They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

In an age of confusion, fear, and loss, Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib's is a voice that matters. Whether he's attending a Bruce Springsteen concert the day after visiting Michael Brown's grave, or discussing public displays of affection at a Carly Rae Jepsen show, he writes with a poignancy and magnetism that resonates profoundly.

In the wake of the nightclub attacks in Paris, he recalls how he sought refuge as a teenager in music, at shows, and wonders whether the next generation of young Muslims will not be afforded that opportunity now. While discussing the everyday threat to the lives of black Americans, Willis-Abdurraqib recounts the first time he was ordered to the ground by police officers: for attempting to enter his own car.

In essays that have been published by the New York Times, MTV, and Pitchfork, among others—along with original, previously unreleased essays—Willis-Abdurraqib uses music and culture as a lens through which to view our world, so that we might better understand ourselves, and in so doing proves himself a bellwether for our times.

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Overview

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781937512651
Publisher:	Two Dollar Radio
Publication date:	11/07/2017
Pages:	236
Sales rank:	11,929
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 7.50(h) x (d)
Age Range:	12 - 18 Years

About the Author

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, writer, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His first collection of poems, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, was released by Button Poetry in 2016. His essays and music criticism have appeared in The New York Times, The FADER, and Pitchfork. He is currently a columnist at MTV News.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Hanif Abdurraqib's music writing possesses a singular, impossible magic—he cracks open the very personal nature of fandom with empathy and skepticism in equal measure. In his essays and criticism he lenses history through heartbreak and limns the vast connections between performer and audience. Through a Carly Rae Jepsen show he explores loneliness, Bruce Springsteen's The River takes us to Ferguson, Migos begets a meditation on the 'burbs. Like Greil Marcus before him, when Abdurraqib is writing about music, what he is really getting at is the true nature of life and death in America, in this moment. They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us is the book I have been waiting for; it is the book we need."

—Jessica Hopper

"Abdurraqib bridges the bravado and bling of praise with the blood and tears of elegy."

—Terrance Hayes

"Abdurraqib doesn't just understand the intent of songs on a deeper level than anyone else I've ever met or read, he understands them on levels that even the artists cannot. He understands the way art reverberates long after it's collected and compiled and released. Music belongs to those who create it right up until the moment it doesn't. When a song is released, it belongs to everyone at once and there are a lot of writers who get intent right. There are a lot of people who hear an artist screaming into the canyon and correctly diagnose what they were trying to get at, but it takes someone special to hear the echoes. It takes someone special to hear the life a song takes on beyond intent, the way that it reacts with people, not the thing it meant but the things it'll come to mean to different people from different walks of life, all who will glean something unique, something personal but always something equally valuable from it. Abdurraqib has that gift and in this collection, he shows it off in a way that shines a light on just how much music belongs to everyone."

—Dan Campbell, Lead Singer of The Wonder Years and Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties

From the B&N Reads Blog

Page 1 of

They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us

A poet and music critic’s boundary-smashing new collection proves to be one of the year’s most vital documents on an America in crisis.

I don't want to go overboard here. Hanif Abdurraqib is a less masterful stylist than Dave Hickey or Jonathan Lethem, whose finest collections bear down on music, or straight-up rockcrits Greil Marcus or Ellen Willis. Nor is he as deft as Touré or as dazzling as Greg Tate or as original as his acknowledged inspiration Lester Bangs. And yes, there are other notable youngbloods out there, most of them women. But as someone who'd as soon read a good essay collection as a good novel, I don't want to understate either. They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us establishes Abdurraqib as a major rock critic -- polished and deft and original in a searchingly unpolished way and, if you'll grant that the word need be no more race-specific than "rock critic" itself, more soulful than any of the above except Bangs. Yes, he's less funny than Bangs -- we all are. But in Abdurraqib's case that comes with the concept.

Abdurraqib is a thirty-two-year-old African American from a struggling lower-middle-class family in Columbus, Ohio, who owes his Arabic name to parents who converted to Islam in the '70s. Although never devout and no longer observant, he was the only Muslim at the local college he attended on a soccer scholarship. A third of the 60 poems his website links to reference music, which is also the subject of half the 20 essays there. He's got a gig at MTV News, where a dozen of these selections first appeared; others surfaced in Pitchfork and the New York Times. But whatever their provenance, Abdurraqib has worked hard to make this book their natural home.

