They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us: Essays

I.

When Marvin Gaye sang the National Anthem at the 1983 NBA All-Star Game, he knew he was going to die soon.

If you are in Columbus, Ohio, on July 3rd of any year, you will likely drag yourself downtown with a blanket in the middle of the day, when the sun is still at its highest and most hungry. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a space at Huntington Park, where our beloved Triple-A baseball team, the Columbus Clippers, delivered back-to-back titles in 2010 and 2011. When night comes, you’ll fall back into someone’s arms, or be the arms that someone falls back into. And you’ll roll your eyes when Born in the U.S.A. plays while fireworks fly screaming into the sky, tucking all its darkness into their pockets.

There are days when the places we’re from turn into every other place in America. I still go to watch fireworks, or I still go to watch the brief burst of brightness glow on the faces of black children, some of them have made it downtown, miles away from the forgotten corners of the city they’ve been pushed to. Some of them smiling and pointing upwards, still too young to know of America’s hunt for their flesh. How it wears the blood of their ancestors on its teeth.

CHANCE THE RAPPER’S GOLDEN YEAR

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 the way that it is often packaged as an antithesis to that which is burning. 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, the way we do when a sermon calls us home, or calls us back to something better or away from somewhere worse.

I haven’t been to church in years but I am of a people who know how to preach. Chance The Rapper has probably been to church more recently than I have, or at least he understands the gospel better than I ever will. By which I mean the gospel is, in many ways, whatever gets people into the door to receive whatever blessings you have to offer. Everyone I knew needed blessings in 2016. 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. Deadly attacks seemed to be a monthly occurrence, anchored by the Pulse nightclub massacre—the deadliest attack in our country’s history. There were funerals I missed, and funerals I didn’t. People I loved walked out of doors they didn’t walk back through. The summer was cloaked in blood and fear, with more in the fall. If you believe, as I do, that a blessing is a brief breath to take in that doesn’t taste of whatever is holding you under; say I Speak To God In Public and mean more than just in his house, or mean more than just next to people who also might speak to God in public, or say God and mean whatever has kept you alive when so many other things have failed to.

It isn’t hard to sell people on optimism, but it’s hard to keep them sold on it, especially in a cynical year. Yet when it was all said and done, Chance The Rapper stood as 2016’s greatest optimist. His Coloring Book was one of the albums that wouldn’t go away, no matter what came after it. First, it was the perfect summer album. Then summer passed, and I was still kicking up dead leaves in my neighborhood and listening to cars roll by with their windows slightly cracked listening to Smoke Break or Mixtape. Chance made the only thing in 2016 that fit unconditionally. There is something about his joy that makes it stretch longer—perhaps that it demands nothing immediate from a listener or observer, except to take it in and let it be a brief and necessary bandage over anything that hurts.

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. For this, Chance benefits greatly. He has made joy into a brand, particularly coming to light in the middle of 2015, when he released the grinning, dancing, bright video for Sunday Candy, an infectious ode to old black people and church music.

Chance The Rapper is always smiling, or seems like he always could be on the verge of smiling. It is, kind of, just how his face is. He is mostly teeth, and carries an expressive nature that pushes and pulls his brow in various directions while he raps or speaks, but his mouth is often pushing the edges of a smile. 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. There is a lot to be made out of Chance’s relationship to white rap fans, and how he, as an artist, manages to maintain that relationship while not straying from his reliance on the roots of black church music, and the spirit of black preaching. I think, though, that a natural reaction to black people being murdered on camera is the notion that living black joy becomes a commodity—something that everyone feels like they should be able to consume as a type of relief point. I may not come down on the same side of that as everyone who listens to Chance, but I think what Chance does is what the best artists of color manage to do in this setting: makes music facing his people while also leaving the door open for everyone else to try and work their way in. Yes, this black grandmother being praised isn’t a universal grandmother for all who are living, but there is praise in the living hand of someone who raised the person that raised you, pressed against your face.

