They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

It isn’t hard to sell people on optimism, but it’s hard to keep them sold on it, especially in a cynical year.

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 soundtrack to grief isn’t always as dark as the grief itself. Sometimes what we need is something to make the grief seem small, even when you know it’s a lie.

We all do what we gotta do to sell what we gotta sell, and I’ll never begrudge that, for Chance or anyone else. But there’s history that he’s facing, too. Whether he knows it or not.

But when all else fails, you have to be able to go home again and have people call your name in a way that is familiar to only them.

The truth is, if we don’t write our own stories, there is someone else waiting to do it for us.

This, too, is the promise that has always been sold in Bruce Springsteen’s music. The ability to make the most out of your life, because it’s the only life you have.

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

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.

Many of us accept football’s violence, and the culture it breeds, because the game itself promises great rewards—a spectacular play, or the sight of men performing supreme acts of athleticism, at the very edge of impossible.

It’s an exchange for him, it seems. If you can afford entry to his shows, and you’ve offered him a way to work himself into a distance from that which he raps about, you have earned a pass, in his eyes, to fit his language over your tongue. No matter what it is.

The problem is that everyone wants to talk about language entirely independent of any violence that the existence of that language has accumulated over time.

But it is entirely true that an appeal that music offers us is a way to escape our understanding of the world. It is working within a food chain of sorts, particularly in rap music.

In the world of The Weeknd, there was rarely a woman worth trusting, unless they were high, or naked, or both.

I’m unimpressed by The Weeknd. I am perhaps unimpressed by The Weeknd because I’m jealous of the way he makes that which I once believed to be complicated sound so simple.

It is hard to hear the word “brotherhood” without also thinking of the weight behind what it carries with it in this country, and beyond. 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.

Well, what makes you think the attitudes of racism and exclusion in the punk scene are any different from that of the rest of the world? The answer, of course, is that they aren’t.

Afropunk by itself isn’t going to save us, or dismantle a racist world, but if punk rock was born, in part, out of the need for white escape, Afropunk signals something provided for black escape from what the actions of white escape breeds.

Nothing is more punk rock than surviving in a hungry sea of white noise.

So many of us, especially teenagers, strive to be something we’re not. Escape is vital, in some cases, as a survival tool. 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.

There’s something magical about all of your friends being in shitty bands with no intention of really making it.

It’s in the spirit of male loneliness to imagine that someone has to suffer for it.

The problem is one of audience, though. The problem is the one of the notebook becoming public, sung to thousands. The problem is one of men being, largely, the only ones doing the singing. And, ultimately, the problem becomes when those men don’t age beyond the adolescent heartbroken temper tantrums that we all have before we learn better and start to know better.

Brief Notes On Staying // No One Is Making Their Best Work When They Want To Die

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.

All things do not pass. 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.

All emotion, when performed genuinely and facing an audience, can be currency.

The great thing about an afterlife is that we’ve always been able to imagine it as the best possible place for us and our needs.

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

I sometimes consider this, how marginalized people quantify their own lives when compared to others who occupy the same world as we do.

I celebrate expressions of unbridled black joy because I know what it takes to unlock this, to have the joy of the body drown out the anxiety of the mind, if only for a little bit.

The truth is, once you understand that there are people who do not want you to exist, that is a difficult card to remove from the table. There is no liberation, no undoing that knowledge. It is the unyielding door, the one that you simply cannot push back against any longer. For many, there are reminders of this every day, every hour. It makes “Alright,” the emotional bar and the song itself, the best there is. It makes existence itself a celebration.

It is a task, some days. To think about your consistent kindness as, instead, a product of restraint.

Trash talking isn’t about an individual’s ability to be consistently great. If you are from any place in this America where you have seen all breeds of struggle grow until they cloak an entire community, and you are fortunate enough to survive, few things become more urgent and necessary than reminding the world when you’re at your best. Because you know how fleeting those moments can be. You’ve seen how quickly they can vanish.

Rap is the genre of music that least allows for its artists to comfortably revel in fiction, even though all of us know we are watching a performance.

Let the children have their world. Their miraculous, impossible world where nothing hurts long enough to stop time. Let them have it for as long as it will hold them. When that world falls to pieces, maybe we can use whatever is left to build a better one for ourselves.