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.”

The heart scatters across states, and has nothing left after what home takes from it.

The world, it seemed, was reaching yet another breaking point in a long line of breaking points. An endless election barreled forward, a xenophobic bigot leading the charge.

A lot of white people love Chance The Rapper, which makes me reluctant to paint him as some smiling and dancing young black artist, appealing to the white masses.

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. Black people live and die in Chicago; they create and thrive in Chicago.

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

It is one thing to be good at what you do, and it is another thing to be good and bold enough to have fun while doing it.

the happiness is fleeting, and so we search for more while the world burns around us.

That feels like freedom because you are the one who controls the language of your time and your people, especially if there are outside forces looking to control and commodify both.

We all do what we gotta do to sell what we gotta sell,

The truth is, if we don’t write our own stories, there is someone else waiting to do it for us. And those people, waiting with their pens, often don’t look like we do and don’t have our best interests in mind.

Everyone, turn your eyes to the city you are told to imagine on the news and, instead, listen to the actual voices inside of it.

it is understood that there is a singular America, one where there is a dream to be had for all who enter, and everyone emerges, hours later, closer to that dream.

The ability to make the most out of your life, because it’s the only life you have.

the only other black people I saw were performing labor in some capacity. The fact that I noticed this, I’m sure, would potentially seem absurd to many of the other people attending the concert.

for whom work is romantic, and for whom work is a necessary and sometimes painful burden of survival.

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.

an album about coming to terms with the fact that you are going to eventually die, written by someone who seemed to have an understanding of the fact that he was going to live for a long time.

I try not to think about death—my own, or that of anyone I love—but I don’t consider the future in the way that The River seems to consider the future. I don’t fear what the future holds as much as I fear not being alive long enough to see it.

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.

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

love is simply love. It is not war. It is not something you are thrown into and forced to survive.

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.

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.

Any language that is a potential precursor to bloodletting has a small history that it can’t be pulled apart from.

And it is even another thing to then see the newly-fashioned once-weapon scattered into a lexicon that denies you immediate access.

We often see black people, more than any other demographic, restricted to what versions of themselves can be briefly loved and then discarded.

they were outside of the current era of black weirdness that has been accepted in more mainstream spaces as a type of visible and understood blackness.

but as a rap artist gets bigger, and their ticket prices become higher, their audiences become whiter.

If my desire to see young black artists “make it” is worth my desire to watch them bowing to the comfort of others in this way.

What it is to find small pieces of a person who you know you’ll never get to wholly experience again.

it’s never about love but then again, how can it be about anything but love, even if the love is just the love you have for your own ravenous desires.

We are a world obsessed with proof of work, demanding results at every turn, even when we have little hope to tie ourselves to.

To be black and understand that you are in a country that values these things, but will still speak of how you earned your death after you are gone far too soon.

But even in a genre that prides itself on simplicity, the complexities of erasure and invisibility in punk rock go deep.

the exclusion of people of color, of women, of the queer community, and that exclusion being sometimes explicit, sometimes violent, but almost always in direct conflict with the idea of punk rock as a place for rebellion against (among other things) identity.

punk rock, born in part out of a need for white escape, just wasn’t prepared to consider a revolution that involved color, or involved women as anything that the scene deemed useful.

Afropunk signals something provided for black escape from what the actions of white escape breeds.

I don’t know how to be honest enough to say that there isn’t a place for kids like us, so we need to make our own, and nothing is more punk rock than that. Nothing is more punk rock than surviving in a hungry sea of white noise.

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.

The problem is one of men being, largely, the only ones doing the singing.

Life, if anything, is too long. We accumulate too much along the way.

There will always be something great and tragic to celebrate and I am wondering, now, if I’ve had enough.

No matter what comes out of a person in these times, the work that we make when we feel like we no longer want to be alive is not the best work if it is also not work that, little by little, is pushing us back toward perhaps staying, even if just for a moment.

I am, it turns out, a nesting doll of cynics.

What good is endless hope in a country that never runs out of ways to drain you of it? What does it mean to claim that a president is not your own as he pushes the lives of those you love closer to the brink? What is it to avoid acknowledging the target but still come, ready, to the resistance?

I have remained here because of my comfort with the darkness I know and my fear of the darkness I do not.

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.

I tell stories of the sadness of an individual death first and the complete sadness of loss second. I have, in a lot of ways, convinced myself that more people will feel whatever I am asking them to feel if there is a name or a history to go with the body.