Americana / Dying of Thirst

Dear Emma,

I was in Iowa City in the student memorial union for a concert, and I was surrounded by over eighteen hundred white people. I was alone. I was the smallest black man in the world. Outside, the air was warm and dry. Summer had yet to touch down with its fever heat and thick humidity. Inside, the bodies steamed up the room. Everyone looked so young. I stood near the back where the congestion thinned out. Up front, it was wild, the students fervent in their adoration, their devotion to the man onstage: Kendrick Lamar. He had rolled onto the platform dressed in a black crewneck sweatshirt, charcoal jeans, and white hi-tops. He wore a Yankees hat, the ny logo surrounded by two hashtags (like this: #ny#). He looked down at us from the stage and asked, “What the fuck am I doing in Iowa?”

The students erupted. Their rolling arms, bent legs, and hunched bodies all resembled so well the clips they had seen on YouTube. Most everyone knew the lyrics to the songs and many people sang them aloud. At certain moments, the interplay between artist and audience elevated to a call and response. Kendrick bounced around the stage singing and shouting his songs, smiling at the floor of students in front of him. When a song finished, the kids stood up tall with their hands in the air looking like corn crop in late summer, ready for picking, ready for consumption.

I was enthralled, less with Kendrick and more with the scene. I marveled at how the deeply considered music of a black man from Compton could resonate so vigorously with a white student body from Chicagoland and Iowa. I wanted to understand why an album—Kendrick’s good kid, m.A.A.d city—that I felt so connected to on headphones now seemed like it was several acres away with the divide of college students between me and the artist onstage. I was getting queasy—my hands were sweating up and my face turned hot—and I didn’t quite understand why. I inched back slowly with each song, getting closer to the venue’s exit.

The beat from “m.A.A.d city” dropped in like a series of disorienting thunderclaps. It was shocking; it was amazing. Something detonated in the students around me—they left their feet, their eyes glossed over with fascination. The opening hook unfolded and I sensed immediately that there would be a problem. As Kendrick sang, “Man down, where you from nigga?” and the ensuing lines all ending with a declaration of the n-word, it seemed as if the entire room chimed in, shouting along with genuine enthusiasm. The roar of almost two thousand white people shouting “nigga” in a room with a black man onstage took on an odd, discomforting quality, mostly because no one appeared concerned to take part in such a perverse, unfortunate spectacle. I looked around me, peering at the enthusiastic youth and felt almost entirely alone, separated from my music, my blues, my town, my identity. Kendrick beamed onstage, energized by the power, the taut grip of his music.

I backed out of the concert hall more intently than before. I walked outside where it was warm, quiet, and entirely serene. I wondered: Is this the legacy rap has left us with? I wanted to understand how much of what he meant by his words had been lost or actively discarded in its transmission from artist to listener. Do these students understand the blues that run so deeply in Kendrick’s songs? Do they understand that these are work songs, god-songs, gospels, redemptions as much as they are anthems for parties with kegs and cocaine and university-branded sweatshirts? In the far-away future, when they—the people who have survived humanity’s current savagery—look back at our culture and study our music, what will they call rap? Will they call it by that name, or will one hundred years from blues to jazz to rap come to be understood as one insistent call from a tired but endlessly resilient and expressive people? Will they simply call it: Americana? Will they understand that the more pain we faced the more creative we became, that our music of emotional slavery was not just a series of notes and figures and rhythms? That when we said slavery we didn’t just mean ours, we meant yours too. That when we wrote songs, they were more than songs, that they were the texts of American history itself.

Kendrick, Lady Day, Howlin’ Wolf. These songs are civil wars, are emancipations, are movements for deferred liberties, are the sorrows of systematic isolation, and are the joys of understanding that a fractured life is still life nonetheless. And fractured lives are not just black lives but all lives—white lives, immigrant lives, the whole continent. This Americana songbook demands its interpreters to be awake, to be conscious—every song we sing from someone else is also our own, our histories infinitely intertwined since the first landed ship, since the first native cheated, since the first slave put to work, since the first profit made.

My head was full of confusion, as it often is. I briefly considered seeking solace in the bar, in glasses of whiskey and beer—always my easiest escape. But my compass endured and I climbed the hill towards my home, towards you. I knew I would find warmth by your side—it is the place I go when I have been left alone or have stumbled by my own stupid actions.

I fall into your arms as I always do, as I always will. Your skin is as pale as mine is dark. And in that way, we are America too.

Love,

A.