For months of 2016, I wondered, sometimes out loud, if this could still have been The Year of Chance had he come out of any other city. If Chance had been someone who hailed from the coasts, I imagine that the sound of Coloring Book—a joyous mess of voices and harmony, with the self as the most reliable instrument—would have moved us just the same. But what of everything else that came with it? What about the feel-good aspects of Chance’s story, the Midwest kid made good? And it’s not as though he rose from the cornfields of central Iowa. Unlike any other city in its region, Chicago sits at the center of the national conversation, taking up space in exciting, uncomfortable ways. 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. This year, in particular, the city has been a driving force behind art, sound, writing, and a movement of young black creatives claiming a space of their own—SABA and Noname and Mick Jenkins and Jamila Woods and Vic Mensa, to name a few. Chance, though, was the one who tapped into exactly what this year needed. 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.

I went to Chicago in late May of 2016. I found myself crammed into a seat on a school bus driving through the city to an undisclosed location. Chance carried me here, strictly on the promise of something spectacular. It was the first time in years that an artist had made me believe in their capacity for the unbelievable in such a way that I got on a plane and flew toward something unknown. The school bus eventually pulled up to a warehouse, where I settled into a long and snaking line. Once inside, Chance’s voice rang out over the loudspeakers, inviting everyone to Magnificent Coloring World: an interactive event and funhouse for all ages to be experienced while Coloring Book played through in its entirety. It was, in many ways, like watching a visual album playing out, created in real time by random participants. Teenagers colored, twentysomethings rapped to every word of every song while leaning into glowing church pews, young children broke out in dance wherever there was a clear bit of floor—first a handful, and then others, and others. There were bowls of candy, coolers of cold drinks, and the entire set from the music video for Sunday Candy pushed back against a wall. It was a brilliant creation, in both scope and execution. When the album died down, the final handclaps of Blessings (Reprise) echoing off of the warehouse’s brick, a silence fell over the room, and then it quickly became everything but silence, as Chance himself rose from a riser. He was smiling, a Chicago Bulls jersey nearly down to his knees. He stood for a moment, waiting for the cheers to die down. And then he stayed for a moment longer, and a moment longer, until he seemed to realize that the cheers weren’t going to stop.

There’s something about the way Chance takes up space that causes these types of intense reactions. It’s a rock-star-like quality, like The Beatles stepping off the Boeing 707 in New York back in 1964. Because he seems too good to be true, witnessing Chance in person, even in stillness and silence, can prompt a type of thrilling madness. It’s also in the energy he gives off, particularly in Chicago. By the time he arrived to the people at Magnificent Coloring World, he was nearly vibrating, radiant. Eventually he spoke, briefly: Hi. Thanks for coming to Magnificent Coloring World. I hope you had a good time, and please be sure to try to clean up a little for the next group coming in. He smiled as someone in the back yelled, Thank YOU, Chance! And then he was gone, waving as the riser took him back underneath the wonderland he’d created. The air was still buzzing as the masses walked back outside into the sun.

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. It keeps us on that thin edge of annoyance and adulation. When Steph Curry shoots a three-pointer and turns to run back down the court before it even goes in, there is a second where I tell myself that I’d love for the ball to spin around the rim and fall out, that no one should get to be both good and confident in a time when it’s hard enough to be either. But when the ball inevitably falls through the net, I cheer like I always do. I rewind the play and watch again. Chance has the nerve to have fun, which has to be hard on the rap fan who wants something more urgent out of these urgent times, or who imagines that Chance being from a city like Chicago means that he has to commit to only a single narrative. In interviews, he’s still excited to talk about his own work, sometimes rapidly burning through cigarettes and bouncing up and down in his seat. In live performances, he’s still able to come across as genuinely in love with the people he performs with, staring with admiration at Lil Wayne during a performance of No Problem on The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

At the end of the long and bloody summer, I sat with friends in New York and wondered how we survived it all. In June, a gunman massacred 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando. In July, three black men were shot and killed by police officers over the course of just three days in Brooklyn, Baton Rouge, and Saint Paul. In August, the protests spreading through every city, in the face of something that seemed like it was going to swallow us all. I thought back to Magnificent Coloring World then, or at least I considered what it might be like to live inside of an album, and if there would be any pain there if we did. 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. And maybe this is what it’s like to live in these times: the happiness is fleeting, and so we search for more while the world burns around us. There is optimism in that, too, in knowing that more happiness is possible. Coloring Book’s childlike aspects can feel a bit overwhelming at times for the more grown of us, but in watching what those seeds produce in young people, I am, again, energized. Watching people younger and more carefree than I am now spill toward any space Chance is standing in unlocks the part of me that once did the same thing for Kanye West or Lupe Fiasco. When you watch hope closely enough, manifested in enough people, you can start to feel it too.

What Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks was most aiming toward, I think, was freedom. Freedom for herself, of course, but also freedom for her people—or at least knowing that one can’t come without the other. She was a poet for the ordinary black Chicagoan, writing of their triumphs and failures, and understanding that a whole and complete life sat at the intersection of both. And perhaps that is freedom, more than anything. To turn your eye back on the community you love and articulate it for an entire world that may not understand it as you do. 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. Though we don’t see the comparison often, Chance fits directly in the lineage of Brooks, more an archivist and community griot than the high-wire gospel act that sells tickets and makes him fit comfortably on suburban playlists. 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.

Chance’s biggest strength is his remarkable ability to pull emotion out of people and extend those feelings into a wide space. But he is also a skilled writer, one who you can tell was molded through Chicago’s poetry and open-mic scene. He is the type of writer I love most: one who thinks out loud and allows me to imagine the process of the writing. He stacks rhymes in exciting and unique ways; his delivery is the type that seems entirely unrestrained but is, truly, deeply controlled. In How Great, he sets a hard act for Jay Electronica to follow in one of the album’s finest verses, spitting, Electrify the enemy like Hedwig till he petrified / Any petty Peter Pettigrew could get the pesticide and, later in the verse, Exalt, exalt, glorify / Descend upon the Earth with swords and fortify the borders where your shortage lie. His breath control allows for a cadence that seamlessly dances between rapping and singing. There is an urgency in his writing, the idea that he truly believes that this is more than just rap. The leap between 2013’s Acid Rap and Coloring Book is massive, largely in lyrical direction rather than technical ability. It’s the distance from Trippy shit to watch / Drugs while on the clock / Acid on the face / That’s a work of art to Clean up the streets so my daughter can have a place to play. On Coloring Book, Smoke Break seems like a smoking anthem from a distance, but up close, it’s a song about cherishing silent and stolen moments in the face of new parenthood. In Same Drugs, Chance meditates on clinging to youth, even as it slips through your fingers. When he softly sings, Don’t forget the happy thoughts, it is an anchor, a reminder that hangs over many of us, even in the year’s worst moments.

Another thing that Chance showed on Coloring Book is that he’s one of rap’s great collaborators. He is capable of bowing to anyone he is sharing a track with, without it coming off as forced—like the aforementioned Mixtape, when he finds a way to meet Lil Yachty and Young Thug where they’re at, delivering a verse that sounds right at home, and then, two tracks later, sliding on the airy and mellow Juke Jam and lighting a path for Justin Bieber to follow. There is something very Chicago about this, too, like when I call my friends from Chicago who are artists, and we only get five minutes into conversation before they want to know what I’m working on, or how they can help. It is fitting that Chance comes from a city that never lets you walk alone.

He’s also young, and an activist learning to be an activist in these times, as we all are. It’s thrilling, sure, to see so many artists and athletes figuring out how to navigate their role in the political landscape. But with Chance, it feels even more urgent that he get it right—a deeply unfair expectation, but one that he seems up to. National attention is shined on things like his Parade to the Polls on November 7, when he performed a concert and then led thousands to an early-voting site in Chicago. But there is also Open Mike, a series for young Chicago writers and performers, founded by Chance and his friends. Last spring, Chance surprised high school students there with guest appearances by Kanye West and Vic Mensa. There is global activism, but there is also the work of turning and facing your people, which has to become harder with the more distance put between you and those people. I don’t know what the future holds, but Chance’s commitment to Chicago is truly pushing the needle forward. This isn’t without its flaws; a wide, far-reaching community is always going to be failed by its heroes from time to time. 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. Regardless of how wide your wings stretch, they were still born from a single place. For those of us with an eye always facing toward home, Chance inspires.

