As I come up on a year since my father died of cancer last August, I have been reflecting on what this past year has been.
Amid the grief, distress, anxiety and pain, there has been transformation and growth. Such a major uprooting in my life illuminated all the roots my father left behind in making me who I am today.
All of this, spurred by death.
That is what this year has been for me: the year of death. But it goes deeper than this time of personal challenge, into the personal manifestation of a deep social and political reality.
This year of death in my family was compounded by the seemingly endless stories of black death at the hands of police. My father died on the same day John Crawford III was shot to death in an Ohio Walmart while holding a toy BB gun for sale at the store. Four days after that, Michael Brown was shot dead in Ferguson, Mo., and left on summer asphalt for hours.
And four days before my first fatherless Father’s Day, a white supremacist shot nine black people at a church in Charleston, S.C.
So much death. Too much death. Always lurking, ever in wait to take my body away simply for looking as it does.
I’ve had many reactions to this year of death, but mainly I refer to it as the feeling of my head on fire – a combination of hyper-consciousness, rage, fear, anxiety, disappointment.
As James Baldwin wrote: “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.” I am there.
Too many days of anger, and hearing from the white mainstream that I shouldn’t be angry. There have been days of crying at my desk, of shouting in my car. Of feeling an urge to jump into the car and peel off into the night, somewhere between Rocky IV’s “There’s No Easy Way Out” sequence and Taylor Kitsch’s motorcycle PTSD freakout in the dark on True Detective.
Amid all this death, I’ve had the music speak to my head on fire. Music is the pop culture that has satisfied me most in these times of unrest, in a year when Black Lives Matter mutated from a hashtag into a movement.
Let me share some with you now.
“Be Free” by J. Cole
So emotional, so plaintive, so heartsick. So simple and fiery with the one demand asked for centuries now. “All we wanna do is take the chains off.” The song acknowledges the pesky persistence of racism, which seeks to steal every victory and snuff every dream – even the dream made real in seeing a black person elected president. Regarding Obama, Cole raps, “They let a brother steer the ship / And never told him that the ship was sinkin’.”
Yet Cole remains defiant, because to persist is to live, to stop is to truly die.
“Close Your Eyes (And Count To Fuck)” by Run The Jewels
On the days I feel especially radical, this song comes out. Sure, a thorough accounting of American racism is a radical act, given the miseducation that we receive. But if fear of black revolt is in the foundation of American racism, from slavery to now, Killer Mike, El-P and Zach de la Rocha (raging against the machine so hard that he breaks it) indulge their fantasies of that revolt made real.
From killing police and waterboarding prison wardens to taking down “liars and politicians, profiteers of the prisons,” Killer Mike raps, “we’re killing them for freedom ‘cause they tortured us for boredom.”
“The Charade” by D’Angelo and The Vanguard
Whatever rage I have isn’t blind. It’s mixed with many other emotions, including a deep heartache. There’s the grief in seeing so many lives interrupted and cut down, which is unbearable enough. Add to it the indignity of your experience invalidated, disbelieved and erased, and that fire on my head gets Ghost Rider size. D’Angelo, in his album full of liberation music, sings of the giant charade required to keep the oppression of people hidden and silent, but “feet have bled, a million miles we’ve walked.”
The blood can’t be denied forever.
“Scream” by Michael and Janet Jackson
Say what you will about Michael Jackson and race – and you can say a lot – he never truly presented himself as anything other than black. The skin bleaching, which was joked ad nauseam as Jackson wanting to be white, was about the vitiligo avowed by himself, family and friends. He even was laughed at for his soured relationship with Sony and Epic over what he saw as racial slights related to his banned song “They Don’t Care About Us,” as his public image declined amid child sex abuse allegations that were settled out of court.
I like “They Don’t Care About Us” just fine, but it’s “Scream” with little sister Janet that gets me yelling. There’s a pleasure I take in hearing them aggressively sing, “Stop pressuring me, stop fucking with me.” Keeping my aggressions in for the sake of not upsetting too many folks has its moments of necessity, but sometimes I wonder if it’s slowly killing me inside.
“Alright” by Kendrick Lamar
Currently my favorite in depicting the concept of hope on a tightrope, pitting the will to live against the crushing weight of systemic oppression while searching for the faith in deliverance. Kendrick, quickly becoming the most gifted rapper of this time, squeezes all that determination and grit into these few lines alone: “Wouldn’t you know / We been hurt, been down before / Nigga, when our pride was low / Lookin’ at the world like, “Where do we go?” / Nigga, and we hate po-po / Wanna kill us dead in the street fo sho / Nigga, I’m at the preacher’s door / My knees gettin’ weak, and my gun might blow / But we gon’ be alright.”
Wow.
At times, I describe the experience of being not white in a society built on white supremacy as walking around with a box of death in your mind at all times. The box can be made smaller by riches, by luck, but the box never fully closes and never disappears. Times such as Ferguson rip the lid off, and everything’s flying out.
Such is the lesson. Such is the madness. And, for me, such also is the origin of what is known as black cool.
The desire to walk as a full human being, unfettered and unafraid, unfolds so strongly that we overcompensate heavily. We take classical brass instruments and turn their music into the notes that aren’t being played. We take the guitar from being held chest-high to hip-deep, and bang. We party in deprivation and tell our own murder ballads of germs, guns and steel.
Such is the music I play in this year of death.
When the conscious rage takes over me, when the tumultuous heartache threatens to pull me into the abyss – again, and again, the music saves me.
When the world makes me crawl, the music tells me to strut.
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