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A review by 3mmers
They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib
emotional
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
Hanif Abdurraqib makes me believe in love.
You should read this book. Rather, you should listen to the audiobook. It’s narrated by the author and includes a few incredibly charming off-script notes about Abdurraqib’s thoughts as he records his essays but to eight years after he initially wrote them.
Also, you should read this book, it’s for everyone. The idea of music criticism might seem dull or annoying for the casual music enjoyer, but this isn’t about criticism so much as it is about the love of the game. Carly Rae Jepsen, The Weeknd before he was coo, MCR’s The Black Parade, Fall Out Boy and Twenty-One Pilots before they were cool. Chance The Rapper. Nina Simone. Yes, it is about unwelcoming scenes. Yes, it is about tragedy. Yes, it is about racism. These things are also about love.
I picked this one up as a bit of an aspirational read. I like the idea of being the kind of person who listens to a lot of music and has deep and thoughtful conversations about the artistry far more than I like actually listening to albums. I caught the rot youn. Unlike Abdurraqib, I came of age in the musical purgatory of 2010-2014, the Pitbull years, the iTunes generation. Or, if we’re being honest, the Limewire generation. My music listening technique has always been to select each and every song as the previous one ended. I didn’t fuck with playlists and I definitely didn’t fuck with albums. Who has the time to rip and entire album on Youtubetomp3.com? The hidden cost of Limewire’s free music was no album art and a high chance that at least a couple songs would be straight up missing. You took what you could get. As an anxious nerd in the extremely dispersed Canadian prairies, I didn’t go to shows (there weren’t any shows) (stop touring Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver and calling it a Canadian leg jesus christ).
My project here was to listen to the albums along with the essays and finally learn how to Appreciate Music.
We started strong, with Chance The Rapper’s Colouring Book and Carly Rae Jepsen’s Emotion. These albums are great! Listening to them more intentionally led me to appreciate the background elements far more. Colouring Book’s soaring horns and Carly’s upbeat atmosphere.
One of the first things that jumps out to you about this collection is that it is extremely about live music. Almost ever essay is based around a concert or live experience and each of these is defined by Abdurraqib’s interactions with other audience members. A guy who was at a Springsteen concert the night John Lennon was shot. Teenagers making out to Carly Rae. Disrespectful boomers chewing out stadium staff. Moshers. Scandalized parents escorting their kids to The Weeknd. It’s eerie, in a post-lockdown world, to look back at a time when live music was so… normal. Tours are ramping back up but they feel enormously changed by new economic realities. The idea of live music is dominated by huge tours you can’t afford. Many of the microscopic venues of Abdurraqib’s teens and young adulthood are closed now. You can still score tickets to small shows and local acts, but you’ll be one of a couple dozen audience members awkwardly milling around a mostly empty floor. Conversely, conversation about popular acts is no longer about the experience of the concert — the visuals, the setlist, the live singing, dancing, etc — but about whether the artist is accessible enough to their fans. “I just feel like a concert should be the artist giving back to their fans, not making money,” a woman on Instagram tells her front facing camera, as if by enjoying their music we are entitled to an artist’s service. It’s cynical and financialized and a far cry from the humanity which Abdurraqib finds in the collective experience of music.
I was thinking about this when the collection came right for my heart. It started with an essay about being too sappy and in love for The Weeknd’s emotionally distant RnB persona, attending the concern because someone who no longer loves you told you not to miss it. Flying to a dozen states in as many weeks for work and hearing friends check in on how you’re doing when you lay your head down on a strange pillow. I don’t know exactly how to articulate it but despite the fact that Abdurraqib attends most of his events alone the presence of community and friendship is so strong as to be physical.
I got into emo/scene well after all its biggest acts had blown up and sold out, but Abdurraqib’s essays on seeing Folie a Deux era Fall Out Boy in a midwest hole consisting of a stage, the pit, and a one-deep crowd of others lining the wall spoke to the part of me that listened to three-quarters of From Under the Cork Tree at the bus stop as the sun rose.
Abdurraqib is a terrifically evocative writing, and a brilliantly sensitive one. His writing reminds me of Caleb Azumah Nelson in the way its lyricism stretches the boundaries of prose in a way that inspires emotion the same way music does. It feels reductive to describe it with a small word like ‘compassionate’ when what I really want to say is that this is writing that reaches into my brain and touches my limbic system directly. I say this is about love, and I want to make it clear that ‘love’ also includes sadness, it also includes pain, and loss. What I want to say is that this book makes me believe in love, but also community, but also resilience, but also family.
If you care about what words can do - and if you care about the physical sensation of sound pumped through the anonymous yet familiar crowd dark but for the corona of the stage - you owe it to yourself to read this book.
