I don’t want to go overboard here. Hanif Abdurraqib is a less masterful stylist than Dave Hickey or Jonathan Lethem, whose finest collections bear down on music, or straight-up rockcrits Greil Marcus or Ellen Willis. Nor is he as deft as Touré or as dazzling as Greg Tate or as original as his acknowledged inspiration Lester Bangs. And yes, there are other notable youngbloods out there, most of them women. But as someone who’d as soon read a good essay collection as a good novel, I don’t want to understate either. They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us establishes Abdurraqib as a major rock critic — polished and deft and original in a searchingly unpolished way and, if you’ll grant that the word need be no more race-specific than “rock critic” itself, more soulful than any of the above except Bangs. Yes, he’s less funny than Bangs — we all are. But in Abdurraqib’s case that comes with the concept.

Abdurraqib is a thirty-two-year-old African American from a struggling lower-middle-class family in Columbus, Ohio, who owes his Arabic name to parents who converted to Islam in the ’70s. Although never devout and no longer observant, he was the only Muslim at the local college he attended on a soccer scholarship. A third of the 60 poems his website links to reference music, which is also the subject of half the 20 essays there. He’s got a gig at MTV News, where a dozen of these selections first appeared; others surfaced in Pitchfork and the New York Times. But whatever their provenance, Abdurraqib has worked hard to make this book their natural home.

An opening section sequenced Chance the Rapper-Springsteen-Carly Rae Jepsen-Prince-ScHoolboy Q-Weeknd establishes his cross-racial orientation and his black identity simultaneously, only not quite as you might expect. Yes, the ScHoolboy Q piece unpacks the rapper’s insistence that the white fans who buy his ever-pricier tickets get over it and utter the word “nigger.” But Abdurraqib’s thoughts on Springsteen, whose delvings into mortality, work, and the American Dream he admires avidly, are just as race-conscious — only a day before the show, he’d put mortality in perspective by visiting Ferguson, and he can’t help but notice that, speaking of work, he’s the only black person at the Meadowlands who’s there for the concert rather than a j-o-b. Yet arrayed around Springsteen are the explicitly happy beginning of a candy-colored, gospel-soaked Chance the Rapper event and, happier still, a Carly Rae concert — which does, he mentions, attract some black couples — where fans are kissing, truly kissing, in Manhattan’s brutally industrial Terminal 5.

If you’re expecting more of the eclectic same, though, Abdurraqib then pulls a switch, because it turns out he was an emo kid, a follower of the punky, hooky, hyperemotional pop-rock subgenre typified by Dashboard Confessional and Fall Out Boy that dominates Section II. I was always too old for emo, with its built-in male narcissism rendered even ranker by its trademark self-pity, but Abdurraqib’s report from the front is something to treasure. Emo is such a white scene that he was often the only black kid at shows where moshers thrashed in full-fledged clubs and sweaty basements alike, and so he begins by outlining his eventual progress to the Afropunk movement. But that clarified, he turns his sympathies to the lost white suburban Midwesterners who were his brothers in pain, in particular his friend Tyler, who surfaces by name in the jumbled eight-part tour de force “Fall Out Boy Forever.” In the beginning, tall Tyler strides into the pit to rescue short Hanif, sprawled below the leaping throng. In the end, troubled Tyler commits suicide. The lesson being that the unlistenable emotions emo indulges are literally too much for many who hear their own anguish there.

Although almost every black American lives closer to death than almost every white American, Abdurraqib is probably more blessed than Tyler was. But not by much. Several other emo deaths haunt him; he lost his mother overnight when her bipolar meds killed her in her sleep; his 2015 “My Demons and My Dog and This Anxiety and That Noise” — not included here, perhaps because he didn’t dare expose himself so nakedly — is an excruciating account of his own anxiety disorders. And so the bulk of the book culminates with a long final section — most of it previously unpublished — that hews close to music as it lays out a piecemeal autobiography. Most of it takes place post−Trayvon Martin, who was slain the night Abdurraqib drove to Minnesota with a companion I take to be his future wife, to witness a typically stirring show by white alt-rap lifers Atmosphere. I don’t agree with all his analyses or feel all his tastes, but every one gains not just poignancy but heft from personal particulars that are also, inevitably, political. Abdurraqib always remains a critic who deals in textual interpretation and aesthetic judgment. But the urgency that infuses music for him, often captured in a few articulated details, is what criticism ought to be for and too often isn’t.

Thus the “shiny suit” rap of the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Mo’ Money Mo’ Problems” moves him because he knows his just-deceased mom would fall for its Diana Ross sample. Thus the Bataclan massacre evokes first Muslim teens seeking in live music “an escape from whatever particular evil was suffocating them” and then Muslim rapper Lupe Fiasco. Thus man in black Johnny Cash, who never shot a man in Reno, parallels suburban trap-rappers Migos, who never dealt crack. Thus the interlude when Atmosphere pauses his nonstop set for a brief “I need y’all to know that we’re gonna be all right” foreshadows both “The White Rapper Joke,” which surveys seven of the ungainly beasts and reserves special praise for Macklemore’s “weaponization” of his excess fame, and “They Will Speak Loudest About You When You’re Gone,” which juxtaposes white outrage about racist police killings against white failure to see living African Americans, like the New Havenite who peremptorily dumped her bags in his lap and then got on her cell to gab about Freddie Gray — an image Abdurraqib says he recalls often, as will I.

