“Dear Nicole”, Part 1

My dear friend Nicole and I are trading a series of letters to each other, starting with our heart-felt reflections about Megan Thee Stallion and Kanye West. You can read Nicole’s opening letter to me here, and below is my opening letter.

Dear Nicole,

I was in my loft apartment in like 2004, up (or I guess down) in Laurel, Maryland on my couch watching 106 & Park when they had Kanye on. There he was with Free and AJ, wearing a backpack, popped-up collar, holding a mic in his hand as he was hunched over, and nervously went into the opening lines of “We Don’t Care” from what was going to be The College Dropout a couple months later. “We put shit on layaway then come back/We claim other people kids on our income tax/We take that money cop work than push packs to get paid/And we don’t care what people say” — remember sitting there feeling electrified by hip-hop in a way that I hadn’t in a long, long time. You remember what 2004 was like? That was the Black explosion of music; I feel like it was the year that we took over officially as America’s soundtrack, it’s feet and it’s beat. It was “yeah!”, “hey ya!”, “milkshake”, R. Kelly’s hits (#muteRKelly). It felt like it was Black Ubiquity; we were everywhere sonically. And then there was The College Dropout, which was something that I’d never even imagined would come again — music that spoke to us.

And Kanye kept speaking. As TCD blew up more and more — ”All Falls Down”, “Jesus Walks”, “Through the Wire” — for the first time since ATCQ, I felt like someone was rapping to me. Like actually to me. There was a fallow period in rap and hip-hop where the music was all flash and party and dance and I just remember thinking I didn’t see or hear myself in it. I’d walked away; I’d spent time deep-diving more into “white” music — Nirvana, Coldplay, Fiona Apple and whatnot — before Kanye’s performance on 106 brought me back. I’d just gotten back to the east coast from teaching in Houston, Texas for two years. I’d driven back and you know what my soundtrack was? Justified. I mean, also N*E*R*D’s In Search Of…but for real; I was so done with rap at that point I was spinning Justin Timberlake. So when I heard Kanye rapping on that couch, as I sat there on my couch — and it wasn’t even my couch, it was part of a furnished condo loft that I was renting because I was so burnt out from teaching I couldn’t even imagine dressing a new life I just wanted, needed something to slip into — I sonically came alive again to rap and hip-hop. Thank you, Kanye. No really; always and forever thank you Kanye for bringing me back.

But it’s hip-hop, and I remember too that an early mainstream Kanye was already being Kanye the Disruptor. I remember seeing him do an MTV special where he talked about the homophobia in hip-hop and how it needed to stop. I was like yes, I am here for this call-out about our culture. (it’s here if you haven’t seen it). Kanye spoke to me even more; there he was sitting on stool face-to-face with Sway (how Sway?????) talking about the rampant homophobia inside of Black male hip-hop and masculinity profiles. And he talked about proximity; about what it meant for him to be labeled “fag” or “gay” by brothers growing up, and how he had a cousin in his family who is gay, and pulling all that together. It was like a 3 ½ prelude to Moonlight. I don’t know; that was radical stuff for someone, a Black man, to be doing in the early 2000’s and it really made me think that Kanye was going to be this cultural, sonic future messiah that we’d never dream of having.

And in a lot of ways, he’s been that. He’s been this exquisitely painful, beautiful, brash, vulnerable, political, romantic, doting artist that we’d never really gotten while I was growing up. I mean to follow Kanye was to follow your angels and your demons and watch the times that they flew and slew with each other. People say that they miss the old Kanye, but Kanye’s ever been influx; he’s never stayed still musically, romantically, geographically or aesthetically. He’s wanted more and that’s been hubris-ly admirable, and now, as we see, politically dangerous. To us, for us. Oh Kanye. Those chipmunk cheeks and those 48 million teeth all seem to be a part of a mouth, a body, a heart and a soul that can’t contain all the things going on inside of him. I was hoping that Kanye would lead us into a collective new consciousness through his music. I spent the first 3 weeks of the pandemic listening to “Touch the Sky” — it’s my favorite Kanye song — and it’s the song that takes me back to what it felt like to be alone on the ugly paisley couch in an apartment composed almost entirely of someone else’s things and still flex like they were mine. I mean, that’s being Black in America; trying to find ways to flex on land, in homes, situations, enterprises and whatnot that aren’t ever really owned by you at the end of the day. I listen to “Touch the Sky” and I hear how hopeful, how scared, how hungry, how determined, how sexy, how powerful Kanye feels all at once. I love that song, like I love Kanye, like I love Us, like I love you, like I learn to love myself — which is to say ‘dream big’. Have an imagination, use your mind.

