They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

  In 2014, Future began a run of production that rap had rarely seen. Starting with Honest, he released three studio albums and five mixtapes in the span of two years. The start of the run coincided with the crumbling of Future’s personal life. The first album of the stretch, Honest, was released in April of 2014, a month before Future’s son was born with singer Ciara, and four months before Ciara called off their engagement, separating Future from his son, also named Future. Allegations of cheating followed, and within months, Ciara was removing a tattoo of Future’s initials from her hand, tattoos that the couple had gotten together shortly after falling in love. It was an intense and public collapse, with Ciara and Future both responding subtly, and then not-so-subtly to the relationship’s end. Ciara, less than a year after the split, was in a public relationship with Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson, while Future, it seemed, was growing increasingly frantic, detached, and brilliantly productive.

  The crown jewel of Future’s run is 2015’s Dirty Sprite 2, which serves as the perfect companion to Honest and stands as one of rap’s darkest breakup albums. On the surface, it’s simply haunted and paranoid: the artist stumbling through descriptions of various drug-fueled exploits. The title itself derives from the mix of clear soda and codeine cough syrup, Future’s drug of choice. But it is more than simply several odes to a vice; it’s a discussion of the vice as a way to undo memory. There is still the boastful Atlanta hustler persona that Future cultivated on his past albums, but there’s also an exhaustion present. On the song “Groupies,” he groans through a chorus of “now I’m back fucking my groupies” in a way that sounds like he’d rather be anywhere else.

  The reason Dirty Sprite 2 is such a brilliant breakup record is that it doesn’t directly confront the failing of a relationship, but intimately details the movements of what that failure turned an artist into. It is misery as I have most frequently seen black men experiencing their misery, not discussed, pushed into a lens of what will drown it out with the most ferocity. Future, in a year, watched a woman he loved leave him with their child, and then find public joy with someone else, while he wallowed, occasionally tweeting out a small bitter frustration about the newfound distance. There are as many ways to be heartbroken as there are hearts, and it is undeniable that it is exceptionally difficult to be both public-facing and sad. Future’s golden run was born out of a desire to bury himself. Rather, a desire to be both seen and unseen.

  All of the albums released from 2014–2016 were released to both critical and commercial success, which made the run even more stunning. Future wasn’t just creating throwaway works to help forget about his sadness. Dirty Sprite 2 went platinum. What A Time To Be Alive, a 2015 collaborative mixtape where Future outshined Drake at every turn also debuted at #1 on the Billboard chart. 2016’s Evol also topped the charts. In between, there were the mixtapes: Beast Mode and 56 Nights in 2015, Purple Reign in 2016.

  All of them ruminated on the same handful of emotions, reveled in the same methods of darkness and escape. I guess, when you work so hard to dodge the long arms of grief, it is impossible to allow all of grief’s stages to move through you. It is difficult to talk about Future’s run without also talking about what the end looks like, or if it will end. He seems to be reaching toward an inevitable collapse. All of us can only outrun silence for so long before we have no option but to face it. I think of this as I turn the volume up on Evol the week after it comes out, an album that deals in all of the various and dangerous forms that love can take. It seems like a small shift in a different direction for Future, who seemed to be sliding back in a more confident, recovering persona. A month after the release of Evol, Ciara and Russell Wilson announced their engagement.

  What often doesn’t get talked about with real and deep heartbreak after a romantic relationship falls apart is that it isn’t always just a single moment. It’s an accumulation of moments, sometimes spread out over years. It is more than just the person you love leaving; it’s also seeing them happy after they’ve left, seeing them beginning to love someone else, seeing them build a life that you perhaps hoped to build with them. Sometimes it isn’t as easy as unfollowing a person on social media to not see these moments. When it is present and unavoidable, there have to be other ways of severing emotion from memory. In a 2016 Rolling Stone interview, Future tells the interviewer that he spends most of his days in a dark recording studio, hours with codeine and a notebook, until he loses track of time. It walks a line between punishment and survival, like so many tools of escape do. So many of Future’s songs since Ciara left him are about how much excess he can absorb until everything around him rings hollow, and I suppose this is maybe a better option than albums directly attacking Ciara’s new life. It strikes me as Future understanding that, in some ways, he deserves where he ended up, and the work, the codeine-fueled brilliance, is how he is delivering his pound of flesh while also trying to never be caught by any single emotion.

