“The Chain,” the album’s most acclaimed song, is haunting, angry, teeming with regret and disgust. It is the whole of the album, condensed into just over four minutes. It was crafted largely in separate rooms, pieced together with past parts of old songs. It churns along painfully, driven by a McVie bass riff that sounds like a caged animal finally coming to terms with its surroundings. On the song, Buckingham and Nicks engage in a tug-of-war on the chorus, “If you don’t love me now / you will never love me again” and it is like they are shouting at each other from across the studio. Buckingham, toward the end before he takes on his howling guitar solo, feels like he is almost shouting. It is the one song on the album that makes me feel like something could be broken at any moment. It is the song you play for someone when they ask you what the fuss about Rumours is. It is the entire emotional cycle of dissolution, peaking at the end of the song with the band singing “Chain, keep us together” in unison, more as a plea than anything else.
It helps to think about Rumours as not just an album, but a living document. Once you push past the theatrics of it, the massive album sales and the thrilling gossip, it is a deeply sad project. One that reflects the human conflict of leaving and not leaving and trying to find some small mercy in the face of what has left you briefly torn apart. The songs are perfect, of course, drenched so richly in the late-’70s California aesthetic that, for a moment, you may forget what the songs were born out of. For anyone who has ever loved someone and then stopped loving them, or for anyone who has stopped being loved by someone, it’s a reminder that the immediate exit can be the hardest part. Admitting the end is one thing, but making the decision to walk into it is another, particularly when an option to remain tethered can mean cheaper rent, or a hit album, or at the very least, a small and tense place that you can go to turn your sadness into something more than sadness. It’s all so immovable, our endless need for someone to desire us enough to keep us around. To simply call Rumours a breakup album doesn’t do it justice. Most breakup albums have an end point. Some triumph, a reward or promise about how some supposed emotional resilience might pay off. Rumours is an album of continual, slow breaking.
My favorite photo of the band from the Rumours era was taken by Annie Leibovitz for the March 1977 Rolling Stone cover, the same month the album was released. The band is sprawled on a queen mattress that is resting on the floor. Mick Fleetwood, the glue, in the middle, his long limbs stretching from the top of the mattress to the bottom, a single sheet covering everyone. Buckingham has Christine McVie in his arms, a hand in her hair. Christine’s hand is outstretched, reaching over to touch Fleetwood’s foot. Nicks is resting on Fleetwood’s bare chest, her legs draped over John McVie’s stomach. John McVie is unbothered, reading a magazine. The joke is that they were always too connected to let each other go so easily. I like to think of this as the great lesson hiding in Rumours: there are people we need so much that we can’t imagine turning away from them. People we’ve built entire homes inside of ourselves for, that cannot stand empty. People we still find a way to make magic with, even when the lights flicker, and the love runs entirely out.
I see hell everywhere.
Future
V.
The clapping grows. By the last lines of the song, the entire crowd has joined in, clapping on beat with Marvin, breaking decorum to honor such brilliance. No one I know remembers who won the game.
For some of us, denying what this country is, and what it is doing to our bodies, is impossible. We are perhaps at the crossroads that Marvin Gaye was at in 1970, with the answers as clear as they’ve ever been, yet still pushing to ask questions. Trying to push our shoulder against one of the millions of doors America built to keep us out. And we are all here, we unlikely patriots. All of us pushed to the margins, trying to fight for ourselves and one another, all at once. Celebrating while still fighting, which is perhaps what represents the ethos of this country more than anything else. To bear witness to so much death that could easily be your own is to push toward redefining what it is to be a patriot in this country. It is even to push toward redefining “country,” until it becomes a place where there is both pride AND safety.
And so a transgender woman steps into the hallowed ground of the White House and fights to be heard in the name of undocumented transgender immigrants.
And so a woman scales a flagpole and tears down a symbol of oppression with her bare hands, taking time on the way down to deliver a word from the same God that spoke Marvin into revolution.
And so a community buries more of its own, but does not forget to celebrate, and does not forget to sing.
These are the people who I will remember most when I look up to the sky this year, watch it explode in light, and hear a child laughing.
February 26, 2012
The drive from columbus, ohio, to the middle of Minnesota isn’t particularly a simple undertaking. It is the worst kind of Midwest drive: the one that spans nearly 12 hours over the course of mostly wide open, farming land. For a brief moment, there is the excitement of Chicago, or the rolling greens of Madison, Wisconsin. It’s a tedious trip, but one that feels shorter with a person you like, and maybe want to impress. So in the still-dark of morning, I jumped into a car next to a girl I liked and wanted to impress. Atmosphere was playing in Minnesota that night, and I wanted to go a little and she wanted to go a lot and so I, then, wanted to go a lot. It was a Sunday at the end of winter. It was raining.
