Search Results for: The Dissolve

Remembering Singer Nancy Wilson

Nancy Wilson autographing fans' photographs at Los Angeles High School,1967. AP Photo

Listening to Nancy Wilson’s “(You Don’t Know) How Glad I Am” over a half century after she recorded it is like taking a master class in voice control and phrasing. She incorporates Eartha Kitt’s tart enunciation and Dinah Washington’s melodic upticks in the verse. By the 22-second mark Wilson is stretching out the word “you” into its own little story of restrained passion in a way few singers can. This is Ella Fitzgerald-level breath control. When Wilson effortlessly leaps up the arpeggiated steps of “and you don’t know you don’t know you don’t know…how glad I am” in her first chorus, it’s a marvel of clarity and precision.

Nancy Wilson died on December 13, after an extended illness. She was 81.

Released in the summer of 1964, “How Glad I Am” broke the Top 20 and earned her a Grammy. Wilson, then five years into her recording career, already considered herself a pop artist. “People labelled me as jazz,” she said at the time. “I don’t like that designation. I want to be able to reach everybody, not just the jazz crowd.”

Although never quite able to dodge the label of jazz thrush, Wilson considered herself “a song stylist,” as she told The Washington Post. “That’s my essence,” she explained, “to weave words, to be dramatic.” Regardless, Time magazine once called her Ella Fitzgerald’s heir apparent. “At her opening at Los Angeles’ Coconut Grove last week,” they wrote in 1964, “the crowd of 1,000 voted her everything but the deed and title to the place.”

When she was 15, Wilson had her own television show called Skyline Melodies in Columbus, Ohio, singing pop tunes by request. She later played night clubs in the Bronx and Chicago, but it was venues like the Coconut Grove that encouraged Wilson to up her game. “Now I have to really entertain,” she told Music Business in 1964. “You can’t just get up there and be soulful in clubs like these. They expect a show and you’ve got to give them one. But this is something new and fresh and exciting for me. Even if I’m tired it doesn’t get me bugged.”

It’s a perfectly American thing to delineate forms of musical expression, assigning them to differing demographics for both performer and audience. The word ‘blues’ was tacked onto the end of many of what were called “race record” titles in the 1920s to serve more as a racial signifier than song description. Jazz, initially a product of black subculture, became the pop music of the 1930s and ’40s once accepted into the white American mainstream. Rock ‘n’ roll helped transform American teenagers into a lucrative consumer group in the 1950s, just as it signified that whites had started making and consuming black music.

These race and genre-based boundaries eventually dissolved. Producer Norman Granz asked jazz icons Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald to record an album of mostly white show tunes in 1956, to astounding success. Black entertainers like Nat Cole and Johnny Mathis soon gained access to mainstream stardom without the old restrictive labels.

Wilson came to prominence at a time when jazz, blues, and pop had become intertwined in the public consciousness, allowing her to move farther down the path blazed by her hero Jimmy Scott. Thus she was able to make jazz records with saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, slow burners like “Our Day Will Come,” and standards. “The Very Thought of You” was recorded by Billie Holiday years before, but Wilson’s early ’60s reading is more intimate and engaged. She stands perfectly poised between the earlier era of vocalists like Lena Horne and Anita Baker, and those — like Natalie Cole and Nnenna Freelon — whom she would inspire.

“In the ‘great tradition’ of blues, torch and jazz singers that began with Billie Holiday, Nancy Wilson leans toward the left wing, where pop meets jazz, a translator of popular standards into the jazz idiom,” Time wrote. “Her repertory is a treatise on variety and taste, spun by a voice of agile grace and knowing jazz inflection and phrasing.”

By the mid 1960s, Wilson was behind only the Beatles as Capitol Records’ best-selling artist, outselling Frank Sinatra and the Beach Boys. Her short-lived NBC program The Nancy Wilson Show earned an Emmy.