  It is easy to think of anything that makes you feel better as medication, even if it only makes you feel better briefly, or even if it will make you feel worse in the long run. In my high school years, after my mother was gone, I watched my father run himself into the ground. In part, due to necessity: two high school-aged children, active in sports, caused him, as a single parent, to be in several places at once. But he was (and is) also, by nature, someone who takes immense pride in labor, and this heightened when he seemed to be coping with the death of his wife. At a traffic light on the way home from a soccer practice in 1999, two years after my mother died, my father fell asleep in the driver’s seat of the car. The light turned green, and cars behind us honked, eventually jarring him awake. I remember staring at him, the glow of the red light bleeding into the car and resting on his briefly sleeping face. I remember thinking that, instead of waking him up, I should let him rest. That maybe, what we see when we close our eyes is better than anything the living world could offer us in our waking hours. I imagine this is why Future has become obsessed with losing track of time. It is hard to keep missing someone when there’s no way to tell how long you’ve been without them. When everything blurs into a singular and brilliant darkness.

  POSTSCRIPT:

  It is February 2017 and I am crying in the John Glenn Columbus International Airport in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio. It could be the lack of sleep. I just got off of a plane from San Francisco, a city I flew out of at midnight after flying in less than 24 hours earlier. I am back in Columbus for less than 24 hours to do a reading, and then I am flying back to Los Angeles. It is a wretched schedule, one that has caused many of my friends to put their hands on my face and ask me if I’m doing okay, and I am not really, but I smile and shrug and tell them I’ll see them soon. I’m holding a newspaper with my face on it. It is the Columbus Dispatch, my hometown’s biggest newspaper. I learned to love reading at the feet of this newspaper. As a child, I would unravel it on Sundays and hand my brother the comic section while I read the ads, the obituaries, the box scores. I am in it because I answered questions to a kind interviewer about a book of poems I wrote. It seems almost impossible to measure the amount of work (and luck, and certainly privilege) that allowed me to end up here, but that isn’t the entire reason that I’m crying. It is my mother’s birthday. If she were living, she’d be celebrating 64 years today, and I am in an airport holding something in my hands that she might have been proud of, and I can’t take it to her and place it in her living hands and say look. look at what I did with the path you made for me. And states away, someone still living has decided that they aren’t in love with me anymore, and so I am flying thousands of miles for weeks at a time and staying up staring at computer screens until there is nothing rattling in my brain but a slow static to ride into dreams on.

  Headphones are around my neck as I cry in this airport newspaper shop, blaring the second of Future’s two new albums, released in consecutive weeks: Future on one Friday, and HNDRXX on the next. HNDRXX is startling in approach and executi
on. It is Future both unapologetic and unimpressed with himself, all at once. For the first time, he seems truly sad, made plain. It’s an album of broken crooning, finally slowing down enough to undo the vast nesting doll of grief. From denial to acceptance, and everything in between. It seems like this may be the album that ends Future’s run. Both are projected to go #1 on the charts, making Billboard history. HNDRXX is the logical bookend to Honest, which started his run in 2014. Honest, with its performed depth, offered nothing of emotional substance. HNDRXX ends on “Sorry,” a nearly eight-minute song where everything comes apart. It’s Hendrix apologizing for Future, or Future apologizing for himself, or regret piling on top of regret until the whole building collapses. At the opening of verse two is the line, “It can get scary when you’re legendary,” delivered in Future’s signature throaty drone. The endless work, the hiding from that which hurts, maybe leads to some unforeseen success. And the funny thing about that is how it won’t make any of us feel less alone. That’s how running into one thing to escape another works. Distance has a wide mouth, and I haven’t slept in a bed in 48 hours, and the people who miss me are not always the people I want to be missed by, and the last time I stood over my mother’s grave, the weeds had grown around her name so I picked at them with my bare hands for a while before giving up and sitting down inside of them instead. Still, I am in a paper because I chose work over feeling sad for three months, and now I don’t have the energy to feel anything but sad. The woman who works at the newsstand taps me on the shoulder, and asks me if I can turn down the music in my headphones because it’s distracting other customers. She walks away, never saying anything about the fact that I was crying in the middle of her store.

