Doughboy turns back, nods, walks away, and vanishes into the sun. Alone, but briefly loved.
Tell ’Em All To Come And Get Me
“We speak of heaven as if we’ve been there. As if heaven was a mile away.”
—MarShawn McCarrel
There are few things I love more than watching black people joyfully greet each other. There is much to be made of the act, in almost any setting, even though the tone of it may vary. The familiarity of a too-forceful slap on the back during a hug, or the more gentle How your mama doin’? pitched across a parking lot while someone throws down their bags and makes their way over for a hug. The more subtle nuances of a joyful greeting, sometimes rooted in relief or exhaustion: I walk through a sea of white faces in Salt Lake City, or Portland, or anywhere in America where I am made especially aware of the space I am occupying and how I am occupying it. From the sea emerges another lone black face, perhaps two. We lock eyes, raise an eyebrow, smile, and give a nod. One that says: I see you, and you see me. Even if no one else does, we know we’re still here.
It is an art, really. One that, like all institutions of black joy, gets dissected, parroted, and parodied—but only the language that comes from the body, and rarely the language that is spoken. On the other end of the jovial How you been doin’? that bursts from the mouth of someone who you haven’t seen in awhile is often a response of “all right,” or “fine,” or, a favorite among people I know, “I’m working on it.”
I sometimes consider this, how marginalized people quantify their own lives when compared to others who occupy the same world as we do. I say that I’m “all right” even when I’ve had good days. My father, a caring and deeply thoughtful person, has been “all right” for all of the years I’ve known him. The black woman who works in the market next to my apartment sighs, pats my hand, and tells me she’s “all right” as she hands me back a receipt for another purchase.
If there is a cost to this, the reality of fear, the fights that grow and seem insurmountable, the obsession with your grief in America as a beautiful and moving thing, it is a lowering of the emotional bar. Waiting for the other shoe to drop instead becomes dodging the avalanche of shoes, occasionally looking back to see the avalanche claiming another person you know, love, or have been on this journey of survival with for so long, you could be family. I celebrate expressions of unbridled black joy because I know what it takes to unlock this, to have the joy of the body drown out the anxiety of the mind, if only for a little bit. I know that blackness, when turned away from the mirror of itself and back into America at large, is most appealing when there is a type of suffering attached to it—sadness, anger, struggle, dressed up and packaged to the masses. A quarterback dances to celebrate an accomplishment in a violent game, and words like “class” appear, hanging in the air for months. 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. I think about this when I go to the gym and hand my gym card over to the same front desk person, always a white man. I ask how he’s doing. Most days, he says “Good. Really good.”
The link between black music and black survival shows up most urgently when the stakes are at their highest. When I say that music is how black people have gotten free, I mean Harriet Tubman echoed songs along the Underground Railroad as a language. I mean the map to black freedom in America was built from music before it was built from anything else. Black music is the shepherd still pointing us toward any needed liberation, giving us a place to set our emotions, a room of our own.
More than any other song on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, “Alright” signaled the arrival of a new song to nestle itself into this new historical movement, led by young black people from all backgrounds: black women, black college students, black queer and trans communities. The black song that sits in the movement has often been a reflection of black people in America, hope rooted in a reliance on faith, but still so often looking over its shoulder, checking for an exit. There are trains or chariots coming to take us away to a better place, a place just for us (“People Get Ready,” “The Gospel Train,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”). There is the imagery of water, that which carried black people to this place, and that which will save them from it (“A Change Is Gonna Come,” “Wade in the Water”).
I’ve always viewed “Alright” as part of the evolution of these songs. It’s a song that clings to the idea of a hope that rests primarily on spirituality, but also a song that meets the people where they are and doesn’t try to take them away. The dynamics of “freedom” have changed, the idea of freedom and escape becoming less physical. When Kendrick Lamar, before the first chorus hits, tells us “I’m fucked up / Homie, you fucked up,” it feels like permission to revel in whatever we must in order to feel alive. The song is a gradual unpacking of the author’s failings, his rage and vices, all held close in the idea of surviving. Where so many songs from the past promised a new and improved paradise on the horizon, “Alright” promises nothing except the fact that there is pain, and there will be more to come. We can push our backs against that door and hold out the darkness until morning, but the night has been so long it feels like it might never end. “Alright” tells us to, instead, revel in the living, despite it all. When a smiling, joyful black person says they’re “doing all right,” I imagine it’s because they know “good” may be too close to the sun. I imagine it’s because they’ve seen things burn.
The heaven that Kendrick tells us is touchable might not be real, or I maybe saw heaven this fall, when Yale students marched across their campus in a demonstration against racial insensitivity. It was a seasonably chilly November day, and the well-attended and vocal march was visibly draining some of its participants. To fight for a country to see you as human is an exhausting thing, that exhaustion compounded by the physical exertion of marching, chanting, making your space your own. After the march wound down, someone found a loudspeaker, pressed play on “Alright,” and this imagined cloud of despair pulled itself back. People danced, hugged, rapped along with what parts they knew. I realized then that the magic of “Alright” is the same magic that exists in the body language of the joyful black greeting. It fits so well into these movements because it pulls so many people on the front lines of them to a place of healing. It works as both a rallying cry and a salve. It meets you at eye level and gives you what you need—an escape from the fight, or a push to get back into the fight. It is the warm nod and knowing smile from a black face emerging in a sea of white.
