They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

Abdurraqib discusses racism in the punk rock scene, which makes little space for people of color: “[T]he choice […] for non-white men is a choice between being tokenized, or being invisible” (52). He began to gravitate toward the Afropunk scene, which felt more inclusive and community-centered. The essay ends with Abdurraqib observing a Black boy at a punk concert passing out in the mosh pit and being trampled on. He wonders now what he would have said to the boy if he saw him after the show and thinks he would encourage him to make a space for people of color.

Abdurraqib explores childhood and poverty through the lens of The Wonder Years’s album Suburbia I’ve Given You All and Now I’m Nothing. Abdurraqib grew up biking into the suburbs with friends, struggling to understand how people in the suburbs could feel sadness when they seemingly had so much. As he ages, he understands that “a life that look[s] beautiful [can] be immensely sad” (60). He ultimately appreciates The Wonder Years’s album because it is honest about the flaws of the band’s hometown and doesn’t sugarcoat living in the suburbs.

This sectioned essay follows two bands: Abdurraqib’s friends’ band Constellations and Twenty One Pilots, which got its start in Columbus, Ohio. Abdurraqib has complicated feelings about Twenty One Pilots—he considers them overly “manufactured” and believes they won their first Grammy at the expense of other, more deserving artists—he remembers both Constellations and Twenty One Pilots fondly because he got to support his friends and his hometown through their music.

In 2016, the band Cute Is What We Aim For reunited for a tour playing the entirety of their 2006 album Same Old Blood Rush. Abdurraqib remembers enjoying the album when it first was released but was surprised and uneasy at the lyrics’ misogyny by the time of the reunion tour. Very few people attended the concert, and Abdurraqib and a fellow male concert-goer discussed how uncomfortable the sexist lyrics made them now that they were older. Abdqurraqib feels “ashamed that [he] once decided to wear it” as “balm for an old wound” (70)—i.e., that he once took adolescent pleasure in lashing out at women in heartbreak.

This short essay explores sadness and death. Abdurraqib speculates that the last work an artist completes before tragedy strikes them inevitably “sounds better,” but he pushes back against the glorification of suffering: Much tragedy is not dramatic enough to capture the public imagination, and in any case, Abdurraqib does not view any art as worth an individual’s life. He reminds himself that while he may be sad—in the present and in the future—he will continue to work toward joy and art.

Following a difficult and confusing year in 2016, Abdurraqib drove to Provincetown, Massachusetts, for a few days of quiet solitude before Christmas. While perusing a record store, he picked up Richard Hell and the Voidoids’s album Blank Generation. He remembered an interview with Hell where he “prattled on about how much he wanted to die” (76). Though Hell is still alive as of the essay’s writing, Abdurraqib admits he understands how it feels to desire—if not death itself—the desire to desire death.

Abdurraqib’s friends think he has become cynical, which he agrees with: He is not especially optimistic about the future and values honesty more than unthinking hope. He recalls that before leaving Provincetown, he bumped into a man he had seen on the street previously. The man told him, “We’re all going to die” (78). Reflecting back on this, Abdurraqib agrees but says he hopes to have more time to hope and live, even if both are difficult at times.

Abdurraqib reflects on My Chemical Romance’s concept album, The Black Parade, 10 years after its 2006 release. The album documents an unnamed cancer patient’s experience with illness, treatment, and death, and Abdurraqib structures his commentary on the album into “Acts,” interspersing reflections on his own experiences with death and grief with close readings of the music. Abdurraqib argues that despite My Chemical Romance’s theatricality, there is a core of earnestness to the album, which aims to bring listeners to the heart of death and grief. Though it does not minimize the tragedy of death, the album offers glimpses of hope in its imagination of the afterlife; though Abdurraqib is unsure of his own views regarding life after death, the album’s image of the patient’s most cherished memories chaperoning him to the afterlife resonates with Abdurraqib. The album also takes for granted the universality of loss and grief, which Abdurraqib credits with much of its power. Nevertheless, this effort to channel death and dying came at a cost; Abdurraqib details the injuries the band members sustained in performing “Famous Last Words” and notes that Gerard Way envisioned the album as the band’s last. In that vein, Abdurraqib recalls a conversation with a friend about how much of their own suffering an artist owes their audience.

Abdurraqib describes the atmosphere at a Defiance, Ohio concert: Everyone knew the lyrics to the songs and there was a general sense of comradery, although at one point a band member had to intervene after one attendee punched another. Despite its name, the band is actually from Columbus. Defiance, Ohio, is a small town that got its name from a fort built there in the late 18th century in “defiance” of attacks by the British, Indigenous Americans, etc. Abdurraqib and his friends used to visit Defiance (the town) when they were young, but they stopped after a man with a Confederate flag and (possibly) a shotgun chased them away from his house. Abdurraqib notes that Defiance, Ohio released an album in 2006 that spoke to his grief over friends who died the same year; at another performance he attended, this one in 2007, the mood was subdued, the attendees all apparently caught up in their grief. Defiance the town has since become an epicenter of the heroin epidemic, which Abdurraqib links to the increasing obsolescence of small Ohio towns.