Wilson scored another hit in the late ’60s with “Face It Girl, It’s Over,” then embarked on a second career of ubiquitous television guest appearances. She again expanded her audience in the late ’70s with funky tracks like “Sunshine.”

By the end of the 1990s Wilson had issued more than ’60 albums and gathered up awards from the NEA, Urban League, Playboy, and the NAACP. She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and was recognized for her work in the Civil Rights Movement by the International Civil Rights Walk of Fame.

Successful before she was famous, and beloved until her death, Wilson stands almost alone in career consistency. Now we’re left with what Time called her “treatise on variety and taste.” The best tribute we can pay is some close listening.

***

Tom Maxwell is a writer and musician. He likes how one informs the other.

Editor: Aaron Gilbreath; Fact-checker: Ethan Chiel

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Miami Herald

This week, we’re sharing stories from Julie K. Brown, Joe Sexton, Zachary R. Mider and Zeke Faux, Bruce Grierson, and Michael Hainey.

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Karst: the Latest Casualty of Clear-Cut Logging

ANCONA, ITALY - AUGUST 17: A general view of the Frasassi Caves on August 17, 2018 in the province of Ancona, Marche in the municipality of Genga, Italy. The remarkable karst cave system are among the most famous show caves in Italy, discovered by a group of Ancona speleologists in 1971 are situated 7 kilometres (4 miles) south of Genga. Rich in water, the cave system is particularly well endowed with stalactites and stalagmites. (Photo by Simona Granati - Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images)

As Bruce Grierson reports at Hakai Magazine in this fascinating piece, clear-cut logging has much deeper repercussions than simply denuding the land of trees — it also affects a critical underground ecosystem of dissolved rock called karst and the organisms that depend on it.

The server returns with a glass of ice-free water. Immediately, the reading climbs past 40. The higher number is a geological tell. It’s proof that the water ran underground through karst, an underground ecosystem of dissolved rock.

“That’s more like it,” Griffiths says.

Something naturally perfect happens to water when it flows through karst. It trickles and tumbles, picking up oxygen, picking up minerals, losing its acidity. The result is life-giving, luring and nurturing organisms from the tiniest microbes to humans to bears.

To be clear, karst isn’t a kind of rock. It’s a topography, one shaped by water that seeps and squeezes through limestone or gypsum or marble or dolomite, creating cavities from the size of the ones in your teeth to caverns the size of ballrooms, filigreed with delicate speleothems, dripping down and growing up and sometimes meeting in the middle. Limestone bedrock—the kind found here—was once alive and in the tropics before plate tectonics ferried it to Vancouver Island 100 million years ago. Limestone, composed of skeletal fragments of shallow-water marine organisms, such as corals and mollusks, is found in your toothpaste, your newspaper, your store-bought bread, and the cement beneath your feet—but the true worth of this karst bedrock includes more than its commercial value. A single subterranean water droplet is an ecosystem of its own. Two drops less than a meter apart have been found to harbor entirely different biological communities. For something that’s mostly nothing, karst contains an awful lot.

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The Cavernous World under the Woods

Longreads Pick

As Bruce Grierson reports in this fascinating piece, clear-cut logging has much deeper repercussions than simply denuding the land of trees — it also affects a critical underground ecosystem of dissolved rock called karst as well as the organisms that depend on it.

Source: Hakai Magazine
Published: Nov 20, 2018
Length: 21 minutes (5,400 words)

After World War I, Horror Movies Were Invaded By an Army of Reanimated Corpses

"J'accuse!" 1919.

W. Scott Poole | an excerpt adapted from Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror | Counterpoint | October 2018 | 23 minutes (6,219 words)

The murderous folly of the Great War chilled western Europe to the bone, and the new, gruesome entertainment of the horror film became neither escape nor catharsis but rather a repetition of trauma. Telling these stories sometimes had the effect of ripping the scab from the wound so that it never became healthy, or grieving until grief became an end in itself. At times, the stories included social criticism. In all cases, the horror film included a long, angry procession of unquiet corpses.

