragility and dismissal, of course not as harsh as videos of guns firing into black men, or the force feeding of mugshots we get when a dead victim is black. But it was a reminder that choosing invisibility means giving yourself over to what so many systems in this country already deem you. Punk rock, as it stands now, being no different.

  Eventually, as the song winded down (ironically with the line “die young and save yourself,” a line that I used to have scrawled on a notebook before I got older and started to quite enjoy living, or at least stopped finding death romantic), I watched the boy sit up, shake his head, and gingerly stand up. He looked around, and slowly made his way to the back of the venue. Like I did when I was his age. After the show, I aimed to find him, to at least make eye contact. There is something powerful in someone who looks like you actually seeing you. I never caught up to him, and I don’t know what I would have said if I did. I don’t know how to be honest enough to say that there isn’t a place for kids like us, so we need to make our own, and nothing is more punk rock than that. Nothing is more punk rock than surviving in a hungry sea of white noise.

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

  It is a strange thing to grow up poor, or in any interpretation of the hood, and be in very close proximity to the suburbs—a short walk or bike ride away from a world that seems entirely unlike your own, a dream that you could be snatched from at any moment. As a curious kid, always fascinated by the idea of escape, I would sometimes meet my friends and ride our bikes to the edge of our neighborhood, into the blocks where the houses were taller. The sidewalks were more even underneath our bike tires, and the silence was a gift to a group of reckless and noisy boys, spilling in from a place where everything rattled with the bass kicking out of some car’s trunk. We would ride our bikes with our dirty and torn jeans and look at the manicured lawns and grand entrances and the playgrounds with no broken glass stretched across the landscape. During the day in the summer, we were just kids there. Black, sure, but not particularly threatening or dangerous to all of the other kids who were, like us, trying to find a way to kill time while their parents were at work and school was out.

  And then, with the sun setting on another hot day, we would ride back a few blocks to our neighborhood’s familiar skin—the language we knew, the songs we could rap along to, and the comfort that comes with not standing out. When I say it is a strange thing to live in close proximity to a world so vastly different than your own, I mean that it creates a longing within the imagination. You long for a place that you know only by its snapshots and not by the lives moving within them. It allowed me to fantasize, imagine a world where everyone was happy and no one ever hurt.

  The Wonder Years’ third album, Suburbia I’ve Given You All and Now I’m Nothing, released nearly five years ago as of 2016, takes its title from the Allen Ginsberg poem, “America.” The poem opens: “America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing. / America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956. / I can’t stand my own mind. / America when will we end the human war?” The poem, like most Ginsberg poems of its era, is sprawling and emotionally uneven, a meditation on the unrest of war’s aftermath that is equal parts angry and humorous, confused yet determined.

  We meet The Wonder Years here in their truest form on the album opener, “Came Out Swinging,” a song that, even now, is a high-functioning album opener, an arm that reaches from the speaker and wraps around you, pulling you gently to the speaker’s mouth. We find this Pennsylvania pop-punk band as we found Ginsberg in a different time. Not lost and anxious in the aftermath of actual war, of course—only war is war—but the anxiety on the album is palpable nonetheless. 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. I know the suburbs best by how they consumed the kids I knew in my teenage years: the punk kids, the emo kids, the soccer kids, the kids who came out to the basketball courts with the black kids to play the way they couldn’t in their backyard. So many of us, especially teenagers, strive to be something we’re not. Escape is vital, in some cases, as a survival tool. Once, I never knew how anyone who lived in a beautiful home in a nice neighborhood could be sad. Sometimes, when you know so much of not having, it is easy to imagine those who do have as exceptionally worry-free.

  Sadness, when you are truly being swallowed by it, can feel almost universal. Not the vehicle that drives you to the doorstep of sadness, and certainly not the way it manifests itself inside of you. But the sadness itself, the soaking feeling of it, is something that you know everyone around you has had a taste of. The kids who came to rap and punk shows in nice shoes, always fighting to stay out just a bit later, anything to keep them away from home, anything to keep them in a world unlike their own. This is the cycle we create and live through: we see the greener grass and then run to it.

  The first time I lost a friend, a true friend, to the unfamiliar violence of a bottle of pills, I wondered what it must be like to not feel like you were destined for death, but still want to arrive at it. And then another friend. And then another. A rooftop, a car crash. When you go to enough funerals in summer, you learn tricks: bring a lighter jacket, something that can be carried. Wear a shirt that you don’t mind sweating through. Deep pockets to stash your tie after it gets taken off and your shirt buttons are loosened. I don’t remember when my friends and I stopped asking the question of “why?” around death. I understand what it is to be sad, even when everyone around you is demanding your happiness—and what are we to do with all of that pressure other than search for a song that lets us be drained of it all?

