I found out I was Black when I was 20, so I started listening to rap music. Part I.
Sometimes, the puzzle pieces of life fit together perfectly, and you’re humming with the feeling that you’re on the path you’re meant to be on. Yesterday was one of those days. And it was all because I started listening to rap two days ago, for the second time.
The first time I really sat down to listen to rap music I was in Budapest for study abroad. I can see the parallels between now and then: a move to a new place, a feeling of the world opening up and anything being possible. After years of being busy and my whole brain going to to-do lists and assignments I suddenly had a little time to think about myself and what I needed.
Of course, back in 2016 in Budapest I was at a huge tipping point in my life because I had found my birth father on Facebook and I knew that I could message him at any point if I wanted to. Knowing that was such a strange feeling — that I could press a button and alter the whole course of my life. How do you decide when it’s time to do something like that? At the time I had only a handful of adopted friends and none of them had gone through a reunion. I didn’t know what to expect from it and I was scared he would disappoint me, or that I would disappoint him.
I had decided not to message him at least until I got home because I figured I’d want to meet him in person and I couldn’t do it while I was in Europe. Or at least it’d be a hell of an expensive trip. But having the knowledge that I could speak to him if I wanted to felt huge. On top of that, looking at his photo I felt certain of something I’d only every theorized about growing up. Which is that my birth father was a Black man.
There’s some shit you can’t look up with a Google search, and one of those things is “How to develop a sense of Black racial identity as a twenty year old adoptee.” So while it feels a little embarrassing to say that my gut instinct was to start listening to rap music all the time, I can’t really judge myself. And even now I don’t wish I’d done anything differently, because the decision I made then ultimately landed me here.
After awhile I figured out a different version of my question that I could Google: “Best rap albums of the 2010s.”
I can’t remember the particular moment when I did that and found Yeezus. But I know that that album characterized the rest of the semester. I can’t listen to “Black Skinhead” without remembering standing alone in the drafty eat-in kitchen in my Budapest apartment, taking shots of the gin my housemate had bought at the ABC. I left my house to meet friends at the ruin bar, Szimpla, with my headphones in my ears, listening to that song on repeat. I had a crush on a guy in our program that was in a relationship and I knew I needed to get over it but I didn’t know how. The fury laced through “Black Skinhead” was enough to transition me from heartbroken to empowered: the distorted guitar, the fierce drum beats between the sound of Kanye’s sharp inhales, the chorus that escalates and escalates until it peaks with a strangled scream. Standing on the bus, holding an orange juice jug full of gin in one hand and watching the city fly by, I felt like I could conquer the world.
Before hearing Yeezus, if I was feeling sad I would listen to music that helped me to embrace the feeling or shift toward something like hope. Almost every time I’ve really fucked something up in my life, I’ve hit play on Noah and the Whale’s “The First Days of Spring.” Charlie Fink’s voice would cut through the pain: “And I do believe that everyone has one chance/to fuck up their lives.” The song reminded me that it was OK to make mistakes, that I’d lived through them before and would again. I’d have a good sob, wipe my eyes, grit my teeth, and face whatever mess I’d made.
The songs in Yeezus — “Black Skinhead”, “Blood on the Leaves”, and “Hold My Liquor” especially — gave me something different. Anger was not a feeling I spent a lot of time with but those songs helped me to let it envelop me. “Black Skinhead” helped to transition me from feeling sad that this skinny physics nerd didn’t like me to feeling too strong to care.
This week I listened to Dan Harris’ interview with Pixar Director Pete Docter, where they discussed the movies Soul and Inside Out. Docter said that while we often label anger as being a “bad emotion” you need to stifle, it’s really a healthy emotion because it tells you when you are being mistreated. Whether you’re experiencing unrequited love or watching police brutality or white supremacy take over the news, anger is a feeling that lets you know you’re getting less than you deserve. I knew from the summer of 2020 that anger can be destructive but it can also ignite people to action. Yeezus gave me permission to feel anger alongside sadness and to use that anger to propel myself to something better.
