A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance

by Hanif Abdurraqib

how many times I have leaned into someone or something and called it love, because it had to be. Because if it wasn’t love, then something else would crumble. Sure, the stakes were not a hot meal, or a warm and sheltered place. The stakes for me were sometimes depression, sometimes loneliness, sometimes a morning I didn’t think I could make it

Magic tricks all have extremes, but there is so often some movement of the trick that requires sacrifice. A field of dead crows; a trashcan full of playing card fragments. Or the commitment to killing off your whole self so that another version of you can live for an audience’s approval. Until people don’t think of the physics of it all. Until the people who have been aching for a vision see only that vision and nothing else. You know that trick. I’m sure you’ve seen it a hundred times.

Like trump voters

he was once perhaps someone who saw some promise and possibility in a world that would kill him and insist that he deserved to die.

Tonal Expressions, on the Cadence label.