They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

  III. Pants

  Many years ago, I found myself in New Orleans in the early fall, not long after Katrina blew through the city, and the water, in some places, was still high. It was settled, done with its wildest moments, but still dark and mostly unmoving. I remember making the trip to New Orleans because it felt like the vague Right Thing To Do. I was young, and didn’t consider what I might do there, if I would be a burden to a suffering city with my aimless wandering. Many of my college friends planned trips to go south and “help,” which, I realized when I arrived, mostly looked like an exercise in witnessing: to see the damage up close, to stare, take it in, and to leave without actually doing much beyond sighing for several hours at a time, wondering what could be done. An older and wiser version of myself would have, I hope, chosen another action. But in September 2005, I stood on a curb in New Orleans while water pushed itself over my feet and onto the bottoms of my jeans, which were baggy and heavy, hanging thick over my sneakers, immersed in the dark brown water.

  Everything in the music video for the “Wipe Me Down” remix is large and colorful. Eras of rap fashion tend to move so fast and become so comical to look back on immediately after they’re done that the video, released in the spring of 2007, already feels like it is from an era that can barely be remembered. From 2005 until about 2008, the entire aesthetic was about how much of your body could be folded into something two, or even three times, too large. I wore extremely tall tees despite not being tall by any stretch of the imagination. My pants, too, were almost clownlike in how much of me they consumed.

  In the “Wipe Me Down” video, there are airbrushed shirts swinging to the knees of the people wearing them! There are women dancing in outfits that aren’t coordinated at all, and some are wearing what looks like heavily modified pantsuits! Boosie is wearing brightly colored polo shirts that are also too big, but at least he dressed up for the occasion! They are all wearing gold like they just discovered what gold was! Webbie’s pants are so low, the waist is visible even with his tall tee dangling far and long!

  The thing our parents would always say to discourage us from wearing our pants baggy and low was that we’d never be able to run away from anyone. I most love the “Wipe Me Down” era of rap fashion because it didn’t consider the need for escape as a barrier to being the flyest person in the room. Of course it is absurd to look back on now, but in the moment, it felt like the most extreme reaction to young black people being told, for years, to wear clothes that fit as a means of acceptance. Young rich black people in 4XL t-shirts and jerseys, belted pants still being held up by a hand, and no one feeling the need to run from anyone or anything.

  Somewhere along the way, when established rappers began to take fashion more seriously, clothing started fitting around bodies better. Pants didn’t sag as much, shirts didn’t hang as low. And immediately, the era of hiding yourself in what adorned your legs and torso seemed foolish. We became our parents almost overnight, laughing at pictures of ourselves from less than a year earlier. And why wouldn’t we want to wear clothes that would allow us the freedom of escape? And why wouldn’t we want pants high and well-fitting enough to not become victim to a small and merciless drowning?

  IV. Shoes

  In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison writes, in part, about the human investment in objects and material things as a way of tipping the scale of the righteous vs. the wrong, of poverty vs. wealth, of what gets you through the day versus what doesn’t. In the second chapter of the book, the narrator focuses on the history and makeup of the home that the Breedloves live in. A focal point of this section is the description of the sofa. The Breedloves purchased the sofa new, but the fabric split down the back before it arrived, making the sofa look tacky and worn down. The store didn’t take responsibility, meaning the Breedloves had to continue making payments on the damaged sofa. This is most striking because of the relationship we are to understand them desiring with the sofa: something large and new, signifying status and a financial freedom that the Breedloves did not possess, but desired nonetheless.

  I own more sneakers today than any one person should. Some would suggest that a person only needs three or four pairs of shoes to make it through a year: a couple good pairs of dress shoes, one good pair of sneakers, and perhaps a pair of casual shoes that fall somewhere in the middle of the dress-shoe/ sneaker spectrum. I have considerably more than that. I used to say this with a lot more pride than I do now. I’ve become more conflicted about it as I age and think more about the ethics of how things are produced, or the ethics of growing up poor and now living in close proximity to people who are growing up poor, or the ethics of spending large amounts of money on that which doesn’t secure a future for yourself and whatever imagined offspring might exist for you.