But soon, I felt that I didn’t have permission to love Yeezus. I got bits and pieces of pushback over the years — one friend told me that “Bound 2” was overplayed, someone else told me that My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was the superior album, someone else that Kendrick was the superior artist. I realized Kanye was the person who interrupted Taylor Swift’s speech at the VMAs. While he did apologize multiple times, he then wrote the song “Famous” that contains the lines: “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex/Why? I made that bitch famous”, and made a particularly fucked up video to accompany it.
And then of course all the rest: the comments about slavery being a “choice”, his support of Donald Trump, followed by his retraction of that support and his decision to run for president. All of it made me feel like I needed to shove my love for Yeezus back into the closet, that my attempt at connecting with Black culture had somehow been “wrong”. Of course it was wrong, I figured — I wasn’t really Black, had been raised by White parents and would never be able to make up for it by listening to a bunch of rap as a twenty year old. I’d been naïve to think anything otherwise.
Curious if I could do better, I tried listening to different artists off and on in the years that followed. I gave another go at Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. I liked some of the songs, laughed at the absurdity of “This dick ain’t free” (without really understanding it), but didn’t feel about it the way I felt about “Black Skinhead”. I listened to Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book a few times through, but ultimately couldn’t name any song except “Same Drugs”, which I loved. I tried to get into A Tribe Called Quest and listened to The Low End Theory on repeat for a week but I didn’t feel moved. I felt embarrassed about all of it, felt that I was doomed to have poor taste. I could listen to rap and learn to talk about it, but without loving it, I felt even more imposter’s syndrome than before.
However, during the summer of ‘17, a few weeks after I graduated from college, I started jogging and discovered DAMN.. I was using the Couch to 5K app to give myself structure and it started off right at my level — the first week had me running for one minute and then walking for two, on and off for 20 minutes. I did the workouts while listening to podcasts and audiobooks. But at the end of two months I was running for 20 minutes straight and I needed something to keep me going. “Humble” became that thing. Different from “Black Skinhead”, the song had a feel of consistency and flow to it that kept me moving.
But “Humble” was a mid-run song, and ultimately it was Macklemore’s “Good Old Days” that got me through the last 3 minutes, when my calves were burning and I just wanted to give up. I could write a whole blog post about that song, but for now I’ll say that I both loved “Good Old Days” and felt ashamed of loving it. I knew that Macklemore was a white rapper and the construction in my head was that white rappers are appropriating rap and stealing the spotlight from Black rappers and that makes them bad. When I mentioned my love of Macklemore to my friends — few of whom were actually Black — they would poke fun at me and I would feel embarrassed. Why was it that the rap I liked the best was always unacceptable? My love for “Humble” felt acceptable but almost too mainstream — my love for “Good Old Days,” which had given me the strength to finish off dozens of runs, felt shameful.
In 2019, I stumbled upon “Everybody” by Logic. I liked the rhythm — the fast-paced, passionate lyrics reminded me of “Black Skinhead”, and I loved the female background vocals — they made the song feel layered, thick. It took me awhile to even listen to the words, but once I heard them I loved the song even more.
“But he was born with the white privilege!
Man what the fuck is that?
White people told me as a child, as a little boy, playin’ with his toys
I should be ashamed to be black
And some black people look ashamed when I rap
Like my great granddaddy didn’t take a whip to the back
Not accepted by the black or the white
I don’t give a fuck, praise God, I could see the light”
It felt like he was speaking directly to me (Which is funny for me to say, as I just watched a documentary about him where one of his fans said the same thing about “1–800–273–8255”). For years I’d been asking myself, What does it mean to be Black when I was raised by White people? What does it mean to be Black when I am light-skinned enough that I could be mistaken for Italian or Latinx depending on the day or the person? Is race just something that other people put on you, or something in your blood, or something you claim for yourself?
