They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

“This, too, is a response to grief,” he tells us. “Covering yourself in the spoils of your survival.”

It feels, in tone and tension, like coming home for a summer after your first year of college, having tasted another existence and wanting more, but instead sleeping in your childhood room.

We’ve run out of ways to weaponize sadness, and so it becomes an actual weapon.

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 what Chance does is what the best artists of color manage to do in this setting: makes music facing his people while also leaving the door open for everyone else to try and work their way in.

Its name is deployed by politicians who imagine any place black people live as a war zone.

The soundtrack to grief isn’t always as dark as the grief itself.

It is fitting that Chance comes from a city that never lets you walk alone.

There is global activism, but there is also the work of turning and facing your people, which has to become harder with the more distance put between you and those people.

What it must feel like to imagine that no one in America will be killed while a man sings a song about the promise of living.

“Is that weed? Who the fuck brings weed to a Carly Rae Jepsen concert?”

This is the difficult work: convincing a room full of people to set their sadness aside and, for a night, bring out whatever joy remains underneath—in a world where there is so much grief to be had, leading the people to water and letting them drink from your cupped hands.

I considered how often there is shame attached to loving anyone publicly. The shame, of course, comes on a sliding scale, depending on who you are and who you love.

Before Super Bowl XLI, it never occurred to me that a halftime show could exist that would upstage the spectacle on the field.

This is a particular type of love. The type that has survived history and the weapons formed against the body and all of its lineage. The type that has turned the weapon back in on itself and now, that which welcomes violence can also welcome two arms, spread apart in a wide and waiting hug.

there is nothing about The Weeknd that assumes love as a necessary vehicle for physical intimacy.

and I wonder what it must be like to trust a stranger with your undoing in the way that The Weeknd asks us to. What it must be like to feel briefly full without considering if any emptiness might follow.

The Weeknd tells the same tale: it’s never about love but then again, how can it be about anything but love,

When I still hear and read the punk rock scene referred to as a “brotherhood,” I think about what it takes to build a brotherhood in any space. Who sits at the outskirts, or who sits at the bottom while the brotherhood dances oblivious and heavy at the top.

Too often, the choice in punk rock and D.I.Y. spaces for non-white men is a choice between being tokenized, or being invisible.

Sadness, when you are truly being swallowed by it, can feel almost universal.

we feel like we owe it something, even when it has taken more from us than we’ve taken from it.

There are endless ways that we have found and will find to blame women for things, particularly when it prevents us from unraveling our own unhappiness.

I’d rather have average art and survival than miracles that come at the cost of someone’s life.

But what I’m less in favor of is the celebration of pain that might encourage someone to mine deeper into that unforgiving darkness, until it is impossible for them to climb out.

Sometimes, that which does not kill you sits heavy over you until all of the things that did not kill you turn into a single counterforce that might.

I am sad yesterday, and I might be sad tomorrow, and even the day after. But I will be here, looking for a way out, every time.

Even now, I’m not as invested in things getting better as I am in things getting honest.

There is no evidence to suggest that humans are going to become any more kind this year, or more empathetic, or more loving toward each other.

I’m not sold on pessimism as the new optimism. I need something that allows us to hope for something greater while confronting the mess of whatever all this blind hopefulness has driven us to.

This is the part of death as art that isn’t always noble: the idea that the death, before it is art, is still death.

even when death is inevitable, there are so many who will still fight against it.

but what I’m learning more and more as I go on is that my grief isn’t special beyond the fact that it’s mine, that I know the inner workings of it more than I know yours.

What’s Going On is, at its most literal and perhaps most difficult to process, an album that presents a small series of inquiries that weave into a much larger and rhetorical narrative: what are we doing to each other, and what will the world look like if we don’t change?

It’s easy to convince people that you are really okay if they don’t have to actually hear what rattles you in the private silence of your own making.

an acknowledgement of that which we all spend a lifetime searching for: the permission to come home again, after forgetting that there are still people who will show up to love you, no matter how long you’ve been away.

No one decides when the people we love are actually gone. May we all be buried on our own terms.

it seems the nightmares about drowning have again mounted my dreaming hours & have left me gasping into the stillness before morning & yet I still have not learned to swim.

A person is a whole person when they are good sometimes but not always, and loved by someone regardless.

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.

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.

The shared machinery of love and trust has many parts and therefore many flaws, and therefore many opportunities for disaster.

Heartbreak is one of the many emotions that sits inside the long arms of sadness, a mother with many children.

At some point, a person figured out that the performance of sadness was a currency, and art has bowed at its altar ever since.

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’s all so immovable, our endless need for someone to desire us enough to keep us around.

And so a community buries more of its own, but does not forget to celebrate, and does not forget to sing.

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 thing about grief is that it never truly leaves. From the moment it enters you, it becomes something you are always getting over.

Selfishly, and more than anything else, I’d like to see her again, whatever seeing in the afterlife might look like. I’d love to sit across from her and hear her laugh at something, anything.