HANIF ABDURRAQIB: on Community, Music, Craft
DT McCrea: I love the way you intertwine the personal with the public; whether you’re writing about an album, a moment from an NBA game, or a film, you tie the subject matter seamlessly to moving and often devastating moments from your own experience. Can you speak to how you see the relationship between the personal and the communal in the project of your own writing, and in the project of writing in general?
Hanif Abdurraqib: I think that often times what I am trying to do is to pepper in an understanding of the fact that I have lived in a moment that has been sound tracked by or immersed in culture—popular culture—that I received and am continuing to receive on an adjacent frequency or a similar frequency or an exact frequency to someone else, potentially someone I don’t know, someone I didn’t live alongside of. That understanding—and that seeking—does more for me to understand that even through whatever devastation I’ve lived through or whatever pain I’ve lived through there is a potential for connection that suggests that my life has been more than just grief. Or even that my life has been more than just pleasure. Take Fallout Boy Forever for example, writing about seeing Patrick Stump at SXSW was for me a good example of saying I experienced this thing that only a small group of other people experienced and I know that through our shared experience, though we consumed it differently, that connection in that moment allows me to rearticulate and rethink through this otherwise large and immeasurable sadness that the essay is ruminating on. If that makes sense.
They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, Hanif Abdurraqib (2017, two dollar radio)
D: In an interview I saw you describe Go Ahead In The Rain as a love letter. I get that sense from all of the music and pop culture writing you do. There’s a clear love for the people and the art that you’re writing about. You’re also one of my favorite follows on social media because I love how where you open up these conversations with other fans of music and pop culture. Could you talk a little bit about how you got into music writing?
H: I think the way that a lot of people witnessing me engaging with music, and more importantly engaging with people and using music as a vehicle, is very representative of not only why I got into music writing but how I got into music writing. I got into music writing as a tool for conversation. You know I think when we’re young—and of course there are people who are on the margins of whatever places they’re in—but for me, I remember being young and being like I’m such an outsider when really, you know, I played sports and was a very kind of typical teenager and was not marginalized enough in ways that made me an actual outsider, but because I though myself unique—especially emotionally unique—I was like I’m such an outsider, I’m so weird.
D & H: (Laughs)
A Fortune for Your Disaster (Tinhouse, 2019)
H: I think through the cultivating of that myth—through the cultivating of that lie I would tell myself—I did spend a lot of time isolated, listening to music and growing in understanding of music. And another lie that was born out of that was that music was something that should be enjoyed privately and ruminated on privately. When I began to find my people and breakout of that myth of music being an isolating thing, it was so exciting for me to just talk to people about music. On a lot of levels, and on these granular levels of like talking about the way a guitar sounds in a song we both love or talking about a singer’s voice—what it sounds like when it’s traveling through instrumentation—those kinds of things. Part of my writing—all of my writing—is really reaching towards that. It’s reaching towards a continuation of the excitement I feel when I just simply get to talk to people about music. And I do think that a larger project, a more immersive project of my work, is to strip down the hierarchy that is built between critic and listener and replace it with something like shared fandom. I mean the reason I engage with people when it comes to music the way I do is because I’m really interested in hearing form other people about music. I really love this idea that we’re all just music fans who are excited about stuff. Some of us more than others. I do understand that I am excited about a lot of music all of the time in a way that a lot of people don’t have the capacity to be or interest in being, but I don’t want to just talk to those people. I don’t want to just talk to the people who, like me, have immense interest and excitement about all of the music all the time. I want to talk to people who love one album a whole, whole lot. I want to know what that album is. I want to be able to listen to that album differently through the lens of that person. To me that is what critical engagement is—is to not pretend yourself as someone who is fully formed, but to allow yourself the ability to listen and never stop listening—not just to the music, but to various ways other people hear music.
D: I love that. It’s interesting to hear you say that it was a place of isolation that you started at, and then the realization of how wrong that was—and how much more there was to listening to music communally—that blossomed into the beautiful writing you do about music now.
H: Yeah, I mean writing was like that too for me. Especially because I did poetry alone. You know, I don’t have an MFA, I didn’t go to school for writing so I mostly learned how to write poetry alone in my room. So, I told myself the lie then that writing is something you do on your own. That also is a lie that I’m thankful to have figured my way out of.