Not everyone would agree, or at least believe, that horror films carry so much weight. “You are reading too much into the movies” is a fairly common response to such claims. “They’re just entertainment.” This idea of course has its own history and, paradoxically, it begins with a writer who thought that the films made after the Great War did contain coded messages about the era. He saw in them a dangerous message that explained the path from Germany’s defeat in 1918 to its resurgence as a threatening power twenty years later.

Siegfried Kracauer left Germany in 1933, emigrating to Paris the same year that Adolf Hitler became the German chancellor. After the beginning of World War II and the invasion of France, he fled for the Spanish border with the renegade essayist Walter Benjamin in the summer of 1940. Unlike Benjamin, however, Kracauer found a way to make it to the United States, where a Rockefeller Fellowship awaited him in the spring of 1941, thanks to his fellow exile the philosopher Max Horkheimer. New York City’s Museum of Modern Art offered Kracauer a position that involved studying the German films made between 1918 and 1933, a task he hoped might yield some clue as to what had become of his homeland. Read more…

The Possessed: Dispatches from the Third Trimester

Illustration by Lily Padula

Sara Fredman | Longreads | October 2018 | 11 minutes (2,913 words)

 

In the second season of Stranger Things a tentacled smoke monster forces its way into poor Will Byers’ mouth, taking up residence inside his body. When his mother draws him a warm bath, he refuses. “He likes it cold,” Will intones creepily. The demon inside is invisible to others but exerts its will on Will, who is himself but also something else. As I watch the story unfold, the human being growing inside my body moves frenetically, as if it is popping and locking to a beat I cannot hear. This flurry of activity makes my stomach look like a potato sack with several distressed squirrels stuck inside; this is likely due to the cookie-dough ice cream I have recently eaten. I, too, have something inside of me; it also likes it cold.

“Pregnancy has every element of an alien invasion,” I read on the NPR website. “The human placenta is one of the most invasive placentas.”

We often turn to the extraterrestrial when we describe the phenomenon of growing a new person inside of an existing one. Early ultrasound images recall the classic imagining of alien form: a giant head attached to a smaller, translucent body set against a black abyss. It’s not just the optics. As pop icon and formerly-pregnant person JLo once remarked, “Pregnancy and giving birth are weird, strange. The growing life inside you — it’s like an invasion of the body snatchers.” I assume this creepy description reflects the way in which the growing fetus influences, commandeers even, so many of the bodily processes of its host. Google “alien” and “pregnancy,” and the least-frightening video that comes up will confirm: “Clearly, the fetus has no qualms about doing whatever it needs to do to get things for itself.”

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Shelved: The Sound of Big Star’s Self-Destruction

Michael Ochs Archives / Stringer / Getty

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | October 2018 | 16 minutes (3,146 words)

 

In 1948, Columbia Records introduced the first commercial long-playing record, which revolved at 33 1/3 revolutions per minute and could hold more than 20 minutes of music per side. The older technology, 78-rpm records, couldn’t hold more than three and a half minutes per side. It was now possible to make a self-contained album.

Prior to that, the term “album” was used to describe a printed collection of short classical music pieces, such as Felix Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words. Later, 78 records would be bound in volumes called albums, which would allow the limited medium to communicate longer orchestral works. By the same token, the books that contained family photos also became known as albums.

With the new technology, it wasn’t long before albums were used to communicate a collection of songs united by a common theme. Frank Sinatra is widely credited with releasing the first concept album, 1955’s In the Wee Small Hours. All of the songs were arranged by Nelson Riddle and were united in their themes of love, loss, and romantic dissolution.