  November 22, 2014

  Believe it or not, there are places in Ohio where boys load guns on the laps of their fathers and walk out into the slow-arriving winter air for the hunt. Believe it or not, there are places the hunt is about the feeling of pulling on a trigger and the rich vibration it sends through the shoulder. The joy in watching a body fall. I say believe it or not for myself, really. You likely already know this, or have a corner of a place you’re from that feels familiar to it. My parents wouldn’t let any of their children make their fingers into a gun, even while playing. My oldest brother, the first and most eager to push back against their rules, decided to buy a Super Soaker water gun. In the ’90s, they were all the rage. Bright, splashed in fluorescent colors, and large enough to hold nearly a gallon of water. My brother kept it under his bed in a case, taking it out only for the occasional neighborhood water fight. During one such bit of revelry, after he’d gone off to college in the late ’90s and left his water gun treasure behind, I remember a boy spraying an occupied police car with a brief and sharp blast of water. The police, outraged, burst from their car and began running, a small gathering of black children scattering like ants, laughing their way into never being caught.

  I am in one of Ohio’s corners where animals die by the bullet and pile up in fields, or hide in tall stalks of unharvested land. It is southern Ohio, the part that rubs up close to Kentucky and considers itself a part of the Grand American South. This section of Ohio is interesting due to the aesthetics of the South it aspires to, and fails to reach. People hang confederate flags from trucks and anchor their words in a drawl. It is the South crafted by someone who only understands the South through movie stereotypes. A few days away from Thanksgiving, I am sitting at the table with a man who certainly has fired a gun, both for survival and for sport. On the news, there is another story about gun control and the man growls. We all have a right to protect our families, he says, looking out into the vast land through the window. And I think I agree with him, at least on the surface. So I nod slowly, lowly offer a small sound of affirmation. We all have a right to keep the people we love safe.

  The reason my parents gave for their hard stance on toys explicitly molded after weapons was that they didn’t want their children to fall victim to the world’s obsession with violence at such a young age. What’s funny about my corner of Ohio and the corner of Ohio that I am spending Thanksgiving in is that both of the populations, though of vastly different demographics, can tell the difference between a gunshot and fireworks. This knowledge is essential if you are black and a child in a house with big windows, perhaps dreaming of the outside world and all of its possibilities. The key is in the echo. A gunshot, generally, is a brief burst and then a brief echo. A firework, on the other hand, explodes and echoes back, back, back. It swallows and keeps swallowing. Even if the light never touches a sky you can see, the echo is what to listen for. I don’t remember how young I was when I learned this, or if I will teach it to any children I may one day have to look after. We all have a right to keep the people we love safe.