Atmosphere is a rap duo (made up of Slug, the rapper, and Ant, the producer) from Minneapolis. They are, in many ways, the darlings of the Midwest underground rap scene, the crown jewel of Minneapolis indie hip-hop label Rhymesayers. Their career, by 2012, spanned nine albums over 15 years, all of them filled with Slug’s singular ability to either pick apart his own flawed life, or enter the life of someone else and give their stories depth, a softness that might not otherwise be afforded to them by the outside world. His natural eye toward empathy is why, even with fans stretching all over the country, the passion for Atmosphere in the Midwest is at its most eager. Slug is an MC that comes across like the guy you might bump into telling a story at the supermarket or the diner. A pal of your parents who comes by to talk about the days that were both good, and old. Couple this with the fact that they are seemingly always working, piling on hundreds of shows in most years while also dropping a consistent stream of EPs, and their status with kids in working-class Midwest towns is cemented.
The fifth Atmosphere studio album, When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold, is, by all accounts, a concept album. Slug spends most of the songs looking into the lives of people who are struggling: single parents, minimum wage-earners, just trying to hang on to what they’ve got before someone comes to take it away. In 2008, I was struggling my way through my early 20s, leaving a good job with the state to sell music at a local bookstore because of some flawed punk concepts about principles. Every hour I worked stocking records and CDs or bantering with some customer about the importance of grunge felt like I was slouching my way closer to some type of freedom, even though there were months I could barely afford to keep my phone on, or times I had to wait until direct deposit hit at midnight on a Friday before I could eat. There are the politics of chosen struggle. What it is to not go home, when going home might be a more comfortable option. When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold was filled with anthems for me and my friends. Kids who were getting by, leaning on each other when they could. Kids that would pool their money and get a pizza on a Saturday night after working for ten hours. It was this album that played at house parties in whichever apartment had the most space to spare. This album that I would have in my headphones while I walked home from work in the rain, with my dark hood pulled up over my head.
On February 26, 2012, Atmosphere had a show in St. Cloud, Minnesota, which is about 45 minutes outside of Minneapolis. They were playing in the Atwood Ballroom, a banquet hall-type venue on St. Cloud State University’s campus. Not exact
ly the ideal setting for an underground rap show, but it was still not enough to turn us off from the journey. By 2012, my struggle was at least more glamorous. A few places would pay me to write words here and there, which would keep my lights on and keep a frozen pizza hanging out in my freezer. The 12-hour journey on that day seemed logical. My Sundays were mine and mine alone. I had just crawled out of the wreckage of a horrible relationship, and the potential to spend that much time in a car with someone who I liked felt thrilling. Someone who maybe liked me back, or at least didn’t think too poorly of spending 12 hours in a box with me, traversing the vast landscape of soybeans. We stopped for a few minutes in northern Ohio while the sun rose. We watched the planes take off and wished ourselves, for a moment, winged machines.
On the trip north through Illinois, the playlist was Atmosphere-heavy. This is a thing that I did, often. Listening to the act on the way to see the act, trying to figure out what songs they might play. I was missing the NBA All-Star game for this, something that I had strongly wanted to watch, but was told not to worry about by my smarter friends. One of them rolled her eyes, exasperated. “You like this girl, right?” she said. “Then why would you sit and watch a game that happens every year where it doesn’t even matter who fucking wins?”
There was sound logic there, but the NBA All-Star game was, in my life, less about who won and who lost. There was something freeing about it, the tone and pace of it. Seeing all of these players, mostly black, who spent the entire season restricted by the NBA’s structure, sometimes slowed down by coaches. Watching them call back to some of their playground days, ones that perhaps mirrored my own in freedom, if not in talent. Seeing players attempt alley-oop passes to themselves, or dribble moves that would get them pulled from most games. Most of the people I know who hate the NBA All-Star game are white. They complain, mostly, about the showboating, or the lack of fundamentals. They don’t understand why anyone would want to watch a game like that. When I think about black freedom, I think about the small moments of it, in concert with a larger-scale version of liberation. The NBA All-Star game brings me joy as it brought me joy to run on the blacktop and throw a no-look pass, or watch someone dribble a ball through someone else’s legs and get a chorus of “ooohhhhhs” from spectators. There is something about performing toward our roots in this manner, without an eye toward the white people who may be watching us, following our every movements with fear, or disgust.
My favorite parts of a road trip with another person are the moments where silence allows everyone in the car their own thoughts, and the space to assume what the other person is thinking. The song “Dreamer” from When Life Gives You Lemons is about a teenage mother who is raising kids on her own. She fantasizes of a better life until she realizes that her family is the better life. This song filled the car as we crossed through the middle of Wisconsin, and it made me think of the value in someone who is willing to see the world and write about it in the way that Slug does. The consideration of empathy in mainstream spaces does a lot, but what it might do better than anything is convince someone to fight for your life after your life is taken. Or, at worst, it might convince someone that you don’t deserve to be murdered because you wore gold teeth or typed a curse word into a box on the internet. For most of the drive I considered this. Slug, championed as the MC who could tell stories accesible enough for everyone in the world to enter. I envied this then, from the passenger seat of a car being driven by someone I desperately wanted to talk to in that moment, but instead pushed my lips to a small bottle of sweet tea to keep our silence ours.