  The great mission of any art that revolves around place is the mission of honesty. So many of us lean into romantics when we write of whatever place we crawled out of, perhaps because we feel like we owe it something, even when it has taken more from us than we’ve taken from it. The mission of honesty becomes a bit cloudy when we decide to be honest about not loving the spaces we have claimed as our own. This is the work of Suburbia. It isn’t carried out with bitterness, but with a timeline of questions. Who is going to be brave enough to ask where home is, and seek out something else if they don’t like the answer? And, yes, the songs that fall out of this process are as brilliant as any songs the pop-punk/emo genre have ever seen. “Local Man Ruins Everything” dresses up the grief in the center of the room until it becomes forgettable. “Summers in PA” could be about you and all of your friends in any summer where you all felt invincible. “Don’t Let Me Cave In” is a negotiation of distance, and home, and greater distance. The band was operating at a level of greatness they hadn’t reached before that point. It’s a jarring, emotionally honest undertaking that chooses interrogation over nostalgia’s soft and simple target. The album ends with “And Now I’m Nothing,” the ultimate anchor, echoing a small plea of freedom: “Suburbia, stop pushing / I know what I’m doing / Suburbia, stop pushing / I know what I’m doing.”

  A lot of the people I knew who dismissed “emo” while the genre was at its peak did so because they believed emotions were things that should be sacred and unspoken, not screamed out to the listening masses. I push back against that, both in personal practice and as someone who has seen the other side of that coin, or known people completely eaten alive by the hoarding of sacred emotion. And, of course, we say the world doesn’t care about your problems. We say that and we know that our probl
ems aren’t only our problems, and that there are people who need to know that their problems aren’t only their problems. The glory of The Wonder Years, in Suburbia and everything since, is that their mission seems to be entirely unselfish in scope. This is what, to me, has separated them from their peers in the genre: a willingness to own their shitty pasts and everything they entail without also trying to cash it in for points, without trying to be the smartest or most charming band in the room. I’m sad and I’ve hurt people and I’m a beautifully tortured survivor of my past is a hard thing to say out loud (or scream on a chorus), but it is the honest thing, which means it is the thing that I would rather have sitting in the room with me on the days I miss everyone.

  Suburbia is the first of a stunning trilogy of Wonder Years albums that all seem to be in conversation with each other. 2013’s The Greatest Generation and 2015’s No Closer to Heaven all sit in the same space. They are albums that are awash with questions, and content not providing any answers. They are all telling singular stories in their frantic urgency and emotion: Suburbia about the idea of home, Greatest Generation about the idea of growing up and leaving things behind, No Closer to Heaven about death and loss—all of them, particularly the first two, centered on the American suburban experience. All of them say, “I’m sad like you are, and I can’t promise to fix this, but we’re going to be here together.”

  I am still, always, a black kid from a black neighborhood, who once biked to the edge of the suburbs and then once loved my friends from the suburbs and then sometimes buried my friends from the suburbs. And even then, never understanding the interior of those lives beyond the angst-ridden stories that teenagers share, I never understood how a life that looked beautiful could be immensely sad. Where you live and grow up in America has very real implications, and that isn’t to be ignored here. But I found myself, and still find myself, always considering the place I’m from and the pressure and expectations that come with that. I am proud to have survived where I’m from, and I happily keep it close to me. What The Wonder Years do best, first with Suburbia, is kick a door wide open to the rest of us who admire the imagined life from afar. I listen to The Wonder Years, and I am back on my bike again, tearing through the even sidewalks and manicured lawns. The difference is that when I close my eyes and imagine this, I can see the houses now. I can see the lives inside. I can feel the unshakable and honest grief, thick in the air, as I bike home.

  All Our Friends Are Famous

  My buddy nick screamed in this metalcore band called Constellations because he couldn’t really play an instrument and didn’t want to learn, but he wanted to get laid at least close to as much as our other buddy Nick who wasn’t in a band at all, but who had dark hair and boyish good looks, and a devil may care ambiance that all the girls we hung around found irresistible. Constellations wasn’t that good of a band and Nick wasn’t that good of a frontman but the band still got gigs because during the slow season, The Basement would let any band that can fill the place play a set and an argument can be made that when it comes to impressing a potential date, being some scene kid who knows the band might be better than actually being the scene kid in the band, because if you embarrass yourself, at least it won’t be on a stage with everyone watching. Plus, all of our pals got drink tickets but only about half of them could drink, and so, in half-full venues full of our friends, we could live like brief and generous kings. Constellations cut an EP called Alpha right before the summer of 2008, and all of the songs sounded the same, but we still played it in our cars like it was hot shit because when would we ever get to hear one of our own dripping out of our car speakers. Constellations never sold out a show, but they did get to play The Basement in summer once, toward the end of the band’s run in 2009, before Nick got kicked out of the band for not being a good enough screamer to justify the mental headaches he caused the so-called creative process. And at that summer show, they played their song “Model T Drive By,” which was maybe the only song that felt like it had real potential, or at least the one song that didn’t sound like everything else. When the breakdown came, Johnny, who played guitar for the band, jumped directly into the thrashing of the pit, guitar still plugged in. Nick had, somehow, obtained a drumstick from some other band’s setup, and was using it to orchestrate the violence in the pit, almost pulling the bodies from one side to the other like they were attached to a string at the drumstick’s tip. For a moment, you could only hear Johnny’s furious guitar playing, but you couldn’t see him through the wave of arms and elbows swinging in every direction, enclosing him. The dude behind the bar at The Basement, who drank heavily on the job and never made a sound during these shows except to let out the occasional skeptical or frustrated sigh, looked up from his second beer of the night, took stock of this brief and incredible madness, put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Now this is a fucking hardcore show.”

