Make no mistake, I loved writing about rap music and musicians. In my thirties now, it felt like an apex, a natural culmination of my craft and biography. It was the role-reversal of a lifetime: now, thanks to the good luck of friendly access, the suburban white kid was spending weeknights hanging out in the backyard of many of Boston’s most accomplished Black creatives. But the more the role came to mean to me, the more difficult it got to function. I had to do not only a good job but an exceptional one, to affirm all of life’s tributaries that had led there. I’d been given so much, I felt, I had scores of favors to return.
I’m thinking here of an old friend of mine, or maybe an acquaintance I admired. (I have, I think, a habit of conflating the two.) Jefe Replay was the kind of rapper that reminded you there’s no asset more valuable to that profession than charisma. We’d met a few times over my years as a hanger-on of the music scene when I was commissioned for a feature about him, a first for both of us. I already liked the guy, but now he was my first chance at a really substantive bit of music writing—more than ‘find out about this show’ in a few hundred words.
If there is such thing as star quality, Jefe Replay had it. He was just crushingly likeable, and I was as taken as anybody. In my first few years hanging around the Boston music scene, we met a few times, always embracing like old friends despite hardly knowing one another. As was the case with a few of my favorites in town, I’d felt that it wasn’t a matter of if I’d write about him, but when.
The opportunity finally came when a few of my editorial well-wishers conspired to assign me to a feature story on Replay that would coincide with the much-awaited release of his first complete album. The article would be part of a recurring feature that shone a spotlight on an assortment of hip-hop artists from different Boston-area neighborhoods. Replay was from a notorious one, Roxbury’s Orchard Park, known both for its strife and its musical history, as the origin point of New Edition breakout star Bobby Brown.
The idea was that the feature would examine both the artist and where he was from, teasing out the relationship between the two. So, for the first time in my music writing career, I had some research to do. I trekked to the Boston Public Library and dug up old reports on the neighborhood and what had been done to police it. I found an old David Foster Wallace book that related the exploits of he and a friend who would voyage into inner city Boston in the 1980s to survey and participate in the local Black music scene. I took the assignment seriously and poured all that I could into it.
When the time came to conduct the main interview, Replay invited me to the home he shared with his mom, no longer in “OP.” The conversation we had was the most fun I’d ever had working in my life. We hung out in his bedroom with my audio recorder whirring, passing a bottle of Hennessey back and forth between pulls from a blunt. His walls told a story, one where Murakami and MLK Jr. were, given their ability to inspire, equals. Spoils of fashion spilled out of every cabinet and corner.
He told me about the pains of growing up in a notorious hood and how it had instilled in him a strong desire to be liked, as a ward of protection, which I latched onto. He told me of his designs to forge a path in music that people from his community could follow, reckoning as he was with his burgeoning influence, which was already manifesting itself in the sounds of teenage musicians walking in his wake. At one point, his father FaceTimed in, the two enjoying their easy love and support. Intermittently he’d yell to his mother downstairs about the WNBA game that was happening. I got a little too blitzed for an “on-the-job” hang, but I got what I needed out of the afternoon—even more than when I walked in, I loved the guy.
The next phase of the assignment was to travel with a photographer to the project where Replay was raised. You could tell that he and the set of lifelong pals that had accompanied him were really soaking in the moment—proud survivors, perhaps. Replay seemed to know he was carrying the expectations of quite a few on his back, doing so joyously and in good humor.
I haven’t read it in a few years, but I was pleased with how the story turned out. It was made the cover story of our indy newspaper, my lone foray onto page 1. Even more, the powers that be deigned to throw a party to coincide with the release of Replay’s album and the issue. Held in the front room at the Hojoko bar in the Fenway neighborhood, the shindig was homecoming-like, for us both. All the friends I’d made in the scene were there, as was a horde of Replay’s fans, family, and loved ones. There were, on every surface, copies of my cover story, and what felt like on every tongue there were expressions of gratitude for my part in bringing the story to life, and getting it right. There was too much to get inebriated off of. But more than anything, it felt like a coronation for the musician and his kingdom—and in some ways it was. Word was buzzing that Replay would be headed to Los Angeles soon, to take the next step in his recording career. But he wouldn’t forget home, everyone was certain. It wasn’t in his character.
