Hanif Abdurraqib’s monthly column, Notes on Pop, muses on the relationship between songs and memory. Read more here. 

Still from HAIM’s “Want You Back”

During my craft talk about poems and sound, I play small parts of songs or music videos. I’m giving away the secret here, but it’s to distract from the fact that I don’t know what I’m talking about. Or, I do know what I’m talking about, but I can’t articulate it in any way that makes sense outside of the hamster wheel of my own brain. In some spaces, there is the assumption that anyone who writes poems wants to talk about the writing of them in front of people, and is equipped to do so. But some of us are just fumbling around dark rooms, occasionally lucky enough to find a light switch. And so, to not give away my fumbling, when I give a craft talk, I play songs. I play spirituals and gospel, and I play the rap songs that have sampled the spirituals and gospel. To talk about the magic trick of pace—of suggesting a big moment only to later reveal an even bigger moment—I play the iconic video of the Who performing “Baba O’Riley.” The one you’ve maybe seen, where the intro swells and swells until it feels like it could fill an entire stadium, and you might think, How can we ever climb atop this? But then Pete Townshend tosses his tambourine, steps back from the microphone, and windmills his arm around his guitar and shakes his ass in white pants while Roger Daltrey holds a microphone to the heavens with both hands.

But first, I play HAIM’s “Want You Back.” A specific part, around the 2:20 mark. All of the instruments drop out for about fifteen seconds and all that remains is the layering of voices, singing out “just know / that I want you / back” before the drums enter and the song rebuilds itself from the vocals up. In the talk, the point is about silence, I think. Or the point I’m trying to make is about how the voice itself isn’t the instrument. That language is the instrument and voice is just the vehicle, like a speaker or an amplifier. The point is about silence and the things we deem as percussion. How, along the landscape of silence, any sound that interrupts can be percussive. I make the point by pulling up a poem that has one word drowning in the otherwise white space of a page. That’s percussion, I say. In the poem “Katy,” Frank O’Hara writes, “I am never quiet / I mean silent,” and I assume people who have been lonely enough or isolated enough know the difference. Percussion can be even the gentlest interruption. Here’s a concrete example I give: two people on the telephone, near the end of a conversation, when the line between them falls into the depths of soundlessness. Even one person saying the words “I love you” is percussive. All our affections, coming on the backs of drums.

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Still from Belly (1998)

It is hard to say when I stopped noticing the sirens. They’re still there, piercing the otherwise normal Wednesday-afternoon noise. But I haven’t noticed them for at least fifteen years. In the central Ohio area, a test of the state’s tornado-siren system takes place every Wednesday at noon. I would describe the sound for you, but even now I can barely remember it. I recall it beginning as a low whistle that bends into a loud howl, but the sound feels distant to me now. It’s indistinguishable from all the other ways this city rumbles its way toward productivity.

When I was a kid in elementary school, I assumed the siren tests happened everywhere. Twice a month, at noon, when the howling began to announce itself, all of us kids spilled into the hallway, and sat on our knees facing the wall. We’d lock one of our hands into the other, put them behind our heads, and curl ourselves downward. It was practice for the actual tornado, which we were told might come at any moment. It might come while we were in our classrooms learning whatever it is elementary school kids learned in the nineties (yet another thing I don’t recall). I never knew this was something exclusive to my school, or schools in my area. I imagined an entire chain of balled-up bodies, trembling against walls in school hallways across the country.

Once I hit my early teenage years, when tornado rehearsals were no longer required of me, my ears stopped registering the sirens. Most people who have lived in central Ohio for long enough echo this sentiment. We know the sirens only by those around us who haven’t been here long. The way they jump, or their eyes widen as they look to the sky, expecting chaos. That’s when I hear the noise again.

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Whitney Houston in 1991

Friends and heartthrobs of the past, future, and present: where I am now, the temperature has begun its slow climb, and summer is preparing its eviction notice for all the gentle breezes and drives with windows down and the incessant joyful choir of birds. We will soon have to settle for less pleasing aesthetics of romance. Sweat becomes romantic because it will happen whether or not I want it to, and I’ve got to make the best of it. During summer in Ohio, the storms come briefly, but violently, and seemingly out of nowhere. The sun will be out as you make your way to the car, but by the time you arrive at your destination, you’re trapped in a parking lot with torrents of rainwater collapsing on your windshield. I think I would like to call this moment romantic, too, for all the times I’ve sat outside of a grocery store, or a bar, or an ice cream shop, turning up a song that reminded me of someone in hopes that the music and the memory might intersect and silence the downpour.