They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, which takes its title from a sign Abdurraqib spotted in Ferguson, is on balance a rather dark book. His anxieties can’t be much fun, his marriage falls apart as his story ends, and he’s seen too much death without becoming inured to it like a gangsta sporting a teardrop tattoo. But let’s not kid around. The era of African-American good feeling that began with the election of Barack Obama — which generated what “The Obama White House, a Brief Home for Rappers” calls an “optics of equality” — was radically disrupted by George Zimmerman and demolished by white supremacist Donald Trump. Abdurraqib assigns himself a mission of celebrating music’s “love and joy” — his Columbus elders with their Sunday soul parties, his emo brethren discharging pent-up torment, the Baton Rouge rapper Foxx igniting his only hit with a profligate “I pull up at the club VIP / Gas tank on E / But all drinks on me,” those provisionally carefree Chance and Carly fans. He ends with a meditation on the wheelies gleeful kids are practicing in the parking lot behind his apartment. But it isn’t just his anxiety disorders that compel him to dwell as well on all the injustices that surround and subtend the same music. It’s a sense of the moment all too few can figure out how to put into words.

Abdurraqib doesn’t write zingers. His power is cumulative, preacherly even, though his Muslim upbringing renders him the rare African American who’s an outsider in the black church. I’ve told you how he ends, with those innocents and their wheelies. So let me end with how he begins. Goes like this: “This, more than anything, is about everything and everyone that didn’t get swallowed by the vicious and yawning maw of 2016, and all that it consumed upon its violent rattling which echoed into the year after it and will surely echo into the year after that one. This, more than anything, is about how there is sometimes only one single clear and clean surface on which to dance, and sometimes it only fits you and no one else. This is about hope, sure, but not in that way that it is often packaged as an antithesis to that which is burning.”

 

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Every author has a story beyond the one that they put down on paper. The Barnes & Noble Podcast goes between the lines with today’s most interesting writers, exploring what inspires them, what confounds them, and what they were thinking when they wrote the books we’re talking about.

In this episode of the podcast, we talk with two very different writers about how one kind of art can fuel another. First, the actor and writer Krysten Ritter talks with our interviewer Josh Perilo about her psychological thriller Bonfire – whose main character shares some character traits with the detective Ritter plays on the Netflix series Jessica Jones. Then, Miwa Messer is joined by the award-winning young adult author Jason Reynolds in a conversation about his new novel Long Way Down, and how Reynolds uses poetry to make a page-turning story sing.

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It has been ten years since Abby Williams left home and scrubbed away all visible evidence of her small-town roots. Now working as an environmental lawyer in Chicago, she has a thriving career, a modern apartment, and her pick of meaningless one-night stands.

 

  An ode to Put the Damn Guns Down, this is National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestseller Jason Reynolds’s fiercely stunning novel that takes place in sixty potent seconds—the time it takes a kid to decide whether or not he’s going to murder the guy who killed his brother.

A cannon. A strap.
A piece. A biscuit.
A burner. A heater.
A chopper. A gat.
A hammer
A tool
for RULE

Or, you can call it a gun. That’s what fifteen-year-old Will has shoved in the back waistband of his jeans. See, his brother Shawn was just murdered. And Will knows the rules. No crying. No snitching. Revenge. That’s where Will’s now heading, with that gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, the gun that was his brother’s gun. He gets on the elevator, seventh floor, stoked. He knows who he’s after. Or does he? As the elevator stops on the sixth floor, on comes Buck. Buck, Will finds out, is who gave Shawn the gun before Will took the gun. Buck tells Will to check that the gun is even loaded. And that’s when Will sees that one bullet is missing. And the only one who could have fired Shawn’s gun was Shawn. Huh. Will didn’t know that Shawn had ever actually USED his gun. Bigger huh. BUCK IS DEAD. But Buck’s in the elevator? Just as Will’s trying to think this through, the door to the next floor opens. A teenage girl gets on, waves away the smoke from Dead Buck’s cigarette. Will doesn’t know her, but she knew him. Knew. When they were eight. And stray bullets had cut through the playground, and Will had tried to cover her, but she was hit anyway, and so what she wants to know, on that fifth floor elevator stop, is, what if Will, Will with the gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, MISSES.

And so it goes, the whole long way down, as the elevator stops on each floor, and at each stop someone connected to his brother gets on to give Will a piece to a bigger story than the one he thinks he knows. A story that might never know an END…if WILL gets off that elevator.

Told in short, fierce staccato narrative verse, Long Way Down is a fast and furious, dazzlingly brilliant look at teenage gun violence, as could only be told by Jason Reynolds.

Click here to see all books by Jason Reynolds.