Writing about someone, trying to take their life and make art of it, is decidedly intimate. You end up feeling pretty close to the subject, and since Replay and I had enjoyed so many fond embraces, I took it to heart. But, as I’ve been discussing at length, I might have a habit of erring into the realm of presumption. At the event, I followed Replay outside at one point, hopeful to insinuate myself into what I knew would be a smoke break. As he climbed into an SUV, I asked if I could tag along. He said yes, but something betrayed his welcome. When I got into the car, I realized I was there with his true group of closest friends, his inner circle. I was cool, but I wasn’t that. I didn’t stay long and learned something important about boundaries for artists who have to trade on charisma.
I wish I could have made it up to him.
Too few years later, after some time living his dreams in LA, Jefe Replay passed away unexpectedly. The loss shook the community. It is not a stretch to say that he’d been a hero to a younger generation, and an inspiration to many if not most that knew him. We all expected him to “make it,” produce music that earned wide listenership and forge a career that helped to put Boston on the cultural map. When his story was cut short, only confusion and anguish could follow—and it was in healthy supply.
I myself was pretty devastated by the loss. Dying before you’re 30 is always a confusing tragedy, but this was my first exposure to this kind of loss of life. This fit into a bucket I knew only by reputation, life’s cutthroat robbery of potential, with reverberations that had the power to retraumatize entire communities. After some tortured consideration, I decided I wouldn’t feel right unless I attended his funeral. Our stories had been intertwined, meeting as we did in the pursuit of our creative dream careers, and to me that was sacred.
The funeral home was on the far side of town. I wasn’t the only white person there, but it never felt more like it. That dynamic fed an irrational, self-involved worry that my presence was in some way a violation, a presumption gone too far. But I was respectful and only received in kindness. And besides, as out of place as I felt my presence registered as little surprise to most in attendance—Replay was known for his ability to bring people of all stripes together. I was hardly the only person from the Boston music scene there—and in some ways our attendance was a testament to his particular character.
All my life, I’d craved access to Black spaces, Black private truths. And here I was finding it in the heart of a community that was trainwrecked by tragedy. I wanted acceptance and here I had it, under as terrible circumstances as one could imagine. When people asked how I knew the deceased, my answer was ready-made: “I wrote about him,” I’d say, and they’d know just the story, and gratitude would spill out. And I’d say something about how I always imagined our next story together would have been an even greater triumph, and they’d agree.
I cried a lot, joining the chorus. It was a beautiful remembrance, all around. In family and friends and everything else, here was a man who was loved. But as the holy men went on about the tenants of their faith, I felt a chasm start to open up. As others there leaned into rite and ritual, I was struck by how different I was from these folks, in what I believed, in what comforted me. Suddenly, in a way I’d never confronted before, our differences were so much more than skin deep. Because faith isn’t just faith, it’s history. It’s a framework with intergenerational reach that many find peace through. It’s a fucking mystery is what it is, but that day I couldn’t get out of my own head. All I could think was, Maybe I’ll never be able to be as close as I hoped. Especially without someone like Replay—folks that are, in a sense, bilingual, able to traverse multiple worlds—it felt hard to imagine a world where this community was wholly incorporated into the one I was from. Which, I guess, is what I thought I wanted. I was glad to be there in the room, to mourn and process. But I was unmoored. My vision for a perfect society was suddenly in dire need of revision. I was in the process of realizing how very much I had yet to learn.
