(no subject)
It’s the end of a singularly exhausting year, and I have left so many things unfinished. I changed jobs; I travel more. I am still slouching toward enlightenment, whatever form that might take; I am as confused by the relentless march of time as I ever was, and not only because it permits some slippage. It occurs to me that this is impressionistic. What I’m circling: How do you measure a the amount of time in a year?
I don’t have an answer. But here are some things I wrote this year, stories that show at least a little of how I spent 2016.
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- “Early,” New York Times Magazine. A short piece about Run The Jewel’s song, off of their second album, Run The Jewels 2.
It would be tough to write a song like “Early,” which paints an indelible portrait of the police shooting an unarmed black woman, without considering the forces that put her there. Her husband watches, arrested for possession of a small amount of weed: “I could see my other kinfolk/And hear my little boy as he screamed/As he ran toward the copper, begged him not to hurt his momma.”
2. “000000,” WebSafe2k16. A short meditation on the color black.
I could tell you black is associated with magic, death, evil, and elegance; I could say that it’s the oldest color, that burnt charcoal is found in cave paintings — or maybe that it’s one of the newest, as the blackest substance on Earth, vantablack, was developed by researchers in 2008. It’s also the color of our screens when they’re dead, which I guess is full circle.
But maybe it’s less complicated than that.
3. “Digits,” Pitchfork. I wrote a track review of Young Thug’s track. I listened to it so many times it showed up as the first song on my Spotify year-end playlist.
It sounds like violence. It sounds like spending money. It sounds like adrenaline. It’s exactly like being fucked up in the club, just when everyone turns up for the home stretch between 2 a.m. and sunrise. “Digits” is the sound of a single night in Young Thug’s life, played back in just under three minutes; use with caution. Keep a close eye on your checking account.
4. “Shayne HBA,” Fantastic Man issue no. 23. I profiled Shayne Oliver, designer of Hood By Air (among other things). The night I met him, I admired his coat; he told me later he’d appropriated it from his Airbnb. I think it was blue.
If this is HBA’s heart — transgression as ethos, as progress — then it reflects both the soul of youth culture and this community’s own identities: young, queer, of colour. It’s in those identities crashing together in the service of ideas about what fashion can be that HBA has taken shape. I won’t purport to know Shayne’s heart, but I can tell you about his instincts — because they’re right there in the clothes, the employees, the models and the friends.
5. “Why They Died,” New York Times. A review of Marc Lamont Hill’s book, Nobody.
A few weeks ago, all charges brought against the Baltimore police officers awaiting trial for Freddie Gray’s death — which the medical examiner ruled a homicide — were dropped, after three officers had been acquitted. In “Nobody,” Hill can act as prosecutor, judge and jury; he reaches the guilty verdict Baltimore’s courts could not. And this is why Hill’s book is a worthy and necessary addition to the contemporary canon of civil rights literature. He delivers what feels like a dispatch from a war. “Nobody” is a cleareyed look at the actors on both sides of the battlefield, and explains how we came to this.
6. “Blood Orange,” Fantastic Man. A profile of Dev Hynes.
As much as it’s a refuge, New York is also a place to try your luck. If you grant that DEV—whose music is as raw as it is occasionally ethereal, like a pop dispatch from an alternate reality — is daring to channel those old ghosts, you can begin to understand why he’s here. But while Dev is rooted in New York, he’s also an itinerant both at heart and in mind; he dances between topics, reads widely and freely, and spends a lot of time traversing the city on foot, making street recordings as he goes.
7. “Sweating It,” The Fabulist. Some thoughts on sweat.
When I was younger I used to wake up in the middle of the night dreaming of nuclear reactors and plumes of radioactive fallout. I’d stare at the moon while I sweated out the dream, as though surfacing from a body of water at night. These days my anxieties are more generalized, and I can’t remember where I am before I return to consciousness.
I also spent a lot of time this year traveling across the country for TV shoots, though not every video is available online. Of the ones that are: I covered a gloving championship; profiled a young, queer rapper named Gizzle; and met some collegiate e-sports players.
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In retrospect it’s been a full year. I’ll leave you with this, from some listening notes I wrote earlier this year—it feels useful now, rereading as I am from the other end of 2016.
“And That, Too” is pleasingly choral, with a tight central scheme. The whole song swirls and eddies around that melodic phrase, and it never once spirals out of control. Listening to it feels like watching an abstract painter start with a blank canvas and begin layering paint onto its surface. Thick and thin, starting from the middle and working outward. By the end the whole canvas is black; you eventually realize the process was the point.