  Constellations broke up a month later. Nick didn’t get laid nearly as much as he thought he would. I found unused drink tickets in my pockets for months.

  II. Twenty One Pilots Are Innocent (After Lester Bangs)

  This is the truth! You are only from here if you’re from here! Sure, the suburbs count, but only if you’re winning! Twenty One Pilots are from the suburbs! Not the suburbs like the ones my pals would skate through to score cheap weed! Tyler and Josh have never actually flown a plane! But there’s only so many band names I guess! Twenty One Pilots are good Christian kids! They make music that you don’t have to love God to like! Finally, a Christian band that speaks to me! Well I guess! Relient K wasn’t bad! At least they had the decency to write something more than hooks! Relient K is also from Ohio! It’s called the Bible Belt for a reason! Being religiously ambiguous sells more records! Twenty One Pilots are at the top of the charts again! Some dirge about all their friends being heathens! Which friends! Tell me the clear truth! I know some of their old friends and they all seem all right to me! What’s a heathen anyway! We’re all innocent until our friends write songs about us! Was there at the Newport back in ’11 when Regional At Best dropped and all the record labels packed the house! Felt like the whole city made it! Well I mean I guess it felt that way! If you count the suburbs and surrounding areas! Before that at Independents’ Day they put on a real show! Dragged a whole piano in an alley! Tyler jumped on top! No one in the alley could move! He parted the crowd with just a single finger! It was biblical probably! I walked home that night thinking they’d be the biggest band in the city! I walked home thinking they’d be here forever and never make it out!

  III. The Sadness of Proximity

  When Twenty One Pilots won their first Grammy award, winning in the Best Pop Duo/Group Performance category, beating out far more deserving songs (Rihanna’s “Work,” for example), they accepted the award with their pants down. Literally, on stage, Tyler Joseph and Josh Dun pulled down their pants, going into a drawn out story from their younger days about watching the Grammy Awards without pants and dreaming of being there. It was charming, if you’re into the type of charm the band has become known for: a Midwestern emotional affectation that both wins over parents and emotionally starved youth.

  There’s something magical about all of your friends being in shitty bands with no intention of really making it. Columbus is like any other midsize-but-close-to-big city. It overflows with talented people who don’t always know where to place their talent, and sometimes there are far less talented people who just have access to a stage and enough people to watch them. In the era right before Twenty One Pilots exploded, it didn’t seem like any single band would ever approach the heights they eventually would, and so most everyone I knew rolled around in some trashy hardcore outfit, trying to make the nights a little more fun. The bands barely practiced, played shows to whoever could afford the five buck cover, and sometimes took whatever change they made from the show and got everyone pizza. These people all had day jobs. Some would work waiting tables for two weeks just to afford the amp to plug a guitar into so that t
he band could stay together for another show or two.

  I’m not making a value judgement on one versus the other, when it comes to success and simply survival. I’m saying that I celebrated Twenty One Pilots on that Grammy stage with their pants down, even though their song wasn’t the best song in the category, and even though they saddled the speech with a corniness that only their Midwestern brethren could recognize underneath all of the attempted charm. I always hoped for Columbus, Ohio, to have a band make it big, and Twenty One Pilots sit as one of the biggest bands in the world. So I feel guilty when I say that I wish it could be someone other than them. Someone who didn’t feel so intensely manufactured, or line-toeing. Someone who knew their way around more than just a catchy hook. I’m proud of them because I watched them from their early days, and I’m hard on them because I watched them from their early days.

  The closest I’ll get to knowing real rockstars were my friends in summer, before record labels came to town looking to pluck the next big thing. Constellations was a shit band, but they were a shit band that was a labor of love for a few kids I cared about deeply, in a scene full of kids that I cared about deeply, just trying to afford whatever it would take to make it into a studio and put a few tracks together. A week after Twenty One Pilots won their Grammy, I found Alpha, the first Constellations EP. It was in an old CD book, wasting away with the rest of the dead technology of its time. I put it on in my car on a long drive back to Columbus. When the first song hit, I remember the smile on Nick’s face as he burst into our friend’s apartment with the CDs for the first time. How we all listened to every track three times over. How we told ourselves that we loved it. How it didn’t matter whether or not we did.