There is a real excitement in seeing an artist play a show in, or around, the city they’re from. I’ve made trips across the country to see punk bands and rappers play tiny dives in the towns that made them. There’s a natural comfort that takes the stage. It comes with, I imagine, the comfort of knowing you could fall into your own bed after you’re done. I haven’t seen Atmosphere since February 26, 2012, mostly because I haven’t been able to catch them in Minnesota again. That night, what I remember more than anything is feeling, for a moment, like the floor might collapse under the weight of our collective thrill. I don’t mean the usual anxieties about the collection of bodies in a packed space. I mean, during the show, when Slug leaned over the stage and told the audience to jump, everyone jumped, and when I landed, I felt the floor bend itself underneath us all, like it was gritting its teeth just to contain our endless celebration of this hip-hop homecoming. And I did, for a moment, look down and feel like if this were to be it, I would be all right. If the floor gave out and the walls caved in, and we were all trapped under the ruins of the Atwood Ballroom in St. Cloud, Minnesota, I would at least have gone in a room where people were getting free on their own terms.
It remains one of the best rap shows I have ever seen, not just because I was there with someone who made me feel like there was a window for my heartbreak to crawl out of, and not just because I got to watch her smile and sway wide when the first notes of “Dreamer” bled through the speakers. It felt, on that night, like there was a true contract between audience and performer. What Slug does on records so well, the communication of concern, translates even better to Atmosphere’s live shows, where there is space to engage in plain conversation with the listening masses. That night, he put a sneaker on the edge of a monitor near the front of the stage, out of breath after playing through what felt like 30 songs in a row. “Listen,” he said, waiting a beat for the crowd to quiet. “Whatever else is happening out there in the world tonight, I need y’all to know that we’re gonna be all right. We’re going to make it.”
The feeling I love most is walking into night air after spending hours cloaked in sweat, dancing in a small room with strangers. If the night air is cool, the way it sits on your skin is a type of forgiveness. A balm for all of the heat you’ve leaned into. Sometimes, I think I still only go to shows for the way it feels to leave them, everyone pouring out of a bar or an arena, a collective gasp rising after everyone feels the same breeze at once. On the night of February 26, 2012, most phones didn’t work in the venue. I watched everyone staring, frustrated, at their phone screens, as they were denied the opportunity to post a photo or send a tweet. I eventually turned mine off until I got my fill of the cool night baptism. I turned it back on at just past midnight. Trayvon Martin had already been dead for five hours.
It was Twitter first, that night. Bits of a story: a shooting in Sanford, Florida. A teenage black boy. Iced tea and Skittles. Neighborhood watch. Emmett Till, Emmett Till, again. Even in the younger stages of Twitter—I had only been on for about a year and a half—the details of the story were being best reported on the scrolling timeline, even though the information was disjointed, coming too fast. I hadn’t adjusted myself to the routine like I have now. This was the first time I was reading about the murder of an unarmed black person in near-real time. The first time I was seeing reactions to it from people online in the same moment it was happening. The boy didn’t even have a name yet, he was just a parade of descriptions: black. Hoodie. Boy. Walking, and then not.
On February 26, 2012, people weren’t yet insisting heavily that Trayvon Martin deserved to die. People weren’t yet arguing over the hooded sweatshirt as a respectable piece of clothing to wear in the rain. The protests hadn’t swarmed thick into the streets. His murderer hadn’t even been charged. I sat on a bench outside of the Atwood Ballroom, scrolling through my phone, glued to it as I would learn to become in these moments each year after. Over my right shoulder, my date to the show read along with me, first Twitter and then small news hits. Every now and then, she would gasp, something quick and silent. I remember looking up and into the still-lingering crowd and seeing another person scrolling their phone, stopped in their tracks. And then another, and one or two more. I imagined they were all taking in what I was taking in, even if they weren’t. I wanted, for a moment, to share in this small horror. What a country’s fear of blackness can do while you are inside a room, soaking i
n joy, being promised that you would make it through.
On Kindness
I am made more uneasy by a rage that rests itself beneath silence than I am with something loud, stomping along a house and making glass rattle. Growing up, my father was a mostly calm man, even in anger. Instead of spankings, he preferred long, drawn out lectures, often peppered with stories, to get his point across. My mother’s voice, naturally loud, did most of its work when joy was afoot. Her laugh was the type to echo through walls. She was a woman with a loud personality, loud smile, loud walk, the type of presence you could feel coming from miles away. In a largely black neighborhood, I grew up around parents who were not all like my own: my friend Josh, for example, had two parents that were both loud and stern, laying down strict rules and enforcing them at all costs. Other friends had relaxed, playful parents. These were my favorite. The ones who appeared to let all things slide. Video games played until all hours, basketball dents in a garage. One such set of parents, always gentle and thrilled to see me and my brother, split when we were just teenagers. The mother stayed, the father drifted miles away. We never saw him again. The mother, wrecked by grief, grew more and more silent as the years wore on. She stopped laughing, barely smiled when she recognized me on a bike going past her house. A few years ago, I’d heard that after her youngest son went to college, she stopped leaving the house altogether.
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