After the burial, the artistic community Replay had so inspired held a celebration of life event, which was decidedly more buttoned-down, an upbeat wake. Back on familiar ground, I was able to connect with a few of Replay’s friends from different chapters, as well as with those we shared. It was almost like being at a wedding, getting to know someone better through their relationships. We were all holding onto him, mourning through happy tears, grateful for the good company. Honestly, it was almost perfect, but for the occasion. Everyone agreed the man would be proud of the assemblage. And the legacy. He hadn’t lived long. But he lived big.
For all that I’d thought I knew, the day was a pound-you-over-the-head lesson on how in the dark I was about the ins and outs of Black survival amid struggle. I might have the ability to visit, but I was nothing without my translators.
Off Tilter
Part of this story is about imbalance, and part of that imbalance is my own. I didn’t know it at the time, but an element that was impeding my work was festering mental illness. I’d always had periods of sadness as well as energetic ones, but I didn’t know I was bipolar. I didn’t know anything about the condition and how it could manifest itself through obsession, hyperfixation. I didn’t know anything was wrong, besides everything. I just assumed, as one does, that I was failing for reasons that were my own fault.
But no one’s mental illness could have survived unsurfaced throughout the living hell that was 2020. The side effect of the isolation, uncertainty, panic, and social crisis of it all was that any survival techniques that might have masked problems fell away, leaving, with me anyway, only the raw nerve of emotional dysregulation. And, of course, it was a story about another rapper that brought it all out of me.
The assignment was, help tell the story of a 40-year-old hip-hop artist on the comeback trail as he released his first new music since setting his dreams aside to focus on raising his son, now a teen. It should have been straightforward—do an interview, pull a few vignettes, add a little commentary about the work, vacate the stage. But I wasn’t willing to keep things simple. Indeed, with my mind aflame with the warp speed power of mania, I was incapable of that. When we met on Zoom for the interview and I learned the details of his story, having lost his father to gun violence as a kid and becoming the man of a house full of younger siblings before earning acclaim as a musician while just in high school only to lose steam following the signing of a label deal, I latched onto his life as an emblem of a transaction you can often find at the heart of hip-hop—Black struggle in exchange for white attention, and dollars.
Now, it probably goes without saying that at this point in summer 2020 Black struggle in America was uniquely at the forefront of the zeitgeist.
When I think of that time, I think of living full-time through our phones—getting all our information from them, casting our morsel expressions out to our community through them, soaking up multitudes of the expressions of others on them too, spending all day and night on them. It was maddening and out-of-healthy-balance, but it was what it was. And we never really went back.
Then, our phones betrayed us. A man died in our hands over 8-and-a-half long minutes. Our expensive screens cried murder. And suddenly, most everyone with eyes to see understood why it was vital to say the words, Black Lives Matter. Because George Floyd, among the many other victims of police violence that preceded and were like to follow, demanded remembering.
For my part, I was enraged. At the cops, sure—but mostly at my fellow whites, who it seemed were only now awokening. I couldn’t believe that they needed the reminder—we were all children together when in the winter of 1999 Amadou Diallo had been gunned down by New York police for the crime of withdrawing his ID, with no punishment meted out. That was the loss that marked me. Another dead man turned “national conversation about race.” He became a Wyclef Jean song—one I’d listened to endlessly at the time, and which provided me with a pained comfort that summer. I wouldn’t watch the Floyd video. I didn’t need that particular homework assignment.
Suddenly, people had an excuse to go outside. The protests that took center stage weren’t merely about one, one hundred, or one thousand deaths, but rather an aggregate of pain and suffering that reached to the nation’s original sin and continued through institutional and individual harm. Given the pandemic, the nation was a truly captive audience, confronted by anguish and rage that had compounded for generations and centuries. This, of course, led to reactionary accusations by representatives of the status quo, which could only be expected.
It also led to a sea of well-meaning whites finally saying things aloud they’d, we’d, never had the courage or fervor to before.