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. With rap in the midst of what may become its greatest generational shift, geography has taken on a new importance. Chance and his peers are looking at gentrification as a generational issue, looking at place and seeing memories unfold that have to be archived somewhere. I hear that in Vince Staples, in Kamaiyah, of course in Kendrick Lamar, and even in Drake’s Views, a sprawling love letter to Toronto. Chance, at his best, is half rapper, half tour guide. The demand is simple: no one gets to speak the name of my city without first knowing it as I have. The interior of the land is always layered. Yes, sometimes with blood, but sometimes with bodies marching, with bodies moving, with bodies flooded into the streets chanting or dancing at the roller rink. There is no singular version of any place, but particularly not Chicago. 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. There is nothing on Coloring Book that I haven’t felt on the streets of Chicago in any season. It is the album that puts a hand inside of a city’s back and makes it speak, makes it sing.

So many people want to talk about church when they talk about Chance. I understand this, in the same way that I understand my hands clapping, almost against their will, when a choir swells into a single, unmistakable voice. I understand it in the way that I understand gospel in its simplest terms, despite not being raised in the church. But here is what I also know: we stomp our feet in my church. In my church, we yell the names of those who will never be able to hear us. We curse in my church, the way our grandmothers did, loud and defiant, anchored by a life. My church is black, yes, but you might be able to get in if you can stay on beat long enough. My church sits high on a hill, away from a world on fire below it. And all of our time in it is brief, far too brief, but we get free there. We do it at the feet of musicians like Chance The Rapper, and the people who love him. If this year was bad, next year might be even worse, or at the very least it might be harder. We are nothing without our quick and simple blessings, without those willing to drag optimism by its neck to the gates of grief and ask to be let in, an entire choir of voices singing at their back.

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.

A NIGHT IN BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN’S AMERICA

To watch Bruce Springsteen step onto a stage in New Jersey is to watch Moses walk to the edge of the Red Sea, so confident in his ability to perform a miracle, to carry his people to the Promised Land. I believe in the magic of seeing a musician perform in the place they once called home. The Jersey air felt different, lighter than usual, as I walked into the massive Prudential Center and made my way to my seat.

Having seen Springsteen before, I wasn’t surprised by the aesthetics of the arena. I imagine, though, that this could be overwhelming for someone who has never seen Springsteen live. The chanting and relentless fist-pumping beforehand while the stage is being set up, the American flags wrapped around foreheads or hanging off of backs. From another angle, this may feel like a strange political rally. On its face, it matches the tone, passion, and volume of political theater at its base form.

Whether or not the preacher himself intends this, in the church of Bruce Springsteen, 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.

I found my seat next to an older man who, despite our fairly close proximity to the stage, was still using binoculars to scan the rapidly growing crowd around us. Without looking away from his binoculars, he told me that he saw Bruce back in 1980, when The River was first released. He explained that he saw Bruce play on December 8, 1980. I thought on this for a moment, before it came together. Lennon, I said. The night Lennon was murdered. He finally put down his binoculars, nodded lightly, looked at the exit, toward the outside world, and said, I hope no one gets killed out there during the show this time.

The day before I crossed into New Jersey to watch Bruce Springsteen play, I found myself in Ferguson, Missouri, standing over Michael Brown’s memorial plaque. There was no notable reason for this trip. I’m not sure what I wanted to feel, other than closer to a sadness and rage that had become a very real part of my life. I was in St. Louis, and I think I wanted to return to a place where a city was still fighting to pull itself back together, against the backdrop of suffocating injustice that still hangs above it. The air feels different in Ferguson, too. Unlike New Jersey on the night of Bruce Springsteen’s homecoming, the air in Ferguson still feels heavy, thick with grief. Yet it is still a town of people who take their joy where they can get it, living because they must.

There is a part of me that has always understood The River to be about this. Staring down the life you have left and claiming it as your own, living it to the best of your ability before the clock runs out. In Jackson Cage, a man dreams of a life more fulfilling than the one he has with the woman he loves in a New Jersey town, but he settles. He gives himself over to the fact that what he has will do, until he has nothing else. 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.

The technician in me has always loved watching how