They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

  In his final and most iconic music video, for his cover of the Nine Inch Nails song “Hurt,” Johnny Cash sits at the head of a table covered in food and riches. It is all very Christ-like. The video was filmed as a race against time, with the 71-year-old Cash declining in health and uncomfortable in the unseasonably cold Nashville weather. The director, Mark Romanek, decided to use the music video as an opportunity to be candid about the state of Cash’s health. It is a video filled with humanizing regret and heartbreak. Clips of Cash’s earlier career moments juxtaposed with footage of cracked platinum records and an abandoned museum that once bore his name, his longtime wife June, looking at him with both adoration and concern. In a story I read once, Romanek recounts the video’s most powerful and unscripted moment. At the end, Cash picks up a glass of wine and spills it all over the feast sitting in front of him at the table before forcefully putting the glass down. Everyone in the room began crying, Romanek said. Cash sat still, looking out of a window, unblinking. Despite wanting to be a man of deeper evil, surviving himself and all of his demons.

  June died three months after the video was filmed. Johnny died four months later. He was buried next to her in a black coffin.

  Back on stage in New York, Offset yells to the crowd. Something about how good it is to make it out of where they are from alive. The word “from” hangs in the air. The lights fade to black.

  The Obama White House, A Brief Home For Rappers

  Eazy-e was invited to the white house by mistake in March of 1991. It was for a lunch fundraiser being held by then-president George H.W. Bush. Eazy, perhaps in spite of the error, paid $4,000 to attend. This was only a few years after the FBI had set its sights on the members of N.W.A. for their album Straight Outta Compton, most notably for the song “Fuck The Police.” George Bush, a law and order Republican, was holding the dinner for a group called the Republican Senatorial Inner Circle. Eazy-E arrived in a suit jacket, with his signature L.A. Kings hat on his head, curled hair spilling from its edges.

  I remember the moment as a news clip only. I watched as a child who only knew that Eazy-E was a part of a rap group that scared people. But there he was, in the White House, with businessmen, senators, and a president who would likely prefer his music to be banned. It was, at the time, a rare access granted to any rapper, but especially one who was seen as too intense for even some of rap’s younger, more eager fans. Not everyone was impressed. In the diss track “No Vaseline,” Ice Cube opens the final verse, repeating the same line, a thinly veiled shot: “I’d never have dinner with the President / I’d never have dinner with the President / I’d never have dinner with the President.”

  In the photo that surfaced just a few days before he stepped out of the White House for the final time and left us to our wreckage, Barack Obama is surrounded. At first glance, it is hard to make him out among the mass of familiar faces: Busta Rhymes, Chance The Rapper, J. Cole, Alicia Keys, Common, Wale, DJ Khaled, Pusha T, Rick Ross, and Janelle Monáe, among a few others. What struck me as the best part of the photo were the looks sported by everyone other than Obama himself. A couple of the rappers chose suits, sure. But some, like Ludacris, chose to be dressed down in a sweatshirt and sneakers. Even the ones that chose to be in nicer clothing had their own signature touches: Rick Ross letting his dress pants spill into a pair of black Adidas, Ludacris in a pair of Jordans, Chance in his signature baseball hat. The conversation that was happening in the photo was one of comfort. Coming as you are, not in defiance or spectacle, as Eazy-E did in 1991, to sit and smile in the faces of those who wished Eazy-E to be anywhere but smiling in their faces. There is certainly a power in that, but the door that Barack Obama pushed open for rappers to be seen and comfortable in his White House presented a new type of power dynamic.

  The optics of equality, though not doing the same work as actual measures of equality, mean something. Particularly to any people who have been denied access or visibility, or any people who were made to feel like the work they created was not worthy of equal consideration in the eyes of the country it was created in. The history of black people in the White House is weighted primarily in positions of servitude, or performance. Recently, of course, black artists and athletes have been invited as distinguished guests, but few like Eazy-E. There is a lot to be said for the river of quality black art that pushed forward during the Obama administration, particularly during the second half of his time in office, after the shine of the first four years wore off. And though I’m not entirely sure that the right thing to do is tie that art to Obama himself, he made a fascinating companion to the times. What black people always understood about Obama that often got lost in non-black analysis of him was the immense difficulty in being the most visible man in the world and operating in a way that was often unafraid to nod to blackness, even clumsily. I am not speaking in political moments here, but in aesthetics presented to a people who craved glimpses of a black president who, at his most comfortable, was unafraid to briefly talk like our friends or family might talk around a card table. A black first lady who, in public, would be unafraid to cut a look at someone that would both cause us to laugh and send us a chill, a look that we understood. One passed down from some universal black ancestor who we all knew.