I was no different—I never wanted anything the way I wanted to help, to make a difference. It all felt personal, important. I wrote and wrote, in circles and spirals, trying to make this one rapper’s story an object lesson in how Black music operates in resistance to a consumptive mainstream that, as one memorable sign I saw put it, “Only listens when we’re angry.” I was failing and I knew it.
What did George Floyd and this rapper have in common? Perhaps little, but for me, the summer’s tone made telling this Black man’s story of perseverance all the more important, even sacrosanct. I wanted this piece to demonstrate the ways that music and art acted as a ballast to an uncaring society, and as always with my work I wanted to make people care. But I was addled, my mind slipping to obsession and overwriting, and the months dragged on with no completion of the assignment. I wanted to help this man. And I was coming up short.
I worried that I’d conflate issues of Black American plight into this music assignment. I wanted to illustrate that to care about Black lives was to care about all of them. Truthfully, I wanted my work to speak to the moment, in hopes of attention and acclaim. I wanted too much.
Until our current moment, I can think of no lonelier time than that stretch of 2020. Not only were we navigating social distance and quarantine-isolation, but with the election on the horizon there was just a general sense of upheaval. I remember badly wanting to connect with my Black friends, to check in on them and to hear their thoughts on what was going on, but feeling wary about reaching out, because I didn’t want to compound things. “Hey so what’s it like with everyone talking about Black injustice every hour of every day? Has it gotten you a raise? Are you aight?” I wanted to make light, to alleviate the pressure as was my habit, but more than that I wanted to not fuck up. So I mostly just left them alone, hoping that was the best option.
The summer came and went and the story went unfinished. The artist got tired of waiting and released his comeback album without the article accompanying. Eventually, the story was published. But it changed no games. My vision for what his life story might elucidate about the greater world went unrealized.
My intentions had reached towards a higher calling, a profound longing to earn belonging through achievement and talent. We were in the midst of a moment, and I was desperate to find my place. I was sure that this man’s story spoke to the greater issues of systemic inequity and white complacency. But he just wanted help for people to hear his record. My addled agenda overrode his desires until I’d betrayed him by failing to capture the electricity of our initial conversation.
I wasn’t capable of the elegant weave it would take to bow things just so. I could, however, take to the street, which I did. Oh, and I could post.
Oh, how we all could post.
White Fury’s Price
By and large, we use social media to tell stories about who we are, what we care about, what we’re thinking, and what’s important to us. Supposedly, there are no rules, but functionally we know otherwise—as a language we intuit the expectations of our audiences of friends, strangers, and acquaintances. During 2020’s lockdown, this was heightened a hundredfold, as it was really the only means of communication, conversation, and expression available. But as the Black Lives Matter crest rose, it affected the rules of engagement online.
Black people could react however they wanted, as far as I was concerned—whether they sought to engage the topic with their audiences, beyond living, was an intimate choice to be left to them. White people were put in a bind—try and engage with BLM topics in degrees from earnest to performative, or continue to operate as if nothing was going on.
And let me tell you, dear reader, as an audience member I hated either choice.
Again, I was in the throes of mania, a consequence of my emerging diagnosis, which elevated the sensations of it all, but whatever I saw white people do, besides take to the streets, I was enraged by the inadequacy. Obviously, if they posted a picture of their dog or whatever, I’d judge them as uninterested in the matters of the world. And, importantly, beneath me. And if they dared post something related to Black lives or struggle, I’d be doubly outraged—because it felt as though it took a man dying before their eyes to awaken their basic humanity. Where had they been all these years? Why were they only speaking up now? What was wrong with them?
And why hadn’t they been listening to me all this time, as I tried to make the case for valuing Black lives through my lived life?
(Ah, the crucial sin—I was not only mad my white peers lacked sufficient empathy, but that they hadn’t been listening to me.)