An opening section sequenced Chance the Rapper-Springsteen-Carly Rae Jepsen-Prince-ScHoolboy Q-Weeknd establishes his cross-racial orientation and his black identity simultaneously, only not quite as you might expect. Yes, the ScHoolboy Q piece unpacks the rapper's insistence that the white fans who buy his ever-pricier tickets get over it and utter the word "nigger." But Abdurraqib's thoughts on Springsteen, whose delvings into mortality, work, and the American Dream he admires avidly, are just as race-conscious -- only a day before the show, he'd put mortality in perspective by visiting Ferguson, and he can't help but notice that, speaking of work, he's the only black person at the Meadowlands who's there for the concert rather than a j-o-b. Yet arrayed around Springsteen are the explicitly happy beginning of a candy-colored, gospel-soaked Chance the Rapper event and, happier still, a Carly Rae concert -- which does, he mentions, attract some black couples -- where fans are kissing, truly kissing, in Manhattan's brutally industrial Terminal 5.

If you're expecting more of the eclectic same, though, Abdurraqib then pulls a switch, because it turns out he was an emo kid, a follower of the punky, hooky, hyperemotional pop-rock subgenre typified by Dashboard Confessional and Fall Out Boy that dominates Section II. I was always too old for emo, with its built-in male narcissism rendered even ranker by its trademark self-pity, but Abdurraqib's report from the front is something to treasure. Emo is such a white scene that he was often the only black kid at shows where moshers thrashed in full- fledged clubs and sweaty basements alike, and so he begins by outlining his eventual progress to the Afropunk movement. But that clarified, he turns his sympathies to the lost white suburban Midwesterners who were his brothers in pain, in particular his friend Tyler, who surfaces by name in the jumbled eight-part tour de force "Fall Out Boy Forever." In the beginning, tall Tyler strides into the pit to rescue short Hanif, sprawled below the leaping throng. In the end, troubled Tyler commits suicide. The lesson being that the unlistenable emotions emo indulges are literally too much for many who hear their own anguish there.

Although almost every black American lives closer to death than almost every white American, Abdurraqib is probably more blessed than Tyler was. But not by much. Several other emo deaths haunt him; he lost his mother overnight when her bipolar meds killed her in her sleep; his 2015 "My Demons and My Dog and This Anxiety and That Noise" -- not included here, perhaps because he didn't dare expose himself so nakedly -- is an excruciating account of his own anxiety disorders. And so the bulk of the book culminates with a long final section -- most of it previously unpublished -- that hews close to music as it lays out a piecemeal autobiography. Most of it takes place post−Trayvon Martin, who was murdered the night Abdurraqib drove to Minnesota with a companion I take to be his future wife, to witness a typically stirring show by white alt-rap lifers Atmosphere. I don't agree with all his analyses or feel all his tastes, but every one gains not just poignancy but heft from personal particulars that are also, inevitably, political. Abdurraqib always remains a critic who deals in textual interpretation and aesthetic judgment. But the urgency that infuses music for him, often captured in a few articulated details, is what criticism ought to be for and too often isn't.

Thus the "shiny suit" rap of the Notorious B.I.G.'s "Mo' Money Mo' Problems" moves him because he knows his just-deceased mom would fall for its Diana Ross sample. Thus the Bataclan massacre evokes first Muslim teens seeking in live music "an escape from whatever particular evil was suffocating them" and then Muslim rapper Lupe Fiasco. Thus man in black Johnny Cash, who never shot a man in Reno, parallels suburban trap-rappers Migos, who never dealt crack. Thus the interlude when Atmosphere pauses his nonstop set for a brief "I need y'all to know that we're gonna be all right" foreshadows both "The White Rapper Joke," which surveys seven of the ungainly beasts and reserves special praise for Macklemore's "weaponization" of his excess fame, and "They Will Speak Loudest About You When You're Gone," which juxtaposes white outrage about racist police killings against white failure to see living African Americans, like the New Havenite who peremptorily dumped her bags in his lap and then got on her cell to gab about Freddie Gray -- an image Abdurraqib says he recalls often, as will I.