  I consider all of these things, and yet, I still have several sneakers. I still love the seeking out and purchasing of sneakers. I still feel the same satisfaction that I did as a young child, purchasing my first pair of Jordans with money I earned on my own. In my particular part of the Midwest, weather was unpredictable, even more so than it is in most places. In Central Ohio, especially if you were a child in school all day, sneaker choice was important. You could wake up to sun, and walk outside to a muddy rainstorm. For this, I always purchased black sneakers for myself. If I could only afford one good pair of shoes per year, I’d want the pair that I could keep clean the easiest, even in the most unpredictable moments of weather.

  White shoes, for me, were the signifier. White shoes were my un-torn sofa, new and sitting wide in a living room. To own a pair of white sneakers meant that you had enough money to have options. That you could, if you wanted to, keep a pair of sneakers in your closet for a special occasion and wear the other pair when it rained, or snowed, or wasn’t perfect.

  My senior year of high school, I got my first pair of white sneakers—all-white Nike Air Force 1’s. I kept them in the box for weeks, taking them out only to try them on in the safety of my own home, away from the elements. When I wore them, I felt like a different person.

  I am also from an era where people were killed for sneakers. Yes, it does still happen now, of course. But in the ’90s and early 2000s, there was such fear around big sneaker releases that there were tricks to the process: wear an old pair of sneakers on release day and keep the new ones in your book bag. Dress down, so no one will suspect that you’re hiding expensive shoes anywhere. In our twisted and sneaker-obsessed youth, I think we found some small corner of that thrilling. To own something that another person would kill for.

  The first day I wore my all-white Air Force 1’s outside, it did not rain. I checked the forecast tirelessly the night before to make sure of this. When I got to school and stepped out of my car, I accidentally brushed my foot against my tire, scuffing a long and permanent black mark along the side of the shoe. And that was it. The torn fabric down the back of my sofa. My one signifier, tainted. Now simply a dirty sneaker.

  It is fitting that the chant that runs through the “Wipe Me Down” hook is anchored by “shoes.” The whole point of someone wiping another down, it seems, is in the performance: if I know I’m fresh, I don’t need to tell anyone out loud, but lend me a hand and make sure people know I’m on point. The thing I love most about sneakers, perhaps the thing that keeps carrying me back to them, is that there is no confidence I have found like that which comes with something on your feet that you can believe in. Lord, let me walk into every room as confident as the shoes on my feet make me feel.

  “Wipe Me Down,” on its face, is an exercise in boasting from three young rappers who just got money, but surely not as much money as they would have you believe. But that’s the trick of it: they could have you believe anything. The song is about doing whatever it takes to fake your way into the rooms that people might otherwise kick you out of. And beyond that, it was just a hell of a lot of fun.

  The ride was short-lived. Foxx still trudges away on the underground scene; he’s released more than a dozen mixtapes
since 2009, though none to any notable commercial success. Webbie found some mainstream success with his Savage Life album series, the second one, 2008’s Savage Life 2, offering up another Boosie-assisted hit in “Independent.”

  Boosie, arguably the most naturally gifted of the three, lost what could have been his most promising years to prison behind 2008 drug charges. He spent five years in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, from 2009 to 2014. He released one album, Incarcerated, from behind bars in 2010. During this time, also in 2010, he was indicted on federal first-degree murder charges for the murder of Terry Boyd. If convicted, he would have been staring down a maximum sentence of the death penalty, but a life sentence seemed likely, in part because of the fact that prosecutors leaned heavily on the sometimes violent content of Boosie’s lyrics and the fact that he, at the time of indictment, was involved in several other cases. In 2012, he was acquitted of the murder charge due to a lack of evidence. Upon his release, he dropped the album Touch Down 2 Cause Hell in 2015, after changing his name to Boosie Badazz. The album was both critically and commercially successful. Boosie now raps with a clarity that comes with both adulthood and, I imagine, incarceration. Still draped in gold, he is now more introspective, considering things like heaven, family, faith, and the future.

