"I'm not as invested in things getting better as I am in things getting honest."▫️▫️▫️ Hanif Abdurraqib's essay collection 'They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us' was a stunner. Many pieces are about popular music and musicians - Chance the Rapper, Fall Out Boy, Bruce Springsteen, The Migos, and Johnny Cash - relating certain songs or memories of a live show to larger life subjects like death and grief, race, religion, and growing up.Abdurraqib is a poet, and his essays show this background. Bea...

I’ve never read anything like this. This is everything I never knew that music writing could be. I’ve never read this type of music writing in say, the pages of the rolling stone or anywhere else that’s popular. Our particular experiences as young black music writers, purveyors and absorbers of the culture, are not given the space to take shape and breathe like this and I love that Hanif Abdurraqib just lets loose what was in his soul on so many different fronts. As a metalhead, hip-hop fan and

There are some books, man. Some books that just make you stop every few minutes and stare and close your eyes and let the unpunctuated words echo around a bit in your head and where every few chapters you've gotta steel yourself when you feel the feels. Prose as poetry, and when you're done you'll feel like you know Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib like you know your closest friends. This is one that sticks with you.

I can't adequately describe how much or just why I love this book so much. Hanif Abdurraqib writes so powerfully and with such insight about all the things we as a nation are grappling with right now. [A note to potential readers: I loved this book out of the gate but a few essays about emo bands about 80 or so pages in gave me a bit of a stumble near the middle of the book, and I almost didn't finish. What a tremendous mistake that would have been. Perhaps I have been watching too much Olympic

A beautiful body of work, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us is a collection of essays about music, race, and life in modern America. Hanif Abdurraqib has an incredible voice and weaves personal stories with pop culture and the difficult to discuss realities of America. Even if you are not interested in the pop culture aspect, the essays are about much more than what is on the surface. My personal favorite essay is Fall Out Boy Forever. -Jenny L.

I'd never cried while reading an essay about fall out boy before, so that was new

I had never heard of Hanif Abdurraqib (although I don’t read a lot of essay collections, so he might be more well-known in those circles), so it was by pure coincidence that I was in a local bookstore looking for Christmas presents and saw his book on the shelf of Staff Picks. If you want the short review, here it is: this is one of the best books I’ve ever read. Not one of the best essay collections – best books, full stop.Even though I read and enjoyed [title] by Chuck Klosterman, there was de...

Y’all know I don’t rate books on here, because I sometimes feel like it doesn’t allow me to have nuanced thoughts about something and also numbers to quantify someone else’s life work when maybe it just ~wasn’t for me~ feels weird to me! (I overthink everything even goodreads star reviews!) But this is an easy 5 stars. Hanif Abdurraqib’s voice has been one I have admired and loved and drowned in (in the best way) since finding his spoken word on YouTube in middle school and this book of incredib...

One of those books where you read 20 pages, grab a pen and restart to take notes, and then abandon the pen at page 50 because you're underlining everything and making a mess of ink.

CRACKED MY HEART WIDE OPEN

Poet, writer, and critic Willis-Abdurraqib has written a series of smart essays about music and his thoughts and feelings about it in relation to current events and culture, including the Springsteen concert he attended the day after visiting Michael Brown’s grave and seeing PDA at a Carly Rae Jepsen show. AND THAT COVER. W-o-w!– Liberty Hardy------------Tune in to our weekly podcast dedicated to all things new books, All The Books: https://bookriot.com/listen/shows/all...

An outstanding collection of essays about music, race, and life in contemporary America. Hanif is a black Muslim who grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and his writing on being who he is in that Midwest space is out of this world good.All of the essays have a connection to pop culture, and most to music, and it doesn't matter whether you know or like any of the thematic threadings of the pieces. They're about much, much more.(And that Carly Rae Jepson piece!) Those who love and laud Roxane Gay would do

This is, single-handedly, the greatest music/culture book I have ever read. Two essays in and I felt that; two essays in and I was recommending it far and wide. It sustained across the whole collection. Hanif writes in a way that blows music out beyond a sub-culture; it's true that it bleeds into everyday life, but to see it articulated in such a way is surreal and fantastic as a reader and a music fan. He is basically what every music writer should aspire to, imo. He makes you feel a lot, even

I've read five stellar essay collections that came out in 2017 and this one might sit at the top of the pile. Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib has this way of laying out whatever it is he wants to discuss, then beautifully diving into it and taking the reader in directions they weren't expecting, but that all end up feeling totally right. Seeing Bruce Springsteen in 2016 turns into a meditation on something much bigger than simply seeing a rockstar; Ric Flair, growing up Black in the 1990s, Chance the Ra...

Did you feel my absence, Goodreads friends? I haven't been here in a while, it seems like I haven't been able to finish a book since September, a month that coincided with me finishing the Neapolitan Novels and moving away from my hometown for the first time. I tried to move on since Ferrante, but her unyielding prose put other author's words to shame and put me in a slump like no other, one that coincided with me being unemployed and cursed with reader's block. They Can't Kill Us Until They Kil...

I was not fully prepared for how good this collection was going to be. Sure, I saw good reviews. But not until I started reading did I realize how well-crafted every sentence is. Each essay moved me through a whole story. Typically, Abdurraqib starts with a life story that quickly brings in the element of music belonging to that time in his life. Even if you don’t know the band(s) and album(s)/song(s) in the particular story, you fully understand the connection that Abdurraqib is making.I had so...

Ahhh! Hanif is so good. My sister mailed me this book (not something we do) because it hit her. And it did the same for me. And he's from Ohio. And he's amazing. This book will move you. And may make you cry a few times. And make you want to look up artists you thought you had no interest in. (My Chemical Romance) My new favorite author. Please read.

This is one of the most powerful and enlightening books about race I've ever read. It's also one of the most powerful and enlightening books about music I've ever read. To be able to do those two things at once, and to have one enlighten the other and vice versa, while also inviting the reader in with such a warm voice, like an old friend sharing stories on the porch, without judgement or snobbishness, with an aim at understanding and love is an absolute miracle. That he was able to reach such h...

From a metaphorical standpoint, one of the worst things we do is compare love to war. We do this in times of actual war, without a thought about what it actually means. Mothers bury their children while a pop musician calls the bedroom a war zone and romance a field of battle—as if there is a graveyard for heartbreak alone. We’ve run out of ways to weaponize sadness, and so it becomes an actual weapon. A buffet of sad and bitter songs rains down from the pop charts for years, keeping us tethered...