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I Believe Her: A Reading List

Getty Images

On September 27, 2018, I sat home alone at my kitchen table, my laptop open to Christine Blasey Ford delivering her opening statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Outside, the neighbor’s dog barked and a truck throttled down the street, but as Dr. Ford uttered the phrase, “but his weight was heavy,” the world around me, the one I have built for myself here and now, seemed to dissolve. As she testified about Brett Kavanaugh and Mark Judge’s laughter, “pin-balling off the walls,” I wept. My body tensed. I was no longer seated at my kitchen table, but waking up instead on the cold hard tile of my college dormitory, my assaulter and my best friend both standing above me, laughing.

During the second semester of my freshman year of college, my mattress had been placed directly on the floor because a neurological illness had stolen my ability to safely climb into my lofted bed. The man who assaulted me was a friend. The night of, he kissed my roommate goodnight before making his way down the ladder of her bed. He crawled on top of me, using his body weight to pin me down. His breath smelled like beer. With one of his hands he pressed hard against my collarbone, and with the other he groped me beneath my shirt. When he at last fell asleep on top of me, I squirmed away. Not knowing where else to go, I found a spot on the tile floor and curled up there for the rest of the night.

There are more details but, even in saying this much, my voice quakes. I have seen what happens to women who offer testimony. Leigh Gilmore, in her book Tainted Witness, writes about “how women’s witness is discredited by a host of means meant to taint it: to contaminate by doubt, stigmatize through association with gender and race, and dishonor through shame, such that not only the testimony but the person herself is smeared.” Women who report sexual assault are asked, what were you wearing? Why didn’t you tell someone? How hard did you fight back? During her Senate testimony, Dr. Ford was asked, “So what you are telling us, this could not be a case of mistaken identity?” “You would not mix somebody else with Brett Kavanaugh, correct?” “You do remember what happened, do you not?” And in 1991, when Anita Hill faced the Senate Judiciary Committee to offer her testimony of Clarence Thomas’ sexual harassment, she was asked, “Are you a scorned woman?” and “Do you have a martyr complex?”

Watching Dr. Ford on the stand, and remembering with respect Anita Hill who testified before her, it is clear to me that both women’s testimonies represent much more than simply the confirmation of a Supreme Court nominee. In their stories, I hear my own, of which I am usually reluctant to speak. And in the voices of people who disbelieve both Ford and Hill, I hear my worst fears vocalized. In the days that followed Kavanaugh’s confirmation, all that held me were the words of writers who skillfully dismantle harmful rhetoric, expose systems of privilege and power, illuminate the stories of vulnerable others, and bravely voice their own.

I believe Dr. Ford. I believe Anita Hill. And I believe in the power of our collective witness as a way to make change. As Tarana Burke, Amanda de Cadenet, Glennon Doyle, Tracee Ellis Ross, and America Ferrera wrote recently in their open letter to Dr. Ford,

“You’ll see it when we march, when we walk out, when we show up.

You’ll see it in the voting lines that go on forever.

You’ll hear it in our reawakened voices.

You’ll feel it in our strengthened siblinghood.”

1. “One Year of #MeToo: The Legacy of Black Women’s Testimonies”(Allyson Hobbs, October 10, 2018, The New Yorker)

By writing about the fragmented nature in which memory of her own sexual assault emerges, chronicling historical incidents of black women such as Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Simril, and Betty Jean Owens bearing witness against their attackers, and examining the context surrounding Anita Hill’s testimony, Allyson Hobbs illuminates why it is so difficult for women — particularly African American women — to share incidents of sexual violence. She emphasizes that to move forward we need to stop privileging the voices of white women, and create a narrative that’s more inclusive.

“To do better by all women, we must listen and recognize the historical and contemporary circumstances that shape their experiences and have real consequences on their lives.”

2. I Rewatched Anita Hill’s Testimony. So Much Has Changed. So Much Hasn’t. (Liza Mundy, September 23, 2018, Politico)

Liza Mundy writes about Anita Hill’s 1991 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, providing valuable context for how incidents within the 1991 hearing can be reframed based on our current knowledge of sexual harassment. This piece was published before Christine Blasey Ford testified, but Mundy offers insight as to how Dr. Ford’s testimony might be received differently based on changes in the digital age, the presence of female members on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the influence of the #MeToo movement.