  Baton Rouge has also, in many ways, recovered. Homicide rates have dropped in recent years, as have the rates of homelessness. When visiting it last year, I talked to longtime residents who praised the city’s ability to balance itself out after a hard decade. People were in love with their homes again. People finally stopped looking backward.

  For all three of the rappers at the center of “Wipe Me Down,” but especially for Boosie, the song feels like a brief and bright moment, with comical fashion, which burned out as quickly as it arrived. But there is something special in that, too—in three young black rappers, trying, in a moment of peril, to put their city on the map. To build themselves bigger than they were. From the sneakers up.

  Rumours And The Currency Of Heartbreak

  When I was fresh into my 20s, a pal of mine moved into a small, one-bedroom apartment with his girlfriend. Our group of friends thought she was wonderful, but still had our concerns, not all of them tied to the fact that he was splitting from our established post-college but pre-adult house and leaving his portion of the rent uncovered. The concept was entirely foreign to me: I hadn’t yet loved anyone enough to want to share a space with them that wasn’t temporary and then potentially quickly forgotten. The shared machinery of love and trust has many parts and therefore many flaws, and therefore many opportunities for disaster. At the time, it all existed on too thin of a ledge for me to imagine walking. When my pal and his girlfriend broke up three months into the lease, they stayed in the apartment together. Breaking the lease was too expensive, but so was one of them taking on the rent alone. There is also something about remaining inside of the wreckage that is more seductive than pushing your way out of it alone. It seemed, at the time, like stubbornness gone off the rails, but it is a judgement call. If I have the destruction of something that I once loved to carry with me at all times, isn’t it like I still have a companion? The summer of the breakup, my friend would stay at our house late, making sure he could get home after his now exgirlfriend fell asleep. They would avoid each other in the mornings, one sleeping on a tiny couch in the living room. Though it seemed like an absolute nightmare to me then, I remember both of them on the day we helped move them out of the apartment, as sad as I’d seen them in any of the months before. There are endings, and then there are endings.

  In this way, heartbreak is akin to a brief and jarring madness. Keeping up the fight—any fight—to not have to reckon with your own sorrow isn’t ideal, but it might help to keep a familiar voice in your ears a bit longer than letting go would. Heartbreak is one of the many emotions that sits inside the long arms of sadness, a mother with many children. I suppose it isn’t all bad, either. For example, I am heartbroken at the state of the world, so I take to the streets again. But the real work of the emotion and all of its most irrational callings happens beneath the surface. When the room you once shared with someone goes quiet, there are few good ideas. I have gutted a record collection because too many of the songs reminded me of someone I didn’t want to be reminded of. My friends have fled jobs, bands, states. I don’t enjoy being heartbroken, but I’m saying I enjoy the point of heartbreak where we convince ourselves that literally everything is on the table, and run into whatever will dull the sharp echoing for a night, or a week, until a week becomes a year. It is the madness that both seduces and offers you your own window out once it’s done with you.

  At some point, a person figured out that the performance of sadness was a currency, and art has bowed at its altar ever since. Sometimes it’s a game we play: if I can convince you that I am falling apart, in need of love, perhaps I can draw you close enough to tell you what I really need. Other times, it is not entirely performance. In 1976, Fleetwood Mac was in desperate need of a massive album to cement their shift from blues-rock obscurity to more radio-friendly pop. Mick Fleetwood had higher aspirations than kicking around small clubs, and could sense the band’s time running out. Their previous album, 1975’s self-titled effort, was the first with California duo Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. Containing songs like “Rhiannon” and “Landslide,” now seen as Nicks’ signature tune, the album saw success, paving the way for a monster follow-up. But in the two years that followed, everything began to come apart. Here, the part everyone knows: first bassist John McVie and keyboardist/vocalist Christine McVie divorced at the end of a tour after six years of marriage. Then Buckingham and Nicks, embroiled in a volatile on-again/off-again relationship since joining the band, finally permanently turned it off, which didn’t reduce any of the volatility. Mick Fleetwood, the only one not in an intragroup romance, found out that his wife, Jenny, was having an affair with his best friend. The press, catching wind of what was believed to be the band’s collapse, circulated inaccurate stories. In one story, Christine McVie was near-death in the hospital. In another, Buckingham and Nicks were labeled as the parents of Fleetwood’s child. The band was breaking apart, but not broken up, reveling in the false stories before falling into piles of cocaine to forget them. When the spring of 1976 came, they retreated to a recording studio in California. No longer at the edge of chaos, but fully immersed in it.

