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“Nigger music,” he said.

He paused and thought deeply for a moment. “Yeah, that’s what we do: full on nigger music. It’s fucking great.”

I wasn’t quite sure what to say so I leaned into the couch and mumbled something like, “That sounds fascinating. I’ve got to come see that sometime.”

San Francisco hipsters filled the corners of the dark apartment. Outside, a light rain came down around the city. Conversations oscillated between fashion and music. I could have talked to so many people but I had chosen this skinny musician who had tried to French kiss me earlier. In that moment, he seemed like a true artist to me—someone who created, revised, destroyed, and rebuilt in an effort to understand the world. And, he played nigger music. Was it a travesty or a triumph that this skinny, five-o’clock-shadowed white guy had so comfortably described his band’s style of music to me, a skinny, five-o’clock-shadowed black guy, as none other than “nigger music”? He apparently didn’t know what else to call it. He said that his rock band, Mutilated Mannequins, constructed lyrical diatribes on racism, pairing them with gripping art-rock freak-outs. He was so sincere, calm, and honest. His eyes honed in on me, his confidence unwavering. His philosophies unfolded: “We are doing important shit, man. Rethinking the whole world. The whole fucking paradigm.”

He went on describing his music. After some time his words echoed listlessly like the distant pitter-patter of rain on the windowsill. I thought about punching him in the neck. I was in a state of existential shock. Lifting up from my body I considered that I needed to spend fewer nights like this: twenty-six years old, going to work, making music, barely sleeping, and then going out just to hear someone talk about nigger music. The age-old question lingered: Would it ever be possible for a nonblack person to throw around the word nigger in a nonmalicious sense? Does the weight of such a word truly vary with context or is it a shotgun shell whenever it gets fired into the air? And, damn, sometimes it takes a minute to figure out how they’re shooting. Former NAACP representative Julian Bond said that the second civil rights movement will be harder because the WHITES ONLY signs have been taken down. Yet their shadows remain firmly placed to doorways and water fountains. How do you challenge a ghost when you can’t even touch it?

*

I visited the University of Virginia when I was nineteen. I was a freshman studying at Princeton but I joined some friends for a road trip. The campus stood as a memorial to Thomas Jefferson—political leader, slave owner, and sexual violator. I stumbled down fraternity row, drunk and foggy, beneath a warm blanket of Gentleman Jack Daniel’s. I had chased down the whiskey with half a case of Natural Light. Then I had lost my friends at the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity house. That was the place where they tossed couches from the second-floor balcony when they get bored.

I had spent the day tracking down friends from D.C. In high school, our class was so small that there wasn’t much room for segregation. White kids and kids of color spent a lot of time together—we were mostly all friends. Yet, just several months removed from that privileged prep school experience I found that all of my friends had splintered into different circles in Charlottesville. If they did not see each other because of their different academic and social interests, I could understand that, but the realization that white and black people did not congregate socially at such a distinguished school shocked me. I had been fast asleep and suddenly I was awake. As I grew older and more explicitly understood the context in which the University of Virginia had been conceived, it was my early-college naïveté that would prove more shocking. It is a school and community that pays homage to a remarkable, elite, and intelligent hero, Thomas Jefferson, who, in the midst of his accomplishments, embraced the ownership—and sexual predation—of slaves toward his own benefit. The system, from its inception, was complex and cracked.

As the evening descended, I conspired to find my college friends who I had parted from earlier. In an age before cell phones, I asked a group of white-shirt, dark-tie frat boys sitting on the steps of another fraternity if they had seen about four or five guys in Princeton T-shirts walking by.

One of them stepped forward, stars and bars glistening behind his eyes, and pointed in a direction that I had no intention of following. He said, “A bunch of black guys came by here ten minutes ago. They went that way.”

He might have been helpful had I specifically inquired about black friends, but I hadn’t and his assumptions bred something foul in my stomach. He had used the golden sword of twenty-first century racists. He had called me a nigger without even using the word. The invisible noun: it just needs to be insinuated—a subtle threat of a bomb that could go off at any moment. I waved my hand at him, pushing away his advice, a dismissal of what he had to offer. I could have taken them on. I could have traded in bloody teeth for intangible pride. I could have found out if they have WHITES ONLY signs in Valhalla.

*

Wait, do you remember the first time you put that record on? Maybe it was a CD or a tape. My roommate had picked up the LP from a San Francisco street vendor for ninety-nine cents: Elvis Costello’s 1978 album This Year’s Model. That picture on the front is priceless: Elvis bent over a camera, taking a picture of you, turning the listener into his model. The album’s third track, “The Beat,” captures the essence of new wave music as well as Blondie, the Cars, and Talking Heads had done in entire albums. I used to spin “The Beat” and other songs off This Year’s Model at late-night house parties just when the makeshift dance floor of someone’s apartment needed one more momentous lift. That song, no, that whole album, was always reliable. I even owned the CD, the expanded edition with all of the demos and b-sides.