D: So, you mentioned the broader project of like wanting to tear down the hierarchy between critic and fan, and I think a great example of that is your 68to05 project. I’m really fascinated by this project. the origins of 68to05: “I began to think about my lifetime of loving music, and wanted to make a family tree, of sorts. A tree of influence, attempting to pinpoint the arc of years that made me the music listener and lover I became today.” With that origin in mind, I’m wondering how did you decide a project with a such a deeply personal origin was going to be one where you pulled in writing from others?
The Crown Ain’t Worth Much (Button Poetry, 2016)
H: Mostly because I’m not that interesting you know? (Laughs). I wanted to make it a place that people could return to, not just marvel at for a second and tap their feet waiting for a new playlist. In order for people to return to it I wanted to have a component that really uplifted and celebrated the thing I was talking about. I wanted to reach out to people who don’t always get asked to write about music, who are not quote unquote music capital-C critics. Like last week Brian Oliu wrote a piece on the Miami Sound Machine. Brian’s a great writer, but not a music critic and he was just like “Yo, I have so many thoughts on this Miami Sound Machine Album.” And that’s the kind of writer I want. Because there’s a real excitement in that, in someone who doesn’t always get to write about music but who thinks about one or two albums all the time and has a space to articulate that. So that’s one part of it, another part is I’m always thinking about redistribution of a great many things. So I wanted to pay people to write about music, that’s one thing. Another thing is I kind of just wanted redistribute whatever social or cultural capital I’ve earned by lifting up writing about music that was not my own writing about music. I’ve just written a lot about music and people can find it in a lot of places. That’s not to say I’m done, clearly, I’m not I have stuff coming out often. But 68to05 does not need to be a space where it is centered on my own writing and my own ideas. To me the writing is the most interesting part of it—the playlists are cool and I know a lot of people like them and I’ll keep putting them out—but to me the writing is what has brought people back. The writing is what has gotten me excited and I think what has gotten people really excited. I wanted to bring back this blog-era freedom of if you’re excited about something and you have a thousand words in you about something I’m trying to read it.
D: I love that. The whole project is so interesting to me. I love to make playlists and stuff to and to think about what’s important to me musically, so the starting place of the project before it became this communal thing was already interesting to me. And then the idea of having other people write about what they love within the framework of these very specific years that are important to you, I love the communal energy of that. The way it connects the love of multiple people, the things that they love connected to the things that others love.
H: I just love reading about music through the lens of other people who are not me. I love reading about people’s experiences with albums that are not my own. I’ve heard Fever To Tell so many times, but Micheal Foulk’s essay on Fever To Tell on the site is so unique and so thoughtful. We’re talking about lenses to. Like if I—a straight, cisgender Black dude from the eastside of Columbus—have happened upon an album there’s a very specific lens through which I’ve happened upon that album and love that album. What I’m also asking for on the site and in some ways offering is for people to offer me a different perspective that I have not reached on my own. And that has been immensely satisfying.
D: Can you speak to how community shapes your writing process? Who are the people in your life that help shape your writing and in what ways do they do so?
H: It’s weirdly mostly not writers. I think about community as a deeply intentional act. I don’t think community is something that is formed just because people do the same things. There are certainly poets who I count as part of my community, but it’s more than just we do the same thing so we’re in this community. It’s really rooted in practices of care and accountability, and trust that is earned over a lot of years. What I mostly think about is how I’ve been shaped by my friends in my home town who loved me deeply before I wrote anything. Also, the organizing community I’ve been lucky enough to be a part of or adjacent to and what I believe my responsibilities are to those communities. How my writing work affords me opportunities that feed into abilities to uplift organizing communities. Part of this for me is just understanding that when there is a community of care in place, and accountability practices in place, and just plainly people who love each other in place that, for me, is an opportunity to think carefully about what I’m doing and how I’m moving in the world as a writer and as a human so that I don’t disappoint the people who are inextricably linked to me and invested in—not my success—but my wellbeing. So often when communities are founded on what people do and not who they are, I’ve seen that mean that the idea of community is flimsy because it’s tied to achievements and accomplishments and not personhood. I just don’t have time for community-based practices that are tied solely to what people achieve. Now of course if someone I love achieves something we’re definitely celebrate that. But the work for me is how do I love a person even when they’re achieving nothing? How do I better love myself when I’m doing the constant work to detach myself from notions of productivity? How do I see loving myself as a form of productivity? How do I see divesting from my own ego—in hopes that I can better love the people around me—as a type of real productivity, generous productivity? Instead of being like, I wrote a thousand words today so love me. You know what I mean?
Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest (University of Texas Press, 2019)
D: Yeah, I mean when you said, “how do I love someone when they’re achieving nothing?” It’s like, how do you reframe that right? What does it mean to achieve something? This capitalistic production-based idea of achievement versus like the achievement of loving oneself, of loving one’s community, the achievement of being alive for another day.
H: And even finding comfort in “nothingness”. That’s an achievement too. As someone who consistently has to work to find practices of care that center stillness. That feels like an achievement in some ways too.
D: It definitely feels like an achievement in the face of the incredible propaganda machine telling us to never let ourselves do nothing.
H: That’s real and I’m always trying to fight outside of that. I finally started meditating—I say finally because one of my homies has been on me to start meditating for years. She’s always like “This is for you. I don’t know why you don’t do this,” and I’ve always been like “no, no, I’ve gotta—” Because your brain—or at least my brain totally tricks me into imaging that I have to keep doing things. Even with organizing, even when I believe the things I’m doing are righteous, I trick myself into being like “even fifteen minutes a day I can’t spare.” About a month ago I finally got a mediation app and now I like meditate five times a week and I’m like “Woah this is what it’s like to just sit still? And not think about anything? I’m on it.”
D & H: (Laughs)
A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance (Penguin Random House, 2021)
D: Okay I just have one last question. What’s your album of the year so far for 2020?
H: You know I’m thinking about this a lot because at the end of every year for the past like decade I do my arbitrary number of favorite albums for the year and we’re getting to that time. I don’t stop listening but I stop considering albums the first week of December because I just don’t have enough time to sit with them and declare them anything. I can’t say my favorite—not because it’s a secret but just because I haven’t processed. I will say the one album I keep coming back to that will be top five for sure is May Our Chamber Be Full the Emma Ruth Rundle & Thou album. One, it is immensely dark, which is fitting for this year to me. I don’t know if you listen to Emma Ruth Rundle at all but she is one of my favorite kind of singers because everything she sings sounds like a threat. And Thou is just this really great metal band. The last song is this song called The Valley. It’s like 8.5 minutes long and it’s all dark and the last minute of it opens up to this even deeper darkness. It’s kind of like wandering through a forest and thinking your seeing a clearing and getting there and realizing it’s just another darker forest. There are a lot of albums this year that are going to be high on my list but I really think that’s going to be in my top five. I need to spend more time with it, but I think Phoebe [Bridgers]’ album Punisher.
D: Yeah, that’s my number one.
H: It’s going to be up there for me. I think I need to revisit because the thing that I run into every single year is that albums come out and then time passes and I forget how much I love them. Which is another reason I start my list in early December, because I take this list maybe a little too seriously. But I do want to honor earlier albums. I think about how much I love the Soccer Mommy album, but that shit came out in February. Which to me, right now, feels like a decade ago. So, I need to go back and relisten to it. But yeah, I think Phoebe’s album and the Emma Ruth Rundle album are going to be high on the list.
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain't Worth Much, was released in June 2016 from Button Poetry. It was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. With Big Lucks, he released a limited edition chapbook, Vintage Sadness, in summer 2017 (you cannot get it anymore and he is very sorry.) His first collection of essays, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in winter 2017 by Two Dollar Radio and was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune, among others. He released Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest with University of Texas press in February 2019. The book became a New York Times Bestseller, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune For Your Disaster, was released in 2019 by Tin House, and won the 2020 Lenore Marshall Prize. In 2021, he will release the book A Little Devil In America with Random House. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.
DT McCrea (they/she) is a trans-anarchist poet. They love the NBA, know the lyrics to every Saintseneca song, and have a love hate relationship with philosophy. Her work can be found in Gordon Square Review, Honey & Lime, Flypaper, mutiny!, and on her website at https://dtmccrea.wordpress.com/. Follow them on twitter @dt_mccrea