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rushthatspeaksI've been having a lousy last while, and one of the effects of that-- this has been true since the pandemic started-- is that sometimes I simply cannot read or watch fiction. Like, at all. Even rereads. It is extremely frustrating, but I do not have the bandwidth. I have always read a fair amount of nonfiction anyway, but I have never before had to depend on it emotionally the way that I have had to learn to do recently.
Which is to say I have been reading a lot of Hanif Abdurraqib.
Abdurraqib is a poet, and a damn good one; an essayist, and a great one; and probably my favorite currently writing music critic.
Also, he grew up in Columbus, Ohio, in the nineties, as did I.
Sometimes his pieces have the shock of familiarity: I was not imagining that time, that place, those people, the way everything worked. Sometimes they have the shock of realizing that things were different one block over, one freeway interchange over, one neighborhood down. The similarities and the differences both ring so bell-true that I occasionally have difficulty continuing, because I left Columbus as though my shoes were on fire, at the first opportunity I got, and I do not go back, and I am in touch with no one who knew me before the age of eighteen.
But not all the memories are terrible.
Here's Abdurraqib:
-- from Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest.
I no longer own a cassette deck-- or a CD player for that matter-- but I still have the tapes with my scrawled, cramped handwriting all over the labels. I still remember swearing under my breath as I tried to catch a specific song from the radio (which did not transfer well), or from my dad's record player (worse than the radio), and the deep relief of discovering that specific library hack. Because the library had basically any music I could want, if I knew I ought to look for it.
Abdurraqib talks about the trust he had in A Tribe Called Quest, such that he could just curl up at the back of the schoolbus around their first album on his homemade tape and leave his hands in their gloves, before the third album wasn't good enough for him to do that anymore. I remember the biting cold of those winters; I have never been so cold again in my life. My high school had a uniform and it had tiny little skirts, even in winter, though they were a heavier fabric in winter, as if that would help when they were inches above the knee. I never had gloves, because my parents are my parents, and I remember curling around the tiny warmth the Walkman put out, in that very back bus seat, trying to maintain the complex positioning which kept my hands grasping each other inside the sleeves of my coat. No, one could not waste songs. The last two years of high school, I had Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense, from my library dub, and I played it until the tape was watery and wavering like the sound of sleet on the roof of the bus. If you want it hard enough, music can be your life. Or save your life. Or at least give you something to maintain until you can make a life.
There's an essay I've been wanting to write, trying to write, which this isn't, and it's about why Abdurraqib had A Tribe Called Quest on repeat whereas I had the Talking Heads.
The answer is racism, pure and plain, and I wish I had the brain to better analyze it, better explain, but the pandemic has eaten that for the time being. I turn out to love A Tribe Called Quest, and I would have loved their music in high school, but I never heard of it.
There are two reasons I had never heard of it, and both of them involve racism. The first is the newspaper, the Columbus Dispatch. It was my principal source of learning about new art, about the movies coming out and the theatre coming through town and the gallery shows and the concerts and the albums, because this was before the internet, so yes, I read the newspaper. And the arts section of the newspaper never reviewed rap. What they did do was gossip items about the lives of famous rappers. They never said a thing about Tupac's music, but they had a line item about his death. They never said a thing about the music of Dr. Dre, or Snoop Dogg, but they made sure to tell us every disagreement the two had, or might have had. Celebrity gossip about white people was about marriages, pregnancies, paparazzi taking inappropriate pictures. Celebrity gossip about rappers was about death, domestic abuse, and drugs.
Did I notice this at the time? The hell I did, I was like twelve when I started reading the arts section daily. This is hindsight, hindsight on the air I breathed, the bias I never had the tools to complicate, the Nice White Suburban WASP sense that somehow rap was... Not Quite Nice. Which is to say, not white.
And that leads into the second racist factor: I was not allowed to listen to rap music. No teenager I knew personally was, no matter their race. Unless we could argue for it being socially relevant. No, really, I mean that literally, there was a season when the only rap track anyone I knew was allowed to play was Coolio's 'Gangsta's Paradise', because the Social Relevance was obvious. I still remember the knock-down, drag-out, frustrating-all-around four-hour argument my entire youth group had with our adult supervisors when we attempted to argue for the social relevance of Arrested Development's 'Tennessee', which got shot down for being too angry and too radical.
