They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

keeping the circle open.

The great mission of any art that revolves around place is the mission of honesty. So many of us lean into romantics when we write of whatever place we crawled out of, perhaps because we feel like we owe it something, even when it has taken more from us than we’ve taken from it. The mission of honesty becomes a bit cloudy when we decide to be hones

I don’t know how to be honest enough to say that there isn’t a place for kids like us, so we need to make our own, and nothing is more punk rock than that. Nothing is more punk rock than surviving in a hungry sea of white noise.

Their question is often posed as How will I explain this person in the bathroom to my child? or How will I explain those two people kissing to my child? but rarely How will I explain to my child that people die and we do nothing?

I always appreciate What’s Going On as an album that asks first and holds no optimism that the answers will be what it’s looking for. Even the album’s most optimistic song, “God Is Love,” feels like it’s banking on a shaky hand at a poker table, trying to convince everyone of something it isn’t certain of itself.

“Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems” was the first time I considered the true work of the sample: to call us all back to something familiar, in hopes that we might ignore all that is falling apart outside.

Plus, all of our pals got drink tickets but only about half of them could drink, and so, in half-full venues full of our friends, we could live like brief and generous kings.

The real grief is silence in a place where there was once noise. Silence is the hard thing to block out, because it hovers, immovable, over whatever it occupies. Noise can be drowned out with more noise, but the right type of silence, even when drowning, can still sit inside of a person, unmoving.

A woman in a Cape Cod diner the day after Christmas saw me eyeing the news and shaking my head. She told me that “things will get better,” and I wasn’t sure they would, but I nodded and said, “They surely can’t get any worse,” which is the lie that we all tell, the one that we want to believe, even as there are jaws opening before us.