  The lyric that opens up Rumours, the band’s most iconic album, is Lindsey Buckingham’s: “I know / there’s nothing to say / someone / has taken my place” opens the song “Secondhand News,” and just like that, the tone is set. There are few lyrics that set an album’s tone like this one, and few songs. Nicks’ vocals weaving in to clash with Buckingham’s in the verses, littered with bitter proclamations. What sells Rumours as more than just high drama, spun out on record, is the clean brilliance of its pop leanings. While their last album felt like what it was, an old blues band trying on some new clothes, Rumours was the sound of the band fully committed to their new role as a pop band playing the game, aiming for the charts. The collaborative spirit of Buckingham and Nicks, even fractured, played into this more than anything else. Taking on the bulk of the album’s writing and vocal duties, there was an ability to fashion a dual tone: Nicks, both remorseful and hopeful on “Dreams,” Buckingham angry and spiteful all the way through the album, most impressively on “Go Your Own Way.” Even beyond this, the album’s most interesting character, in some ways, is John McVie. He was the band’s most private and reserved member, and didn’t provide lead vocals on any song. This meant that the narrative of his failing message could only play out on record through Christine, the most brilliant and stunning example being “You Make Loving Fun,” an ode to an affair she’d had. She told John, at the time, that the song was about a new dog. It’s hard to ignore that the women made Rumours exciting. Christine McVie wasn’t as flashy as Nicks, but her familiarity and comfort within the band, paired with her and Buckingham’s musical rapport
, allowed space for her to emote with ease and nuance in a way that often made Buckingham sound like he was having a frantic, exceptionally skilled temper tantrum.

  These are the politics of splitting apart: we run to our friends and tell them the version of the story that will ignite in them a desire to support our latest bit of grief. It becomes a bit tastier, of course, if your friends are millions of pop fans. If, in the telling of your heartbreak, you have to share a microphone with the person who broke your heart. If, perhaps, the drugs wore off just in time for you to remember watching your ex-partner going home with someone else the night before. This is what made the album, particularly the collaborations between Buckingham and Nicks, so interesting, and slightly troubling: a real-time plea to see which of them could come out of the breakup more adored than they were inside of the relationship. Buckingham lost, of course, and didn’t stand much of a chance. Nicks, gifted, charming, and singular, was the greatest and most fully developed character in the album’s soap opera, despite only taking lead vocals on two songs. But beyond winners and losers, the formula had already been figured out. For the voyeur who prefers public collapse, there is no better combination than someone who is both sad and willing to lie to themselves about it.

  Without a healthy investment in the art of denial, the album doesn’t work. That, truly, is the album’s greatest performer. Only denial of an emotional desire for escape could lead a band to complete an album when, at their worst moments, they were unable to talk to each other without screaming. In the Sausalito studio where the album was recorded, there were no windows. Mick Fleetwood, after a few weeks of recording, removed all of the clocks from the walls. When there is no image of time to make stand still, everything can become a type of stillness. The album represents the sound of ’70s excess at every turn, asking the band how much of the process and all of its demons they could take into themselves. It all spoke to the band’s interest in self-torture for the sake of Mick Fleetwood’s mission, his desire to make The Great American Pop Album at all costs, even if Fleetwood Mac had to be held together by cocaine and scotch tape.