The line that didn’t resonate was the last one: “I don’t give a fuck, praise God, I could see the light.” I gave a ton of fucks. By then, I was a high school math teacher, and most of my students were Black. While I knew more math than they did I felt excruciatingly aware of the fact that they knew more about their culture and family history than I did about mine. Most of my students were 1st or 2nd generation Haitian immigrants, and I felt envy and shame whenever they would speak in Haitian Creole or come to school with Haitian food. I knew that I should feel “privileged” for having light skin, but most of the time I just felt jealous, frustrated that I had been robbed of the opportunity to engage with my birth culture in a meaningful way and had been left to cobble an identity together by reading “Best of” lists on the internet.
It might have occurred to me that if Logic had this one song about the experience of being a multiracial rapper, he might have other music that would also resonate with me. But I never bothered to check, probably because I was too busy trying to answer questions outside of the race question, like: “What is Pre-Calculus?” or “How can I get myself to grade quizzes even when I don’t want to?” or “How do I navigate telling students they can’t eat in class as per school policy when it seems immoral to make them go hungry?”
A lot has happened between now and then, but here’s the short version: in February of 2021, I lost my job teaching math, ended a relationship, moved to Somerville, and sat down to start figuring out what I wanted to do next. Left to its own devices my brain churns out a lot of content and I’ve spent the last weeks thinking almost non-stop about gender and race and the intersections between the two. Now that “What is Pre-Calculus?” and “How do I teach math on Zoom?” weren’t the central questions of my existence, I started grappling with new questions whose answers felt long overdue. Question 1: “What would it mean for me to identify as a man rather than non-binary? Does masculinity have fundamental qualities or traits that accompany it, and if so, what are they?” Question 2: “How can I get through my morning routine without stopping between every activity to change the song I’m listening to and get lost in Instagram?”
My answer to the first is still in the works. My answer to the second was to start listening to new music. As much as I love The Head and the Heart and Noah and the Whale, these artists felt like a memory from my past, not an emblem of my future. Treading a familiar path, I Googled: “Best rap albums of the 2000s”.
So two days ago I made a list of albums in my journal and decided to listen to a new album every one or two days as I was going through my morning routine. I loved the idea of each day having its own soundtrack and of having music to listen to by default so I didn’t need to spend so much time trying to decide what to listen to when I was doing dishes or taking a shower or working out or whatever else. The list was a combination of artists I was familiar with like Jay-Z, Eminem, and Kendrick, along with artists I had never heard of like Deltron 3030, Cannibal Ox, and Nas. I choose Nas’ Illmatic and Kendrick’s Good Kid M.A.A.D. City for Day 1 and was relieved to find myself enjoying them both.
The next morning I wanted something to watch while I was eating breakfast and so, in a move characteristic of me, I Googled “Best hip hop documentaries” . The first article I found listed a documentary called Rapture as #5. I chose it because it listed Nas among the artists it covered, and because it was on Netflix, but the first episode of the series was about Logic.
There are moments when it feels like your whole life is happening just as it is meant to.
It took me a few minutes to remember that Logic was the person who’d written “Everybody”. Once I did, I felt both transfixed and close to tears.
The first line that Logic says, as scenes of sold-out shows play on the screen, is this: “I did over 120 shows, was on the road for 9 months, all I did was wake up and work every single day, every single day, every single day and I wasn’t taking the time to focus on what was most important which is my mental and physical health and because of that I suffered the consequences.”
The camera switches to him, sitting on a couch, wearing an “Everybody” hoodie. He reminds me intensely of myself. Wireframe glasses, loose curls, a cleft chin. His skin was shades lighter than mine and I realized he was certainly white passing, something re-emphasized when I was looking at comments on his videos and seeing people criticize him for using the n-word in his songs.
And he was talking about mental health. He was talking about anxiety, the beast I’d spent the last four year wrangling with. And here I was now, after 3 years of teaching, trying to figure out what it meant for me to take care of myself, perhaps for the first time in my life.
Later in the documentary there is a quote from his song “Anziety,” which is this:
“I am scared, I am human, I am a man.”
And it seemed that maybe the answer to my second question would ultimately give me an answer to my first question, too.
