(by Hanif Abdurraqib)
In her introduction to this essay collection, Eve L. Ewing writes that this “is a book about life and death—in particular, though not exclusively, Black life and Black death.” Many of the essays use music as a through-line or a jumping-off point, but the book isn’t a collection of music criticism per se: it’s in large part about music as escape, music as community, music as a way “to unlock the small pockets of joy that have kept us all surviving for so long,” as Abdurraqib puts it. Abdurraqib writes about music but about lots of other things too: he writes about being a Black Muslim after 9/11 in an Ohio college town that didn’t have many Black people or many Muslims; he writes about being a Black person in a time where videos of “Black people being murdered on camera” are a part of American life; he writes about sports and anger and loss and love.
I am not very familiar with a lot of the music featured in these essays: I know a song or two by Fall Out Boy, I know a song or two by Migos, I know songs by Fleetwood Mac and Bruce Springsteen and Eminem, but I don’t think I’ve listened to a whole album by any of the artists mentioned in these pages other than Carly Rae Jepsen. But I still liked a lot of the essays that touch on music, because the music isn’t necessarily the main point: the essay about Fall Out Boy, for example, is an elegy for a dead friend, a meditation on fandom, and a piece about the way we remember moments from the soundtrack to those moments. Abdurraqib writes this about 2005: “It has been one of those endless summers again, and “Sugar, We’re Goin Down” is always on the radio, coming out of the rolled down windows of cars in almost every neighborhood.” I don’t remember that particular song from that particular summer, but it makes me think of the summer in Brooklyn when it felt like I heard “Trap Queen” every time I stepped out the door.
Highlights for me, in addition to the Fall Out Boy essay, were the one about Defiance, Ohio (the band and also the town), the one about Serena Williams, and the final essay of this edition, “On Seatbelts And Sunsets,” which features a Julien Baker song but is also about being in love. Oh, and also “On Summer Crushing,” which talks about “the anatomy and anxiety and secret pleasures of a crush,” including crushes on things other than people, from fall leaves to “too many sentences in too many books by too many people to name.”
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