Like this podcast? Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher to discover intriguing new conversations every week.

 

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In the fall of 1939, the writer and self-help guru Marjorie Hillis married Thomas Henry Roulston, owner of the prominent New York City grocery chain Roulston & Sons. She was forty-nine years old, and he was in his early sixties. The bride did not wear white at her wedding. Instead, according to Joanna Scutts, Hillis’ devoted biographer and the author of the sharp new book The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hills Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It, Hillis wore a “gown of ‘pale smoke blue’ in marquisette . . . with an ostrich feather perched on her tightly curled iron-gray hair.” Though Hillis’ outfit was ethereal, there was a lot of added heaviness to her nuptials; she had become a household name for her clever books about never wanting to get married, and here she was, willingly walking down the aisle. It was, to put it in modern parlance, an off-brand move for the writer. An editor at Vogue and a staunch bachelorette, Hillis made her literary debut in 1936 with a manifesto about the glories of being a single woman in the city, titled Live Alone and Like It. The book sailed off the shelves, as young women flocked to cities looking for job opportunities and wider horizons, subsequently finding themselves in dire need of a savvy guide to the brave new world they themselves were creating. Hillis not only wrote the definitive book on 1930s solo living but became its public face; a Washington D.C. News article about her carried the headline “Author of Best Seller Bases Her Books on Theories She Has Proven for Herself.”

When Hillis fell in love, she knew that she was taking a huge gamble. She had written a stack of bestsellers (after Live Alone and Like It came books on personal finance and cooking for one) based on singlehood and had sewn a cult of personality around her ability to remain glamorous and unattached, answering the doorbell in elegant velvet lounging robes, holding a “glass of excellent sherry.” How would her readers take to her decision to wed? Along with the announcement for her engagement, the Chicago Tribune playfully printed the words “Didn’t Like It” above her picture. As Scutts writes, “marriage effectively silenced Marjorie Hillis” — not just because she could no longer be a champion of the companionless but also because she realized that being a contented wife was not thrilling material. “There was nothing radical in ‘live together and like it,’ ” Scutts writes. However, Hillis’ hiatus did not last for long. Roulston died suddenly in 1949, and she found herself flush with ideas again. She wrote You Can Start All Over, a snappy guide to stylish widowhood. Hillis was nothing if not a survivor, bouncing along the zeitgeist and turning her struggles into fashionable sound bites.

Scutts comes from an academic background — she studied at Cambridge and then earned her Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia, and currently serves as the first Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Women’s History at the New-York Historical Society — and she admits early on that she considered Hillis’ story to be a trifle, a subject she “cheated” on her formal studies with, after a friend gave her Live Alone and Like It as a gag gift. Hillis — who did not even have a Wikipedia page when Scutts found her — was her cocktail party anecdote; she loved telling the story of this woman who published a monster bestseller and then was pulled under the historical tides, loved reviving interest in Hillis like she was her press agent from beyond the grave. Suddenly, it became clear to her that this side interest was becoming encompassing, and that Hillis’ story had larger implications for women’s history. She writes: “Despite the charming retro touches, like the insistence that any self-respecting Live-Aloner ought to own at least four styles of a mysterious garment called ‘a bed jacket,’ Marjorie Hillis’ philosophy struck me as almost painfully relevant to modern single women like me who were balancing the fantasy of independence with the fear of being alone.” (It is worth noting that while researching the book, Scutts, like her subject, fell in love and married, despite the implied dissonance with her main thesis.)

The resulting book is itself a kind of a marriage, between Scutts’s academic training and her more personal engagement with Hillis as a flesh-and-blood character. The resulting book is far from a straight biography and offers instead  a colorful dissertation on midcentury womanhood, exploring Hillis’ impact from several angles in order to sketch out a prismatic understanding of feminism and freedom at the time. Scutts carves her chapters into short, information-packed sections on topics like the history of self-help books, the back-story of Hillis’ ambitious editor at Vogue, the politics of Rosie the Riveter, the origin story of The Joy of Cooking, and other deeply researched asides. This could make the book feel like a bowl of potpourri, but Scutts was smart to continually weave Hillis’ story into her diversions. This makes Hillis’ story feel far-reaching — she touched so many aspects of women’s rights and financial independence — but it also grounds an enormous history in a personal narrative.

Scutts makes an effort throughout The Extra Woman to connect Hillis’ story to contemporary feminism, but she is at her very best when she is recounting shimmering details from midcentury history. Her chapter on women and food — especially the section about women drinking alone, which pulls from sources as diverse as The Philadelphia Story, The Savoy Cocktail Book, and a 1933 tome about teetotalism called Bacchus Behave! — is peppered with quirky and crystalline factoids, the kind that you might want to recount at your next cocktail party. Scutts may not have known at first that Hillis’ life would make for a great book, but she did have a hunch that it would make a great window through which to view a forgotten and fascinating slice of women’s history. One obscure woman’s story can be a vessel for understanding the lives of thousands; it is in doing justice to this fact that Scutts does justice to her leading lady.

 

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