You should read this book. Rather, you should listen to the audiobook. It’s narrated by the author and includes a few incredibly charming off-script notes about Abdurraqib’s thoughts as he records his essays but to eight years after he initially wrote them.
Also, you should read this book, it’s for everyone. The idea of music criticism might seem dull or annoying for the casual music enjoyer, but this isn’t about criticism so much as it is about the love of the game. Carly Rae Jepsen, The Weeknd before he was coo, MCR’s The Black Parade, Fall Out Boy and Twenty-One Pilots before they were cool. Chance The Rapper. Nina Simone. Yes, it is about unwelcoming scenes. Yes, it is about tragedy. Yes, it is about racism. These things are also about love.
I picked this one up as a bit of an aspirational read. I like the idea of being the kind of person who listens to a lot of music and has deep and thoughtful conversations about the artistry far more than I like actually listening to albums. I caught the rot youn. Unlike Abdurraqib, I came of age in the musical purgatory of 2010-2014, the Pitbull years, the iTunes generation. Or, if we’re being honest, the Limewire generation. My music listening technique has always been to select each and every song as the previous one ended. I didn’t fuck with playlists and I definitely didn’t fuck with albums. Who has the time to rip and entire album on Youtubetomp3.com? The hidden cost of Limewire’s free music was no album art and a high chance that at least a couple songs would be straight up missing. You took what you could get. As an anxious nerd in the extremely dispersed Canadian prairies, I didn’t go to shows (there weren’t any shows) (stop touring Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver and calling it a Canadian leg jesus christ).
My project here was to listen to the albums along with the essays and finally learn how to Appreciate Music.
We started strong, with Chance The Rapper’s Colouring Book and Carly Rae Jepsen’s Emotion. These albums are great! Listening to them more intentionally led me to appreciate the background elements far more. Colouring Book’s soaring horns and Carly’s upbeat atmosphere.
One of the first things that jumps out to you about this collection is that it is extremely about live music. Almost ever essay is based around a concert or live experience and each of these is defined by Abdurraqib’s interactions with other audience members. A guy who was at a Springsteen concert the night John Lennon was shot. Teenagers making out to Carly Rae. Disrespectful boomers chewing out stadium staff. Moshers. Scandalized parents escorting their kids to The Weeknd. It’s eerie, in a post-lockdown world, to look back at a time when live music was so… normal. Tours are ramping back up but they feel enormously changed by new economic realities. The idea of live music is dominated by huge tours you can’t afford. Many of the microscopic venues of Abdurraqib’s teens and young adulthood are closed now. You can still score tickets to small shows and local acts, but you’ll be one of a couple dozen audience members awkwardly milling around a mostly empty floor. Conversely, conversation about popular acts is no longer about the experience of the concert — the visuals, the setlist, the live singing, dancing, etc — but about whether the artist is accessible enough to their fans. “I just feel like a concert should be the artist giving back to their fans, not making money,” a woman on Instagram tells her front facing camera, as if by enjoying their music we are entitled to an artist’s service. It’s cynical and financialized and a far cry from the humanity which Abdurraqib finds in the collective experience of music.
I was thinking about this when the collection came right for my heart. It started with an essay about being too sappy and in love for The Weeknd’s emotionally distant RnB persona, attending the concern because someone who no longer loves you told you not to miss it. Flying to a dozen states in as many weeks for work and hearing friends check in on how you’re doing when you lay your head down on a strange pillow. I don’t know exactly how to articulate it but despite the fact that Abdurraqib attends most of his events alone the presence of community and friendship is so strong as to be physical.
I got into emo/scene well after all its biggest acts had blown up and sold out, but Abdurraqib’s essays on seeing Folie a Deux era Fall Out Boy in a midwest hole consisting of a stage, the pit, and a one-deep crowd of others lining the wall spoke to the part of me that listened to three-quarters of From Under the Cork Tree at the bus stop as the sun rose.
Abdurraqib is a terrifically evocative writing, and a brilliantly sensitive one. His writing reminds me of Caleb Azumah Nelson in the way its lyricism stretches the boundaries of prose in a way that inspires emotion the same way music does. It feels reductive to describe it with a small word like ‘compassionate’ when what I really want to say is that this is writing that reaches into my brain and touches my limbic system directly. I say this is about love, and I want to make it clear that ‘love’ also includes sadness, it also includes pain, and loss. What I want to say is that this book makes me believe in love, but also community, but also resilience, but also family.
If you care about what words can do - and if you care about the physical sensation of sound pumped through the anonymous yet familiar crowd dark but for the corona of the stage - you owe it to yourself to read this book.