Hanif Abdurraqib

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.

I considered how often there is shame attached to loving anyone publicly. The shame, of course, comes on a sliding scale, depending on who you are and who you love. How often I hear people complain about things like engagement photos, couples being tender with each other in public, or someone who can’t stop talking about someone they love. How often I first think of who may be watching before I lean in to give someone I love a really good kiss in a crowded store.

ScHoolboy Q can certainly do whatever he wants and doesn’t need my permission. When, in another interview, he says, “it’s not like these white people are racist, they’re at a rap show,” I understand that this is all rooted in what I have convinced myself of for years: that a closeness for, or even a love for culture, puts you so far into it that you can embody all aspects without harm. That love is the great equalizer, even if there is blood underneath a word that no longer belongs to you. For this, I feel for ScHoolboy Q when he says that he is not encouraging these white fans to use the word outside of the concert venue. I feel for him, and I envy his optimism.

saying that I want to be in love, but sometimes I just don’t want to be alone, and I don’t want to do the work of balancing what that means in what hour of whatever darkness I’m sitting in.

Home is where the heart begins, but not where the heart stays. The heart scatters across states, and has nothing left after what home takes from it. I know the suburbs best by how they consumed the kids I knew in my teenage years: the punk kids, the emo kids, the soccer kids, the kids who came out to the basketball courts with the black kids to play the way they couldn’t in their backyard. So many of us, especially teenagers, strive to be something we’re not. Escape is vital, in some cases, as a survival tool. Once, I never knew how anyone who lived in a beautiful home in a nice neighborhood could be sad. Sometimes, when you know so much of not having, it is easy to imagine those who do have as exceptionally worry-free.

Sadness, when you are truly being swallowed by it, can feel almost universal. Not the vehicle that drives you to the doorstep of sadness, and certainly not the way it manifests itself inside of you. But the sadness itself, the soaking feeling of it, is something that you know everyone around you has had a taste of. The kids who came to rap and punk shows in nice shoes, always fighting to stay out just a bit later, anything to keep them away from home, anything to keep them in a world unlike their own. This is the cycle we create and live through: we see the greener grass and then run to it.

A lot of the people I knew who dismissed “emo” while the genre was at its peak did so because they believed emotions were things that should be sacred and unspoken, not screamed out to the listening masses. I push back against that, both in personal practice and as someone who has seen the other side of that coin, or known people completely eaten alive by the hoarding of sacred emotion.

Twisting anger over heartbreak into something, well, cute, is easier for some genres than others. In emo, particularly during its heyday of attractive frontmen who fancied themselves poets, the misogyny was seen more as process than problem. Who among us, regardless of gender, hasn’t scrawled something in the silence of a notebook about an ex-someone? It’s a part of the coping, at least to a point. The problem is one of audience, though. The problem is the one of the notebook becoming public, sung to thousands. The problem is one of men being, largely, the only ones doing the singing. And, ultimately, the problem becomes when those men don’t age beyond the adolescent heartbroken temper tantrums that we all have before we learn better and start to know better. It’s not a measure of being morally superior to this band on stage, or not failing in my own politics around sadness, gender, and anger. But it’s the difference between trying to chip away at the emotional debt one has accrued versus piling on top of it.

when you grow up with punks, the kind of kids who listened to Richard Hell records and then found more like that, it’s easy to feel some distance from the kind of optimism that we’re taught to lean into during difficult times. Even now, I’m not as invested in things getting better as I am in things getting honest.

grow up poor, especially with any proximity to wealth, real or imagined, is to think sometimes that money can save you. To think that money can pull you and the people you love out of the feeling of any grief, or sadness.