  My family doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving, but my partner’s family does. So I make my way with her down to Buford, Ohio, each year, and this year is no different except for we don’t live in the state anymore, so the trip is longer. I’m generally the only black person here for miles, which is mostly fine because there aren’t enough people in the town to stare at me with confusion. Once, last year, I went out on my own to find a gas station, or perhaps a coffee shop. And when I got to the counter to pay, I reached rapidly for my wallet in my front pocket, and the white man behind the counter jumped ever so slightly. It’s one of those things you notice after you spend a lifetime as an object of various levels of fear. After that, I decided that if I go out here, someone else should pay for anything I need. But I mostly stay inside. I am sitting on the couch with my partner’s father, who I like because he is much like my father. An Army man, with uncompromising principles and varied politics, who speaks firmly and endlessly, but with good intentions. I like watching the news with him, even when our politics don’t align, because he is a curious observer of the world, something that can’t be said for every white man his age. In a way, we have a relationship that revolves around us using each other: with all of his children moved on and largely out of the house, I’m the son he can sit with and know that I’ll listen to him ramble when no one else will. And for me, he’s a small thing that reminds me enough of home to feel safe. I told him, when I was last here, about my encounter with the fearful cashier, and he turned red with anger and embarrassment. He wanted to know where it was, who the cashier was. It was a small town, and he wanted to know who to see about the issue at hand. It was slightly endearing, done with no performance in mind, just a genuine reaction to what he imagined as a simple injustice.

  On the news, an anchor is discussing Ferguson. In a few days, a grand jury is going to decide whether or not to indict Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot unarmed black teenager Michael Brown a few months earlier. I was on a plane when it happened, I remember, landing to a wave of news that got worse with each minute. When I tell my partner’s father that I think the police officer is going to get off without an indictment, he shrugs lightly. He was just doing his job, he says. And then, without looking away from the television, he says: I hope those people don’t riot in that city.

  It occurs to me that for some, emotional distance is what it takes to equalize race. A white man fights in the army next to black men and so he learns what it is to die for those particular black men. A white man grows old and a young black man comes into his life that could be his son’s age, and he learns what it is to want to fight for him, as well. We all do this, I think. It’s how we learn to work through our various disconnects. Still, without anything chopping at the root of our souls, we’re still imagining the individual only, and not the system that surrounds them, that makes them feared. The cashier in Buford, Ohio, who jumped at my attempt for my wallet, didn’t know me as an individual. He simply knew fear learned from a system, played on loop to him for an entire life.

  We are different and then also not, the people of my temporary Thanksgiving geography and I. We both want to survive through another year. Still, they were taught to run toward guns for survival, and I was
taught to run from them, or even the illusion of them. Soon, I will retreat to the kitchen and chop something large into something smaller with the sharp blade of a knife that I would never carry outside of this home, for fear of what the land and the people in it would make of me.

  The things we work to unlearn are funny, in that way. In my first year of high school, I snuck my brother’s Super Soaker onto school grounds. It was a foolish moment of youthful exuberance. A water balloon fight had broken out in the school’s parking lot earlier in the week. It was nearing the end of the school year, and everyone was restless and eager to be finished. During the lunch period, I pulled out the bright, fluorescent water gun and sprayed it at a crowd in the hallway for a few short seconds before the school’s security guard snatched the water gun from my hands, dragging me to the school’s office. I got reprimanded by both the principal and my father, who took me home, took the water gun, and hid it somewhere. I haven’t seen it since.

  I didn’t, in that moment, understand that what makes a gun real or fake in the imagination ransacked by fear isn’t always the color of it, or the shape of it. Sometimes, it is the body of the person holding it, or the direction that they choose to point it in. What my parents were trying to teach wasn’t a lesson about weapons, but a lesson of the body and the threats it carries. We all have a right to keep the people we love safe.

  In Buford, on a couch in the afternoon near Thanksgiving, I watch old footage of Ferguson, Missouri on fire a few months before, protesters clogging its streets and chanting for justice. I watch my partner’s father shake his head slowly as the bodies of protesters began to clash with heavily-armed police. There are sometimes wide and splitting paths that take us away from the people we aspire to love, even if we know they are loving us in the best way they can, with all of the worldview that their world has afforded them. As the sound on the television dies down before bleeding into a commercial, I hear a popping sound coming from somewhere north. I wait to count the echoes. I look, briefly, to see if there is any light in the sky.