They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, which takes its title from a sign Abdurraqib spotted in Ferguson, is on balance a rather dark book. His anxieties can't be much fun, his marriage falls apart as his story ends, and he's seen too much death without becoming inured to it like a gangsta sporting a teardrop tattoo. But let's not kid around. The era of African-American good feeling that began with the election of Barack Obama -- which generated what "The Obama White House, a Brief Home for Rappers" calls an "optics of equality" -- was radically disrupted by George Zimmerman and demolished by white supremacist Donald Trump. Abdurraqib assigns himself a mission of celebrating music's "love and joy" -- his Columbus elders with their Sunday soul parties, his emo brethren discharging pent-up torment, the Baton Rouge rapper Foxx igniting his only hit with a profligate "I pull up at the club VIP / Gas tank on E / But all drinks on me," those provisionally carefree Chance and Carly fans. He ends with a meditation on the wheelies gleeful kids are practicing in the parking lot behind his apartment. But it isn't just his anxiety disorders that compel him to dwell as well on all the injustices that surround and subtend the same music. It's a sense of the moment all too few can figure out how to put into words.

Abdurraqib doesn't write zingers. His power is cumulative, preacherly even, though his Muslim upbringing renders him the rare African American who's an outsider in the black church. I've told you how he ends, with those innocents and their wheelies. So let me end with how he begins. Goes like this: "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. This, more than anything, is about how there is sometimes only one single clear and clean surface on which to dance, and sometimes it only fits you and no one else. This is about hope, sure, but not in that way that it is often packaged as an antithesis to that which is burning."

Robert Christgau is a critic at All Things Considered, writes for the National Arts Journalism Program's ARTicles blog, teaches in NYU's Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music, and has published five books.
Reviewer: Robert Christgau

The Barnes & Noble Review

★ 08/14/2017
Abdurraqib’s essay collection is mesmerizing and deeply perceptive. Most of the essays are about music, particularly live music, touching on how it acts as a balm in a time of fear and pain. One essay explores being an outsider among outsiders through Abdurraqib’s memory of being a black kid at an overwhelmingly white punk rock show, yet imbues this experience of loneliness with a sense of triumph. Not every music writer would think to connect the performative identities of the rap group Migos and Johnny Cash as Abdurraqib does, showing how both are based on an arguably inauthentic outlaw persona. All of the musicians discussed, including Carly Rae Jepsen and Chance the Rapper, are accorded respect, along with an understanding of what needs in their audience they satisfy. Abdurraqib’s essays linger on the black American experience, emphasizing the desire to be seen and the fear of being invisible. He doesn’t posit music as a cure-all for modern America’s societal ills—those he mentions include mass shootings, racial violence, and prejudice against Muslims—but also observes that it “isn’t only music” but a way of feeling a sense of belonging. Abdurraqib’s essays are filled with honesty, providing the reader with the sensation of seeing the world through fresh eyes. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"Willis-Abdurraqib bridges the bravado and bling of praise with the blood and tears of elegy."
—Terrance Hayes

From the Publisher

2017-10-02
An Ohio-based poet, columnist, and music critic takes the pulse of the nation while absorbing some of today's most eclectic beats.At first glance, discovering deep meaning in the performance of top-40 songstress Carly Rae Jepsen might seem like a tough assignment. However, Abdurraqib (The Crown Ain't Worth Much, 2016) does more than just manage it; he dives in fully, uncovering aspects of love and adoration that are as illuminating and earnest as they are powerful and profound. If he can do that with Jepsen's pop, imagine what the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Prince, or Nina Simone might stir in him. But as iconic as those artists may be, the subjects found in these essays often serve to invoke deeper forays into the worlds surrounding the artists as much as the artists themselves. Although the author is interested in the success and appeal of The Weeknd or Chance the Rapper, he is also equally—if not more—intrigued with the sociopolitical and existential issues that they each managed to evoke in present-day America. In witnessing Zoe Saldana's 2016 portrayal of Simone, for instance, Abdurraqib thinks back to his own childhood playing on the floor of his family home absorbing the powerful emotions caused by his mother's 1964 recording of "Nina Simone in Concert"—and remembering the relentlessly stigmatized soul who, unlike Saldana, could not wash off her blackness at the end of the day. In listening to Springsteen, the author is reminded of the death of Michael Brown and how "the idea of hard, beautiful, romantic work is a dream sold a lot easier by someone who currently knows where their next meal is coming from." In all of Abdurraqib's poetic essays, there is the artist, the work, the nation, and himself. The author effortlessly navigates among these many points before ultimately arriving at conclusions that are sometimes hopeful, often sorrowful, and always visceral.Erudite writing from an author struggling to find meaning through music.

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