They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

Excellent collection of essays: thoughtful and searching.

Some I really enjoyed: Carly Rae Jepson Loves You Back, I Wasn't Brought Here, I Was Born Here, Death Becomes You: My Chemical Romance and Ten Years of The Black Parade.

A few essays were stale time capsules like The Weeknd and the Future of Loveless Sex.

But on the whole, a great read about music, race, and nostalgia for the real that flourishes in our youth when finding meaningful connections.

“I hope they find each other in a room where a song that they know all of the words to crawls up the walls and rattles the lights above their heads.”

Hanif lived rent free in my head for days - his words, his prose - his insights into my own past thru what I couldn't imagine someone half across the world was also experiencing. I will miss this book, but I close this one - extremely thankful for what I've learned.

A beautiful and sad collection of essays. I love the way Hanif engages with music. He made me think about things in ways I had never before, and reconsider previous assumptions I had made without thinking. He writes a lot about death, ultimately arguing that hope and joy are involved in processing fear and loss. This book is a raw portrait of the current American political landscape. It can get dense and certainly heavy, so if you read multiple books at once I would try to find something lighter to pair with this.

I L O V E D this. I forget where I saw it recommended but I almost didn't pick it up because it's a lot of music criticism of music I don't especially like, but it was overall so highly recommended that I checked it out. And I'm so glad I did!! The author is also a poet and you can definitely tell, his style is so beautiful and moving. Even when I'm not familiar with the artists, these essays are always about more than music. (I have to admit I did prefer it when I was familiar with an essay's subject, such as Ms. Carly Rae Jepsen.)

Still: after this I'll read whatever Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib has to say about anything.