The irony is that this youth group was an anti-racism activism group. We were a racially mixed bunch from all over Ohio who got together to go to small towns in the middle of nowhere and do dance and theatre about anti-racism. Usually our venues were churches, some white and some black; sometimes county fairs; sometimes just parks and a permit and a boombox. I was kind of sort of dating a black guy from Cincinnati who I met through the group (kind of sort of because I was kind of out and kind of not, it was complicated, and he was friendly and beautiful, and I was lonely), and we would hold hands walking around these little towns, as did other mixed-race couples in our group, and people would throw eggs and tomatoes at us. Our adults had stories about the sixties, where they'd generally started protesting, and about the endless work of protesting ever since-- that we could tell things were changing and had changed because they threw eggs and tomatoes, but they never threw stones.
This was the group for whom 'Tennessee', with its verse about the inextricable memories of lynching as part of the roots of black America, was too angry and too radical.
My parents didn't understand my Talking Heads obsession, didn't understand any of my music when it came down to it, you have never seen two people so confused by the very concept of They Might Be Giants, but most of what I listened to they groaned and put up with, or else ignored. They put up with the Sex Pistols, they put up with Hole, and they ignored the months I spent with the soundtrack to Trainspotting on endless repeat (still a solid album, mainly about heroin, as the film was), but when I bought the Fugees album I had to insist that it was a gift from a dear friend who was moving out of town, and that I wanted it for sentimental reasons as an object and wouldn't play it, in order to be allowed to keep it at all. Then I had to play it at three a.m. on the very lowest possible volume, huddled around my CD player, the same way I'd watched my library copy of Trainspotting three inches from the television, always holding my breath, ears perked to hit stop if anyone else in the house stirred.
Rap music was, by definition, to the adults in my life, all of them, rated R, not to be played by those still living with their parents. Because, dear, it... Wasn't Quite Nice, was it? Never mind that I literally used to go to concerts at the Al Rosa Villa, the local heavy metal biker bar, as a sixteen-year-old who presented female and was usually wearing my itty-bitty uniform skirt. But the metalheads were ninety-five percent white.
This is where I wish I had some analysis for you about the way forces both conscious and unconscious shape what kids have access to and what teenagers go out of their way to find, but most of what I have here is a grateful appreciation that Abdurraqib is giving me something like the soundtrack I should have had in those years, the funny, angry, sexy, not always political but always politically aware work we were not permitted to share. I hope to fuck it isn't like this for kids anymore. (I have no idea whether black kids were kept out of white music the same way.) It feels as though the internet should have helped with this sort of thing, at least somewhat. I hope it has.
'Go Ahead in the Rain', by A Tribe Called Quest, turns out to be one of the great songs about making art when everything sucks, about putting one foot in front of the other and making art anyway. I wish I'd been able to sit next to Hanif Abdurraqib, on a freezing bus back seat, and hand off my Walkman with the Talking Heads' 'Once in a Lifetime', and get back 'Go Ahead in the Rain'. At least I can listen to it now, when I am putting one foot in front of the other again, and cannot see more than the immediate path ahead.
So thank you, Mr. Abdurraqib. For getting it right, but more than that, for the music.
Which is to say I have been reading a lot of Hanif Abdurraqib.
Abdurraqib is a poet, and a damn good one; an essayist, and a great one; and probably my favorite currently writing music critic.
Also, he grew up in Columbus, Ohio, in the nineties, as did I.
Sometimes his pieces have the shock of familiarity: I was not imagining that time, that place, those people, the way everything worked. Sometimes they have the shock of realizing that things were different one block over, one freeway interchange over, one neighborhood down. The similarities and the differences both ring so bell-true that I occasionally have difficulty continuing, because I left Columbus as though my shoes were on fire, at the first opportunity I got, and I do not go back, and I am in touch with no one who knew me before the age of eighteen.
But not all the memories are terrible.
Here's Abdurraqib:
I am from an era when we learned not to waste songs. If you are creating a cassette that you must listen to all the way through, and you are crafting it with your own hands and your own ideas, then it is on you not to waste sounds and to structure a tape with feeling. No skippable songs meant that I wouldn't have to take my thick gloves off during the chill of a Midwest winter to hit fast-forward on a Walkman, hoping that I would stop a song just in time. [...] The trick was recording from CD to cassette. Recording from cassette to cassette was an option, but only for the desperate, because the sound quality in that transfer would drop significantly. But if you had a good CD recorder-- as we did in my house-- you could set your tape to record songs straight from a compact disc, which not only improved sound quality but made for fewer abrupt stops in the process of recording. I would get CDs from the library near my house, which allowed you to take out five at a time in seven-day bursts. If you were particularly strapped for time or feeling especially confident about an artist or a group, you might just set the CD to record for the entire length of it, copying a whole album's worth of songs and then sorting them out later.