  Even with the aesthetics that nod to a celebration of blackness that black people could latch on to, Barack Obama has, also, never been nearly as cool as we’ve imagined him to be or wanted him to be. Some of that, of course, is due to the constraints of the office. And some of it is, of course, due to the fact that he’s a generation or two ahead of us, and one can lead while facing the youth and still look uncool when they turn away from them to face the nation at large. But, even if we imagined it as something greater, Barack Obama’s connection to rap music and rap artists always felt logical. Not necessarily because of his race, but because of how he always seemed to carry himself with the charisma and understanding of the stage that an MC has. By this, I don’t mean to sell the idea that Barack Obama could be a rapper; more the idea that his understanding of cadence, tone, and crowd control always felt rooted in rap music, which is rooted in a black oral tradition. People telling stories around porches, and then to instruments, and then to beats. It’s why his biggest moments on stage often carried gestures or language with a similar swagger. You could feel it in ’08, when he brushed dirt off of his shoulders while a crowd erupted around him. Or when, during the first presidential visit to Jamaica in 32 years, he smiled while waiting for the audience to settle before shouting, “Wha Gwan, Jamaica!” into the microphone, causing the audience to burst into laughter. Or when he dropped the microphone on the floor of the White House during his final correspondent’s dinner, two fingers pressed to his lips. It was always there, the promise of the Obama Moment that we could watch and see ourselves in.

  For all of the talk about how art can open the human spirit up to empathy, years of black people rapping about what is happening in their communities hasn’t exactly softened much of America’s response to those communities or the people in them. This is most disappointing because rap was born out of and directly into a political moment, and the genre, through its decades of growth, hasn’t turned away from the core idea of archiving life as a political action. Rap has been a genre of speaking directly to politicians, though rarely to their faces. N.W.A. weren’t the first rappers to be feared, but they surely incited a widespread panic among the government and government agencies who felt threatened by the group’s message. For all of its political motivations, rap’s relationship with actual, real politicians has been spotty at best, especially when considering the currency gained by infamy, across almost all musical genres. To provoke someone in power enough that they call for your music to be banned was rap’s greatest trick, especially in the late ’80s and early to mid-’90s, when the government was easiest to provoke into such responses. It didn’t take rappers long to realize that their particular brand of storytelling wasn’t the type that could gain sympathy or understanding from w
hite people in power, so why not play into the inevitable fear? When people in power who enforce and back violent policies pretend that the “rawness” of rap makes its creators less human, there is no use in imagining much of a bridge. The question isn’t about the obscene, but more what obscenities people are comfortable crawling into bed with.

  Obama, as much as we sometimes imagined him otherwise, was a politician. He was an American President, which means that he was tied into all of America’s machinery, which means that he was operating with a proximity to some level of violence at all times. But he was more than this, too, a complex and fullstoried person. The problem with the way visible and complicated people of color and their histories are approached by the world around them is that they are, all too often, not afforded the mosaic of a full and nuanced history. If, in a song, a rapper has lyrics about enduring or even delivering violence, one might not think them as worthy enough to have any concerns about violence in their communities. It’s one of the many fatal flaws of politics: not trusting those who are either living or archiving an experience to know what might be best for that lived experience.

  To see Barack Obama throw open the doors to Jay Z and Beyoncé was encouraging, but expected. I was most encouraged to see Barack Obama continually swing the door open or give nods to rappers like Kendrick Lamar and Pusha T, rappers who have lyrics that still cause panic among some of the suits in Washington. To do this, knowing that it would open him up to the most predictable and worst kind of criticism: stale readings of rap lyrics by conservative pundits looking to discredit both the president’s commitment to politics and his commitment to their imagined American culture. Conservative pundits who, perhaps, once purchased drugs from drug dealers, now decrying the past drug dealers on television. Obama being a politician meant that a part of this was also performance, of course. But he didn’t ever appear to only entertain rappers. He listened to them: Macklemore on addiction, black youth and criminal justice with Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole. The seat that was given at the table was more than just an idle seat. It was one that put artists in a room where they could be heard.

  What strikes me most is that it may never be like this again. When I am asked what I will miss most about Barack Obama, especially when thinking about facing down the coming years, I’m sure I’ll manage to think up something greater than the fact that he let rappers into the White House. I’m sure I’ll miss watching him in front of a crowd when he was on, and he knew he was on. The way he’d lean slightly away from the microphone and let a smile creep in while being bathed in some hard-earned spectacular applause from an audience full of people who knew that they were watching someone who could get them to commit to nearly anything. I’ll miss the way he looked at Michelle. Rather, the way they looked at each other, like no one else was watching them. I’ll miss the shots of him playing basketball in sweatpants and a tucked-in shirt, a reminder that he was, indeed, never as cool as I wanted him to be. But I’ll remember the door held open for rap and all of its aesthetics somewhere along the line, as the funding for the arts are drained, and the environment speeds toward unchecked disaster, and as we take to the streets again, weary, but willing to fight all of these things and more. I’m sure I’ll remember it as rap shifts back into an even more contentious state with politics, and as dinner with the president becomes once again an item of shame and ridicule. I am afraid and do not know what is coming next, but I am almost certain it will not be all good. But above my desk now, a picture of Barack Obama, surrounded. Rappers on every side of him, dressed however they chose to dress. Rappers with their honest songs about the people who live and die in places often used as political talking points, standing proud in front of their proud president. All of those smiling black people in the Oval Office. Miles away from a past where none of them, I imagine, ever thought they’d get to make it this far.