There is something to be said about an artist who can face their people while rolling out the welcome mat for whoever might choose to sneak in the back door while not being ultimately concerned with their sneaking. Kendrick Lamar says “God got Us” and the Us crawls 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.
There is something most comforting in this part of the song: Kendrick’s promise that God has Us. All of Us, sure, but Kendrick is talking about the Us who most need to remember that there is a God out there to be named, even if it isn’t the one we pray to, or even if we are not of a praying people. There is a God to be pointed at, and pulled close. There is a hope in black gospel that I find alluring, even though I wasn’t raised in a church, which echoes here. An urgency, even. Always a cliff to run toward, with the certainty that something will catch you.
In February of 2016, an act
ivist and poet from my hometown, MarShawn McCarrel, took his own life on the steps of the Ohio Statehouse. I found this out when my wife called up to me in the office of our apartment, miles away from Columbus, where I knew MarShawn. Where we spent countless hours joking around at poetry open mics or bullshitting at local action events. I am used to the feeling of knowing the dead, having a touchable relationship with someone who is no longer present. Yet the immediate moments after the news arrives never get any easier to manage. MarShawn ran toward the cliff and there was nothing there to catch him this time. I went to MarShawn’s Facebook page and saw his final message of “My demons won today. I’m sorry.” Right below was a picture of him and his mother, smiling at the NAACP awards. Right below that, a screenshot of a threat that was emailed to him from someone telling him that they wouldn’t rest until he “shut his nigger mouth.”
The truth is, once you understand that there are people who do not want you to exist, that is a difficult card to remove from the table. There is no liberation, no undoing that knowledge. It is the unyielding door, the one that you simply cannot push back against any longer. For many, there are reminders of this every day, every hour. It makes “Alright,” the emotional bar and the song itself, the best there is. It makes existence itself a celebration.
I hadn’t spoken to MarShawn in months, a thing that we feel most guilty about after a person is gone, especially if we are miles away from home, or on a plane to somewhere even farther from home, on the day of a funeral. The last time I saw MarShawn was at a protest. We hadn’t physically seen each other in a while, and we embraced. I slapped his back, perhaps a little too hard, and asked how he was. He told me “I’m all right, you know. I’m still here.”
Maybe all of these heavens are the same—Kendrick Lamar’s heaven, the heaven that all of the trains and chariots took our ancestors to, the heaven on the other side of Harriet Tubman’s river. Maybe all they ask is that we help hold back the darkness for as long as we can, and when we can’t anymore, they’ll save us a room. They’ll make sure “Alright” is playing, and we’ll feel the way it felt hearing it for the first time, in the face of all this wreckage. Full of so much promise, as if all of our pain were a bad dream we just woke up from.
Burning That Which Will Not Save You: Wipe Me Down And The Ballad Of Baton Rouge
I. Shoulders
When people talk about hurricane katrina, particularly in the national conversation, they focus almost exclusively on New Orleans. That city, of course, bore the wrath of the storm’s center—uncovering a failing of local and national government and infrastructure before, during, and well after the hurricane, with effects from it still lingering to this day. But with the lens pulled back, the full story of Hurricane Katrina is not only about water and the dead. It’s also a story of the living, of place and displacement.
Think of Baton Rouge, which Katrina’s weather impacted in less direct ways. In the days leading up to and especially after the hurricane, when New Orleans became uninhabitable, the population of Baton Rouge swelled, almost overnight. Tens of thousands of New Orleans residents made the short journey up Interstate 10 to seek shelter in Louisiana’s capital city, causing it to burst at the edges. The school system took in nearly 6,000 new students, causing immediate overcrowding. Traffic swelled, making navigation of the city nearly impossible. No matter how good a city’s infrastructure is, there is no preparing for an unexpected population increase that rapid.
There was also a swelling of violence. In the years after Katrina, while many of the evacuees settled into their new city and gave up on returning to their old one, the murder rate across Baton Rouge briefly soared, well beyond that of other cities its size. In 2004, homicides per capita in East Baton Rouge parish were at 14.5 per 100,000 people. By 2007, that number had jumped to 21 per 100,000. Residents and law enforcement insisted that this wasn’t simply due to the influx of new bodies in the city, but rather to the lingering state of crisis and uncertainty, where crime can thrive.
So the story underneath the story is about the weight one city can carry on its own. The edges of New Orleans broke open, and there was a flood, and those fortunate enough to escape the flood became a flood themselves, and pushed the edges of another city to its breaking point. Homelessness in Baton Rouge rose, briefly and dramatically, in the years following the hurricane. People were making homes wherever there was land not touched by the ruin of the hurricane and its memory.