-- from Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest.
I no longer own a cassette deck-- or a CD player for that matter-- but I still have the tapes with my scrawled, cramped handwriting all over the labels. I still remember swearing under my breath as I tried to catch a specific song from the radio (which did not transfer well), or from my dad's record player (worse than the radio), and the deep relief of discovering that specific library hack. Because the library had basically any music I could want, if I knew I ought to look for it.
Abdurraqib talks about the trust he had in A Tribe Called Quest, such that he could just curl up at the back of the schoolbus around their first album on his homemade tape and leave his hands in their gloves, before the third album wasn't good enough for him to do that anymore. I remember the biting cold of those winters; I have never been so cold again in my life. My high school had a uniform and it had tiny little skirts, even in winter, though they were a heavier fabric in winter, as if that would help when they were inches above the knee. I never had gloves, because my parents are my parents, and I remember curling around the tiny warmth the Walkman put out, in that very back bus seat, trying to maintain the complex positioning which kept my hands grasping each other inside the sleeves of my coat. No, one could not waste songs. The last two years of high school, I had Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense, from my library dub, and I played it until the tape was watery and wavering like the sound of sleet on the roof of the bus. If you want it hard enough, music can be your life. Or save your life. Or at least give you something to maintain until you can make a life.
There's an essay I've been wanting to write, trying to write, which this isn't, and it's about why Abdurraqib had A Tribe Called Quest on repeat whereas I had the Talking Heads.
The answer is racism, pure and plain, and I wish I had the brain to better analyze it, better explain, but the pandemic has eaten that for the time being. I turn out to love A Tribe Called Quest, and I would have loved their music in high school, but I never heard of it.
There are two reasons I had never heard of it, and both of them involve racism. The first is the newspaper, the Columbus Dispatch. It was my principal source of learning about new art, about the movies coming out and the theatre coming through town and the gallery shows and the concerts and the albums, because this was before the internet, so yes, I read the newspaper. And the arts section of the newspaper never reviewed rap. What they did do was gossip items about the lives of famous rappers. They never said a thing about Tupac's music, but they had a line item about his death. They never said a thing about the music of Dr. Dre, or Snoop Dogg, but they made sure to tell us every disagreement the two had, or might have had. Celebrity gossip about white people was about marriages, pregnancies, paparazzi taking inappropriate pictures. Celebrity gossip about rappers was about death, domestic abuse, and drugs.
Did I notice this at the time? The hell I did, I was like twelve when I started reading the arts section daily. This is hindsight, hindsight on the air I breathed, the bias I never had the tools to complicate, the Nice White Suburban WASP sense that somehow rap was... Not Quite Nice. Which is to say, not white.
And that leads into the second racist factor: I was not allowed to listen to rap music. No teenager I knew personally was, no matter their race. Unless we could argue for it being socially relevant. No, really, I mean that literally, there was a season when the only rap track anyone I knew was allowed to play was Coolio's 'Gangsta's Paradise', because the Social Relevance was obvious. I still remember the knock-down, drag-out, frustrating-all-around four-hour argument my entire youth group had with our adult supervisors when we attempted to argue for the social relevance of Arrested Development's 'Tennessee', which got shot down for being too angry and too radical.
The irony is that this youth group was an anti-racism activism group. We were a racially mixed bunch from all over Ohio who got together to go to small towns in the middle of nowhere and do dance and theatre about anti-racism. Usually our venues were churches, some white and some black; sometimes county fairs; sometimes just parks and a permit and a boombox. I was kind of sort of dating a black guy from Cincinnati who I met through the group (kind of sort of because I was kind of out and kind of not, it was complicated, and he was friendly and beautiful, and I was lonely), and we would hold hands walking around these little towns, as did other mixed-race couples in our group, and people would throw eggs and tomatoes at us. Our adults had stories about the sixties, where they'd generally started protesting, and about the endless work of protesting ever since-- that we could tell things were changing and had changed because they threw eggs and tomatoes, but they never threw stones.
This was the group for whom 'Tennessee', with its verse about the inextricable memories of lynching as part of the roots of black America, was too angry and too radical.