  The White Rapper Joke

  In the music video for the 1991 3rd bass single “Pop Goes The Weasel,” MC Serch and Pete Nice are beating an actor playing Vanilla Ice with baseball bats. The actor, with large blond hair and Vanilla Ice’s signature American Flag track jacket, collapsed on the ground moments earlier. Serch and Pete Nice become more aggressive, swinging the bats down with a type of fervor only reserved for the movies. The song “Pop Goes The Weasel” is a song aimed at the rapid commercial shift happening in rap. The first wave of rap’s commodification was starting at the dawn of the ’90s, when aspects of it were becoming less feared and easier for white people to digest, in part because of pre-packaged megastars like MC Hammer and, of course, Vanilla Ice. 3rd Bass, a celebrated underground group from Queens, seemed to be fed up with the rapidly changing landscape. And so, the actor playing Vanilla Ice is curled on the ground and we are to believe he is being beaten within an inch of his life. There is no actor in the video playing MC Hammer. He is not also on the ground being beaten with bats, though he is as much a part of this song’s narrative as Vanilla Ice is. Both manufactured, with somewhat fabricated histories, created to push into the mainstream and spread their shadows over everything they could so that white mothers in the suburbs might think of them as “fun, wholesome rap music,” and feel more justified wagging their fingers at the other stars of the genre. The fictional attack that 3rd Bass is playing out in the music video, when looked at through this lens, feels like a type of retaliation.

  The joke is that MC Serch and Pete Nice are also white. White rappers taking a bat to a white rapper at a time when the need to separate their whiteness from his was urgent. White rappers fighting to save the world from other white rappers in the name of real hip-hop. The other joke, if you look closely enough, is that the only black member of 3rd Bass was the DJ. His face wasn’t on the cover of the group’s debut album. In the second album cover he is there, in the back.

  The funny thing about Eminem is that me and my crew fucked with him because he talked that reckless shit like the white boys we’d known from a few blocks over who would scream at their mothers. One of them, Adam, punched his daddy one day, right there on the front lawn of his house. And his daddy didn’t even do anything except cover his face and shake his head and tell Adam that he was sorry for not letting him use the car. On the eastside where me and my boys were from, if you raised your hand to your father, you wouldn’t be raising it to anything else for at least a few weeks. There is a level of danger that proximity to whiteness makes thrilling, when taken in from afar. Knowing that you could never survive it, or even attempt it in your own life. Eminem was rapping directly into that proximity. For the black kids in the hood, he gained a type of credibility for the ruthlessness and carelessness with which he regarded human life, particularly his own. We understood nihilism, and a desire for exit. We understood anger, angst, bitterness, and the rage that fueled it. What we didn’t understand was a way to express what we understood and walk away unscathed. Eminem’s fantasies often involved the blood of people who were living, and it must be funny to be on the other side of a fantasy about death.

  Expressive and detailed anger is a luxury. Eminem found a way, despite all of his aggression, to turn most of his rage toward pop stars. Christina Aguilera, NSYNC, Britney Spears, Mariah Carey. In his videos, he would mock them while wearing plain white t-shirts to compliment his blonde hair, sometimes patted down with gel. It was another example of trying to swallow what you might not want to be associated with. Eminem looked, some days, like he could be right there in a boy band: white and welcoming, his most rugged edges only existing when he began speaking or rapping. Eminem’s biggest and best gimmick was about hiding his relentless desire to be separate from the pop establishment while still playing into the hands of it.

  The genre was ready for a white rapper again, after the mid- ’90s didn’t provide much in the way of white rappers that could be taken seriously in the mainstream. In the underground, absolutely. El-P and Atmosphere were starting exciting careers, but didn’t have any intention to break into the mainstream. Rap fans, a growing portion of them wh
ite, seemed to be eager for someone in the mainstream who looked like them. The white kids at my public school in the late ’90s would complain about The Source Magazine, how it had black rappers on the cover every month. When can I see someone on a magazine that looks like me? they would ask. Whenever I tell that part of the story, people can’t stop laughing. Eminem came with controversy, cosigns, and actual ability. His face was enough to get him into suburban households, and the window he offered into a danger with no repercussions let him into the hood. He was built for superstardom, and his rejection of mostly white pop stars and violent threats against their harmless masses completed the allure. He was a classroom bully. He was living out a type of white fantasy that the more liberal of us would shout down if it happened to be in a suit, in a boardroom, or in the White House. The fantasy of being able to say whatever you want, with no respect for the masses, with the masses rarely wanting you silenced.

  Listening to Eminem was like watching my white friend Adam cuss out his parents in broad daylight. Thrilling at first, but then, as I got older, more troubling. I stopped fucking with Adam when he brought a knife to school and threatened a teacher. He got suspended for two days a week after my boy Kenny from the eastside got expelled for having a small bag of weed in his pocket. I stopped fucking with Eminem when he couldn’t stop making rape jokes in his rhymes as he approached 40 years old. There is a time when all of us have to reevaluate the distance we actually have from dangerous moments. Eminem has a distance that never runs out. A distance that only grows wider. And there are those who would call him edgy for not realizing this, while ignoring those who realize that their proximity to danger is a lot slimmer, and yet they’ve still found a way to stay alive. No one finds this funny.