One day a friend told me the old story about Elvis Costello calling Ray Charles a “blind, ignorant nigger” during a drunken argument with Bonnie Bramlett and Stephen Stills in a Columbus, Ohio, bar in 1979. When I heard the story, my blood froze up like Arctic pistons. I stopped listening to Costello immediately. Listening to his music would have felt like a betrayal to my identity, my people. I leafed through numerous articles on the internet detailing Costello’s frequent attempts to reckon with and apologize for the incident. Costello, whose actions have often put him on the side of peace, social justice, and equality, has witnessed the weight of his words follow him into his golden years—as recently as 2015 he discussed and apologized for his drunken, youthful missteps in an interview with ?uestlove. Even though I wouldn’t listen to him, I couldn’t bring myself to throw out his albums. I was caught somewhere between my love for the music and a mistake that I couldn’t forgive. This Year’s Model remains tucked away on my long shelf of vinyl.

Mick Jagger famously referred to black women as “brown sugar” in a song of the same name, then managed to squeeze out a phrase about “ten little niggers sittin’ on da wall” in “Sweet Black Angel”—confusingly in a song about civil rights activist Angela Davis—and came full-circle with the revelation that “black girls just wanna get fucked all night long” on 1978’s “Some Girls,” a song that disparaged women of all backgrounds.

Nevertheless, there was a period when I listened to the Stones all of the time and something about it killed me. Why should Costello get the sanction while the Stones have access to my stereo? Maybe their oft-professed debt to black musicians excuses their racial errs. Wait, Costello loves black American music. Perhaps it’s the fact that they have been roundly sexist, racist, and offensive to practically everyone on Earth. But Costello appears to be one of the nicest people in the music industry. It certainly must be their combination of irresistible hooks, intriguing decadence, and unapologetic rock ’n’ roll clichés that make them the bad guys that I hate to love. Isn’t “Alison” one of the catchiest pieces of pop ever written?

*

Rap artists Mobb Deep’s second album, The Infamous, is one of the best albums of the last century. It offers a gritty portrayal of New York life, possessing a distinct literary honesty akin to Lou Reed’s impressions of the city through his solo work and albums with the Velvet Underground. If I dared to count the number of times they throw out the N-word on that album, I would find myself needing a secretary. But why would I count? Their N-bombs and tales of urban violence don’t bother me when I’m listening to the music. Even though they had art-school backgrounds, their drug-lord sound is so convincing that it doesn’t matter. When I think about Mobb Deep and their Infamous album, and really, any number of rap albums can serve as the control here, my reasonable side tells me that I should be bothered by their loose use of nigger—trap talk and misogyny aside. But it sounds so good. I catch myself in the car or listening to music on my phone, rattling off lines like, “This nigga that I’m beginning to dislike, he got me fed / If he doesn’t discontinue his bullshit, he might be dead,” as if they were my own.

Rap producer Dr. Dre makes records that millions of people can dance and bob their heads to. He’s been doing it for years through the voices of a variety of rappers: Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Kendrick Lamar. He is a legend. Yet he was also a member of a band called N.W.A—Niggaz with Attitudes—and produced an album called Niggaz4Life. Does he feel at this point in his career, when he can roll up to the Grammy Awards looking dapper and decidedly un-gangsta, that he is a nigger for life? This is the man who cofounded Beats Audio, a company purchased by Apple for several billion dollars. Or does no amount of corporate wealth and industry success protect a luminary even like Dr. Dre?

Perhaps in the entertainment world it doesn’t matter what you call yourself as long as you manufacture hits for the executives. Good reviews from the critics are a plus, but only optional. And if to Dr. Dre and others, the “nigga4life” lifestyle means casual sex, getting high, and flaunting money, then perhaps it can be a black term for rock star; in which case, Keith Richards, Tommy Lee, and Dave Navarro all could have had guest spots on the Niggaz4Life album.

How does the rest of the country consider Dr. Dre? How might a white, rap-listening college graduate working on Capitol Hill feel about a rap icon? Does this white college grad consider the image of the African American portrayed in hip-hop when considering larger racial issues? Or does he even care to mix his art with politics and ethics? Maybe after all it’s just music and the ethos of rock ’n’ roll filtered through the African American experience comes out in such a way that niggers are homies are bros are pals are dudes are your crew. What are the nationwide effects if everyone, not just black people, buys into this logic? Or is it already selling? Rap music rarely goes multiplatinum without white money. So where are the white listeners—the ones who roll down the street en route to middle class jobs in their trucks shaking the whole block with the bass and rhymes of A$AP Rocky, Rick Ross, and The Game—where are they when it is time to stand in the streets for justice, for the requiems of Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, and the ever-expanding roll call of innocent lives consumed by hate? Where are they when they just need to vote for the right person? To have it both ways, for all of us, is a distinct privilege that we should never invoke.

Andre Perry is an essayist and arts advocate. He received his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, and his work has appeared in The Believer, Catapult, Granta, and other journals. He cofounded Iowa City’s Mission Creek Festival, a celebration of music and literature, as well as the multidisciplinary festival of creative process Witching Hour. He continues to live and work in Iowa City. Some of Us Are Very Hungry Now is his first book.

From Some of Us Are Very Hungry Now, by Andre Perry. Copyright © 2019 by Andre Perry. Reprinted with the permission of Two Dollar Radio.