It is a privilege to have seasons. Sometimes, in Columbus, Ohio, we don’t get much of spring. Winter digs its claws in and then it’s suddenly eighty-five degrees with suffocating humidity. The planet, of course, may not afford me many more years like this one. One where I’ve been blessed with a distinct turning over from one season to the next. I like it this way, being gently shepherded through, as opposed to dropped in the middle of a landscape already in progress. It is hard to create longing without the reminder of what we’re longing for.

Speaking of longing, I am here to once again consider the moment in the pre-chorus of “How Will I Know,” which creeps underneath the song’s ecstatic and bombastic uncertainty. Whether intended in the original message or not, this was the first song that most clearly articulated the anatomy and anxiety and secret pleasures of a crush. While Whitney drags out the words of the song’s central question as only Whitney can, the backup vocals trickle in with “don’t trust your feelings,” which is the moment that feels the most true to the real-life conundrum. A person, shaky, but fantasizing toward confidence while, underneath, their friends try to whisper them back to reality.

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Hanif Abdurraqib’s new monthly column, Notes on Pop, muses on the relationship between songs and memory.

Source: Thinkstock

I find myself most aware of silence when I am thinking about the many ways it can be punctured. Under the wrong circumstances, a hospital room can become a symphony of noises, each of them courting the worst of a person’s anxieties. There might be an incessant but inconsistent beeping, or the sounds of several machines doing the work of keeping a person alive. It is a privilege to be told that someone you love is going to survive. The message comes from some exhausted doctor, eager to give the good news after the tests, or the surgery, or whatever else. I have also been on the other side: knowing that I would be watching a person I love slowly fade until they vanished altogether, and understanding there’s nothing that can be done.

There’s something uniquely challenging about the moments in between, when the good news of a person’s continued living is delivered, but they still have to stay in a hospital room for a few more days before they can go home. From far enough away, underneath a wave of monochromatic hospital blankets, it can be hard to tell if someone is still breathing. Particularly if you’ve already imagined a world without them in it. If you’ve spent enough time imagining someone as dead, it can be difficult to visualize them as simply sleeping. I don’t love hearing the beeping and the sonic hiccups of hospital machinery, but it is worse not to hear anything.

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Hanif Abdurraqib’s new monthly column, Notes on Pop, muses on the relationship between songs and memory.

To begin with a fact that is entirely beside the point (unless you are the owner of a Michigan area code and a very particular type of pride): South Detroit is, in fact, not a real place, at least not within the flimsy geographical construct of the United States. Anyone beginning in Detroit and traveling south will, because of how the borders are drawn, end up in Canada. From a geographical standpoint, South Detroit is Windsor, Ontario.

The restaurant South Detroit, which is in Windsor, Ontario, was opened by someone with a slick sense of humor and a sharp eye for nostalgia and aesthetics. Since we are burdened with borders, it must be said that there are a lot of good reasons to travel to a border and then cross it. From Columbus, Ohio, where I grew up, the drive to Windsor, Ontario, is about four hours. Three and a half if you disregard the speed-limit signs posted along Route 23, where there are no blue-and-whites hiding along the high grass, and even if there were, they wouldn’t dare flick on their sirens and interrupt their downtime, reclining along the road. My friends and I would make the trip to go to the South Detroit diner in Windsor—passports and all. We’d wait in the long line clogging up the bridge to another country. The food at the diner wasn’t at all spectacular, and my pal Kyryn claimed they didn’t know how to mix a good cocktail—I don’t know much about drinks, so I took her at her word.

What South Detroit did have was a good jukebox. I like a jukebox that requires labor. I’m not aging into one of those fist-shaking olds who sits on a porch and bemoans the fact that kids these days don’t play outdoors or that people stare at their phones or whatever else gets said about the younger generations. But there is the fact that I prefer a jukebox, one that cannot be controlled by a phone. I believe in accountability everywhere, even as it so eagerly escapes much of our day-to-day lives. And so, I must ask for accountability at the jukebox, where people know what songs I’ve played, because they’ve watched me approach the machine and fumble for my coins and scroll through the options. They’ve watched me sit back down and glance eagerly at the machine as each song ends, if they’re watching closely. If they keep watching, they might see a half-smile leap from the edges of my mouth when the first notes of my tune arrives. The jukebox alone is just a vehicle for sound, same as any other. But when a person enters, they can attach themselves and whatever hopes they have for the night, to that vehicle, and it becomes something greater. Read More