For my part, I let rage take the wheel. Frenzied, I was posting my fucking dick off, sampling things I’d seen in Black feeds (and, yes, some well-managed white ones), adding accusatory details of my own, flaunting my lifetime of access, broadcasting my attendance at rallies like a treasured concert bracelet, and setting it all to a beat. I was all ego, full of myself and my pride. I was fury, white hot. And while I was imbalanced, the truth harbored in the recesses of my soul is that I’d have behaved largely the same even were I not—in what should have been a humbled moment, it felt like one not to learn, but to cry out that I was right.
And it came at a cost.
I’m one of those social media folks who checks the stats pretty compulsively, and because of that, I saw during the course of that year my reach, my clout, diminish. People I know to love me tuned out of my feed, lastingly, presumably because of the tone of my content, or perhaps the substance of it. The misplaced sense of authority. The certainty. All those musicians, those friends I’d made across my adulthood, even some from childhood—it felt like all those Black eyes averted themselves from me.
It was a sharp rebuke, though it didn’t happen all at once. In the moment, I said to myself that this was reasonable, that what I was saying through images and words and sonics wasn’t for them, even if it was in whatever part about them. I was crying rage in service, I told myself, and I was called to. Never mind that no one had asked this of me. Never mind that the only available evidence was mounting to suggest that I was not tempered for the assignment. Never mind who I was alienating—I was on a holy mission. I would change them, their minds.
It got worse. Both the temperature of the moment, and my state of mind.
I was invited by my mother to a stand-out rally they were having in the suburbs where she was raising my youngest sister, then on the cusp of teendom, about the same age I had been when Amadou Diallo had been murdered by and under the law. Glad to go, I expected I would be bringing a degree of authority to what I knew would be a protest light on color or heat. I had my sign—“If antiracism is about loving each other better what is so FUCKING controversial”—and, of course, my all-black outfit. I arrived on the scene like a bat out of hell, having worked up a lather listening to Kanye West’s Jesus Is King neo-gospel record en route. My mom and I are close but we’ve also navigated conflict across our lives, and she’s well tuned to my moods, so she knew on sight that I was going to be a problem that day. She didn’t like that my signage had curse words on it, either, where for me the obscenity was the point. I was in a manic rage. It was bad, there was shouting such that strangers could hear. Another parent, a friend of my mom’s, came to kindly intervene, unaware this was a spat between mother and grown-enough-to-know-better child. Things calmed down, we made up, I eased off the throttle. The standout was supposed to be about raising awareness, especially for the kids like my sister, but in or out of my right mind, I’d made it about me, about my own issues.
They tell me that rising egotism is a common expression of bipolar disorder. Those telling me this are, in effect, saying “This was not entirely your fault.” But anyone who has ever done something in an altered state knows it’s not quite so easy to abdicate one’s own responsibility. My mom and I would be fine, we are made of sturdy stuff, but the self-righteousness I inhabited left on me a radiation burn, one impossible to soothe by common aid. In those moments, that summer, I broke boundaries and betrayed limits that I’d respected all of my life. They were my healthiest points of pride, I felt, but I was so angry—with whiteness, myself, my white community, my creative and professional frustrations, the failings of our world—that I could not help but trounce them, and did so with glee.
Counter to the moment, I was taking a communal experience and turning it into my own individual journey. I was casting myself, almost hilariously, at the center of the conflict. I was begging for attention, which meant validation, for being more racially advanced than my peers. Which, of course, invalidates the very credential. And I was so, so, so certain of myself.
Until I noticed my friends’ eyes turn away.
Because when that happened, I was summoned back down to earth, with terminal velocity’s haste. My wisdom was empty without their backing, it felt, I was hollow without their companionship. Without that, I was not “one of the good ones,” I wasn’t outside the realm of failure.
I wasn’t a good friend nor a responsible diversion nor an adequate comfort. I was what I always mortally dreaded becoming—a common, ordinary, everyday part of the problem.
A feeling that’s hard to shake, by your lonesome.
Next: Part 4 (of 4) - Some Kind of Approval