They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

This, more than anything, is about everything and everyone that didn’t get swallowed by the vicious and yawning maw of 2016, and all that it consumed upon its violent rattling which echoed into the year after it and will surely echo into the year after that one.

It was an endless year that was sometimes hot and sometimes unbearable, and I sometimes threw open my windows and let music flood into the streets and I sometimes watched people glance up with a knowing smile,

Chance made the only thing in 2016 that fit unconditionally.

Joy, or the concept of joy, is often toothless and vague because it needs to be. It is both hollow and touchable, in part because it is something that can’t be explained as well as it can be visualized and experienced.

The truth is that I, like so many of you, spent 2016 trying to hold on to what joy I could. I, like so many of you, am now looking to get my joy back, after it ran away to a more deserving land than this one.

He is the type of writer I love most: one who thinks out loud and allows me to imagine the process of the writing.

And so, this is about the choir and about those who might be bold enough to join it before another wretched year arrives to erase another handful of us. This is, more than anything, about those still interested in singing. Say a prayer before you take off. Say a prayer when you land.

I believe in the magic of seeing a musician perform in the place they once called home.

Even in my decade-plus of loving Bruce Springsteen’s music, I have always known and accepted that the idea of hard, beautiful, romantic work is a dream sold a lot easier by someone who currently knows where their next meal will come from.

felt like I fell in a different type of love with The River after seeing it in this way. What it must feel like to write an album like this. To listen to an album like this with different eyes on the world. 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.

understand that this is all rooted in what I have convinced myself of for years: that a closeness for, or even a love for culture, puts you so far into it that you can embody all aspects without harm. That love is the great equalizer, even if there is blood underneath a word that no longer belongs to you.

What it is to find small pieces of a person who you know you’ll never get to wholly experience again. It feels, almost always, like piecing together a road map that places you directly in the middle of nowhere.

Once, I never knew how anyone who lived in a beautiful home in a nice neighborhood could be sad. Sometimes, when you know so much of not having, it is easy to imagine those who do have as exceptionally worry-free.

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

I am still, always, a black kid from a black neighborhood, who once biked to the edge of the suburbs and then once loved my friends from the suburbs and then sometimes buried my friends from the suburbs. And even then, never understanding the interior of those lives beyond the angst-ridden stories that teenagers share, I never understood how a life that looked beautiful could be immensely sad.

he wanted to get laid at least close to as much as our other buddy Nick who wasn’t in a band at all, but who had dark hair and boyish good looks, and a devil may care ambiance that all the girls we hung around found irresistible.

Columbus is like any other midsize-but-close-to-big city. It overflows with talented people who don’t always know where to place their talent, and sometimes there are far less talented people who just have access to a stage and enough people to watch them.

The tortured artist is the artist that gets remembered for all time, particularly if they either perish or overcome. But the truth is that so many of us are stuck in the middle. So many of us begin tortured and end tortured, with only brief bursts of light in between, and I’d rather have average art and survival than miracles that come at the cost of someone’s life. There will always be something great and tragic to celebrate and I am wondering, now, if I’ve had enough. I am, of course, in favor of letting all grief work through the body and manifest itself creatively.

But the way I think about grief is that it is the great tug-of-war, and sometimes the flag is on the side you don’t want it to be on. And sometimes, the game has exhausted all of its joy, and all that’s left is you on your knees.

science says that two dead stars collided once & that’s how earth got all of its gold & it is not vanity to cover yourself in what your people created underneath a summer’s worth of Southern branches & it is not vanity to grow weary of telling the world you cannot be fucked with & it is not vanity to cloak your casket in excess & it is not vanity to have the people who love you bear the weight of your excess for one last time & I imagine it as a question of comfort. Heaven as the only chart worth topping.

Wanting to get out of the hood can be just as honorable as wanting to stay behind, or wanting to keep your hood with you when anyone tries to strip you of your roots, when a city tries to strip the land of its homes.