In 2007, less than two years after the face of Baton Rouge shifted, the remix to Foxx’s “Wipe Me Down,” featuring fellow Baton Rouge MCs Lil Boosie and Webbie, was released as a single. The original version, released a few months earlier, was a Baton Rouge street classic, but got little traction elsewhere. Comparing the original version’s music video with the video for the remix, released months after the single began creeping up the charts, is an almost comedic endeavor. The original video is blurry and shot at odd angles, while various tags and ads tremble across the screen. In the remix, there is gloss, jewelry, all of the trappings of the mid-to-late-2000s rap video aesthetic. It is like watching the difference between a city that’s trying, and a city confident in a light at the end of the tunnel.
Baton Rouge hip-hop has a small history, but it also has the misfortune of being positioned less than 100 miles from the storied music culture of New Orleans. This is particularly hard for rappers from the area, given the massive influence that New Orleans had on Southern rap beginning in the mid-’90s, when Master P relocated No Limit Records from the Bay Area back to his hometown of New Orleans and began working with local rappers, garnering immense commercial success. In 1998, Cash Money Records, which had been toiling away in New Orleans with little success since 1991, got a big break, signing a $30 million deal with Universal Records, in part due to the proven commodity of New Orleans rap.
“Wipe Me Down” was a song made by three born and raised Baton Rouge rappers who were all under 25 years of age at the time of its release, which means they were, in some ways, children of the rise of Louisiana rap music. Young enough to have watched the rapid ascent in the ’90s, and old enough, by the mid-2000s, to want a small piece of that for their own city.
The song is absurd enough to anchor an inspiring sing-along, perfect for both club and car, and with enough nostalgic staying power to still be a point of discussion 10 years after its release. Though not overwhelmingly skilled, the rappers, Boosie, Foxx, and Webbie, find a home on the beat (produced by Baton Rouge legend Mouse on Tha Track) and work it for all it’s worth. It matters that this was a Baton Rouge song, made by a Baton Rouge producer and three Baton Rouge rappers who were icons within their city, in a time when Baton Rouge was in the business of recovering its own identity, waiting for someone to carry it to the light.
II. Chest
To tell someone say it with your chest is about a negotiation of confidence. If I do not believe in what you’re telling me, I won’t believe in you. It is not exactly a measure of volume—rather, a question of defined intent, articulated in a way that people can get behind.
The first line in “Wipe Me Down” is one of the greatest opening lines in all of rap music. Foxx says, “I pull up at the club VIP / Gas tank on E / But all drinks on me,” and he says it with his chest. It is the entire thesis of the song, distilled to a fine point: I don’t have much, but what I have is yours. For this, I think of what it is to grow up poor in one of your city’s worst neighborhoods and dream of money. To grow up with an eye toward gold while young black men who look like you and come from a neighborhood like the one you come from in a city just a highway away are covered in gold from rapping. To get close enough to afford some things, but still sacrifice others.
The thing I think people get wrong about the act of the stunt is that it isn’t entirely narcissistic. Or, at least, it isn’t always an act of self-worship. There is generosity in one who goes out of their way to look fly and raise the bar of the room they’re in. There is generosity in having some cash in your pocket
and an empty gas tank, and a room full of friends who are harboring a thirst, with maybe less cash in their pockets than you have in yours. To grow up poor, especially with any proximity to wealth, real or imagined, is to think sometimes that money can save you. To think that money can pull you and the people you love out of the feeling of any grief, or sadness.
To then get money, especially rapidly, is to find out that isn’t true. It’s all a myth, especially if you are of any marginalized group in America. The only answer is to dispose of that which will not save you. What Foxx was really saying, I think, is that it doesn’t matter how one gets home in a room full of people they love. You make your home wherever you and your people stop.
As someone who grew up with no money, I know what it is to want to show someone, anyone who will look, what little you have earned. Whether it’s drinks, or jewelry, or some combination of both. Whether it’s donating to a school or throwing a fistful of dollar bills to the sky. I believe all of these to be noble acts. This might seem like hyperbole, but I mean this. I say it with my chest, as I might on a night when I know my money is good in a city I love. The act of stunting, when it gets you free, is also charity.
At the end of his verse, Webbie, the youngest of the three rappers, boasts, “This chain hit me for a couple grand / Oh, no, I ain’t complaining / Just watch how you wipe my chest.” It strikes me now, that the best way to show off is to hide that which you are showing off in something else: a joke, a memory, a warning. I once knew someone who wore a thick gold rope and kept it tucked into their shirt, so that the weight of it rested against their bare chest, but the unmistakable thickness of it could be seen around their neck nonetheless, like an opulent snake. It occurred to me that this, perhaps, was truly the way to show off: keep most of what you have at a whisper, but keep just enough of it so loud that it won’t be forgotten.
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