My parents didn't understand my Talking Heads obsession, didn't understand any of my music when it came down to it, you have never seen two people so confused by the very concept of They Might Be Giants, but most of what I listened to they groaned and put up with, or else ignored. They put up with the Sex Pistols, they put up with Hole, and they ignored the months I spent with the soundtrack to Trainspotting on endless repeat (still a solid album, mainly about heroin, as the film was), but when I bought the Fugees album I had to insist that it was a gift from a dear friend who was moving out of town, and that I wanted it for sentimental reasons as an object and wouldn't play it, in order to be allowed to keep it at all. Then I had to play it at three a.m. on the very lowest possible volume, huddled around my CD player, the same way I'd watched my library copy of Trainspotting three inches from the television, always holding my breath, ears perked to hit stop if anyone else in the house stirred.
Rap music was, by definition, to the adults in my life, all of them, rated R, not to be played by those still living with their parents. Because, dear, it... Wasn't Quite Nice, was it? Never mind that I literally used to go to concerts at the Al Rosa Villa, the local heavy metal biker bar, as a sixteen-year-old who presented female and was usually wearing my itty-bitty uniform skirt. But the metalheads were ninety-five percent white.
This is where I wish I had some analysis for you about the way forces both conscious and unconscious shape what kids have access to and what teenagers go out of their way to find, but most of what I have here is a grateful appreciation that Abdurraqib is giving me something like the soundtrack I should have had in those years, the funny, angry, sexy, not always political but always politically aware work we were not permitted to share. I hope to fuck it isn't like this for kids anymore. (I have no idea whether black kids were kept out of white music the same way.) It feels as though the internet should have helped with this sort of thing, at least somewhat. I hope it has.
'Go Ahead in the Rain', by A Tribe Called Quest, turns out to be one of the great songs about making art when everything sucks, about putting one foot in front of the other and making art anyway. I wish I'd been able to sit next to Hanif Abdurraqib, on a freezing bus back seat, and hand off my Walkman with the Talking Heads' 'Once in a Lifetime', and get back 'Go Ahead in the Rain'. At least I can listen to it now, when I am putting one foot in front of the other again, and cannot see more than the immediate path ahead.
So thank you, Mr. Abdurraqib. For getting it right, but more than that, for the music.
no subject
Date: 2022-06-01 08:35 pm (UTC)I can only imagine how frustrating that is. I've lost medium-term access to specific genres through bandwidth/brainspace loss, but not all of fiction. Since fiction is my lifeline to sanity, it'd be ... yikes.
May conditions, and your condition, improve enough that it returns.
no subject
Date: 2022-06-01 10:11 pm (UTC)you have never seen two people so confused by the very concept of They Might Be Giants
*laughs very quietly*
I appreciate this post as a view in and an angle, the more because for me, in greater LA (a little earlier than the events you describe, I think), there was no keeping hip hop or R&B away, yet people still tried, ridiculously. It was on the radio, some called it "too loud" no matter the volume, and like, Compton is right there. By the time I finished high school or a little after, there were white boys recording objectively terrible rap songs in Long Beach (national radio airtime ... on pop/alt-rock stations, not rap-centric ones), too.
no subject
Date: 2022-06-02 12:06 pm (UTC)No one was ever going to mistake me for Black, but I cried when I realized that the country half of this was me effectively being taught by peers and other people's parents to say "please do not mistake me for my own cousins, I am better than them." It still makes me tear up. I do like all kinds of music, but my environment wanted me to repudiate Johnny and Dolly and Salt N Pepa, and this I will no longer do, ever.
I can absolutely see how "Go Ahead in the Rain" fits with "Once in a Lifetime," and I only wish it had sooner.
no subject
Date: 2022-06-02 03:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-06-02 03:17 pm (UTC)Oh, music. I obviously can't give The Black Kids' Experience, but this is a rough summary of what I lived through as a Caribbean immigrant kid in NYC, and what my church recommended to all its parents for their kids:
1) Prestigious music was approved of. Classical, etc. Of course no one told us about The Chevalier de Saint Goerges or any other Black composers.
2) Mainstream modern music was approved of. Michael Jackson, etc.
3) "Christian Rock" (ugh) was approved of (even though listening to it was like eating a quart bowlful of twinkies). This overlapped with Gospel in that Black performers made Gospel and much less money and White performers made Christian Rock and more money.
4) "Black music" was more likely to be approved of the older it was. Older jazz, Mahalia Jackson's singing, those were good. Currently produced rap was right out for aspirational/respectability politics reasons. We were supposed to be the Good Hardworking Black people. (there is so much in that sentence, ugh.)
5) "weird" music (They Might Be Giants, etc) was right out, because it was "weird" and therefore not mainstreamly aspirational. (My parents also hated my reading Fantasy and SF and so on)
no subject
Date: 2022-06-04 03:15 am (UTC)*hugs*
Nine