Kanye’s gone too far on all that though and I don’t know where to reel in neither my love nor the man. I feel on some days incapable of doing either one. He’s a shame and he’s human. He’s a man and he’s Black. He’s an artist supreme and he’s a buffoon. He’s a wannabe politician and he’s in America where everyone wannabe something great and else and rich. I don’t know, I don’t know. Watching the wattage drain from that smile over the years — these years where we’ve watched Obama come and go; Bill Cosby come and go; Sandra Bland come and go; protest come and go; white nationalism come and go and come again — I mean, I get while it’d be hard to smile anymore. He was at the forefront of Black ascendancy in the country in a way that the white zeitgeist just wasn’t ready, or fully willing to handle. I mean, it was one thing to have that music happen, but to think 4 years later we got Obama? Shit, America did not want this kind of dominance from Black people.

Kanye fell into feeling himself so much, too much, a bit much. He climbed up — and Lord knows I cupped my hands to help him get up — and up and up. But now that he’s climbed, he’s done the man thing, he’s done maybe even The Black Man Thing: he done touched the sky and now looked down on us. That’s harsh. That’s ungrateful. That’s delusions of grandeur at its finest.

Kanye doesn’t care about Black people. At least not in the way that some of us want and deserve to be cared for.

There’s all these contradictory theories — from culturists, to psychologists, to therapists, to pop culture psychologists and therapists and culturists, to confidantes to fans to detractors — about what sickness can and can’t make you do. No one’s got a consensus right take on it.

I have my take. When I was at my sickest, back in like 2012–14, I was an Executive Director and had been vaulted up to that position on the props of lots of Black bodies, stories, community dynamics and internal and external politics. When I was at my sickest during that job, I made lucid, consistent, but broken choices everyday. I walked a lot of people away from their truths. I became a master storyteller about how history should be viewed in Philly education and the place I worked at and represented. I downplayed diversity when it suited me and upped it to the forefront when it did. I saw aggregiance when it was personally impacted on me and not always or consistently when it bit the ankles of Black people — and in particular at times, Black women — around me. I will never forget waking up one morning in my broken ass apartment, looking at my broken ass life, and my broken ass face in the bathroom mirror and realized that I’d lost about 25lbs. I remember standing in front of big crowds and small crowds increasingly ranting about how broken the system was and sometimes I said the lies so beautifully that even when I was standing up there telling beautiful harsh truths — sometimes in the same breath and same stories — I couldn’t tell the difference anymore. But I always knew how high I’d made it. That I wasn’t on that paisley ugly couch in Laurel anymore. That I could buy the preppiest clothes, could woo the richest white people, could Pied Piper the Black, brown and white people around me, could carry a flock of a community all around me if I continued to invest in the story, realize it could be taken away from me, and be determined to never go back.

When I left, I fell, I tumbled, I crashed. You can fast forward to 6–8 months into 2013 and there I am speeding along a broken, unpaved, stony road that ran along a steep ravine in Costa Rica. I was literally and figuratively lost. I was only sure when I’d flown there that I needed to get away from it all a bit. I couldn’t look at what I’d made, what I’d become, what I’d done and what I didn’t do because I wanted to try and touch the sky. I was sick, and it took me a long time to get better. I did everything that I did as myself but not unto myself; if I’d stayed that way, I’d have become something different, maybe bigger, but it would’ve come at the cost of continued sickness. I know I did what I did when I was sick, and I know that if I wasn’t sick I wouldn’t do those things. Like me at the time, Kanye believes himself to be free, but for Black folks, sometimes free isn’t what it looks like when someone else is telling you you’re free, and sometimes that freedom comes with a toll for Black folks because your freedom still has to do with how often you can bring the rest of us along, literally and figuratively. Kanye used to carry us, and now he’s dropped us, and we’ve dropped him too, but still kinda pick him up. Free might mean to feel all these things and not weigh what it will and won’t do to your community, how you will or won’t be read on Black twitter, how you can be perfectly imperfect and not doom the generation(s) of an entire domestic race. Kanye’s been broken to pieces like so many of us — Nina, Tiger, Bill, OJ, MJ(s), Lauryn, D’Angelo, Omorosa, the Obamas, Dave Chappelle, Prince, Frank O, etc etc etc etc — we are still fetishizing letting Black people touch the sky and then watch them set themselves on fire and if they don’t, burning them.

I’m on my couch now, my bright canary yellow couch now, better for the journey but I’m no fool; America will ask you to be great at the cost of your health and your soul. Kanye chooses to be captured by sickness instead of love and believes that love is the sickness. I want him to be better for himself. For us.