“Even now, even given the remarkable climate-change wrought by the #MeToo moment, we are seeing in real time how women can be intimidated by everything from the attacks they face to the constrictions placed on how they can tell their stories.”

(Related: read Exclusive: we re-ran polls from 1991 about Anita Hill, this time about Christine Blasey Ford by Dylan Matthews at Vox.)

3. And You Thought Trump Voters Were Mad  (Rebecca Traister, September 17, 2018, The Cut)

Studying historical instances of rage in relation to both race and gender, Rebecca Traister examines the ways in which anger can be progressive or a means of maintaining harmful institutions of power.

“This fight has been against an administration with virtually no regard for women, for their rights, or for the integrity of their bodies, either in the public or private sense. The point should be obvious, yet the anger of the female protesters has repeatedly been cast — as Ford’s story quickly was — by those threatened by it as desperate and performed.”

4. What Do We Owe Her Now? (Elizabeth Bruenig, September 21, 2018, Washington Post)

On September 21, 2018, Donald Trump tweeted, “I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed,” which immediately resulted in a viral #WhyIDidntReport hashtag on Twitter. There are a slew of reasons why women don’t report, one of them being the way that sexual assaults are treated by both authorities and communities.

Elizabeth Bruenig, in a tour de force of literary journalism, writes about a woman named Amber Wyatt who reported her rape 12 years ago to both friends and authorities in Arlington, Texas, only to be harassed and shunned by her peers to the point that she had to leave school. Authorities, even though they were in possession of a rape kit and Wyatt’s testimony, chose not to prosecute, saying “it was a ‘he said, she said’ thing.”

“Making sense of her ordeal meant tracing a web of failures, lies, abdications and predations, at the center of which was a node of power that, though anonymous and dispersed, was nonetheless tilted firmly against a young, vulnerable girl.”

5. What Kind of Person Makes False Rape Accusations? (Sandra Newman, May 11, 2017, Quartz)

On October 2nd, 2018, to the cheer of a crowd in Southaven, Mississippi, Donald Trump mocked Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony, saying, “How did you get home? I don’t remember. How’d you get there? I don’t remember.” He lamented, saying Kavanaugh’s “life is in tatters. A man’s life is shattered,” insinuating that Dr. Ford contrived her story of sexual assault.

While I am reluctant to engage with Trump’s abhorrent mockery of Dr. Ford, his unfounded claim that Dr. Ford made up her assault feeds into the extraordinarily harmful narrative that men’s lives are being ruined by women. Sandra Newman addresses this claim in her extensively researched essay, “What kind of person makes false rape accusations?” Point by point, she breaks down commonly made claims such as innocent men facing rape charges, false reporting, and who falsely reports, and counters each with data from a variety of unbiased studies.

6. Speak Truth to Power  (Lacy M. Johnson, September 24, 2018, Longreads)

“It seems impossible to speak about rape precisely because this threat of violent retribution is real, whether explicit or implicit, but also because of the widespread belief in our culture that rape is an aberration: a violence so unthinkable, so unfathomable, so taboo as to render it unspeakable.”

Through examination of Philomela’s rape in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Steubenville, Ohio rape trial, Bill Cosby’s trial, the 1 is 2 Many campaign, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, among others, and by integrating her own experiences as a survivor of rape and sexual assault, Lacy M. Johnson, in an excerpt from her book The Reckonings: Essays, elucidates how women’s testimonies are perpetually ignored, silenced, shamed, trolled, and threatened. Johnson advocates for women to speak their truth — and publically — even in the face of fear.

7. Gabrielle Bellot: The Story I Kept Hidden (Gabrielle Bellot, October 11, 2018, LitHub)

Gabrielle Bellot, in addition to voicing her own experiences with sexual assault, writes about the history of trauma women have endured as a result of harmful patriarchal systems, and emphasizes the importance of telling true stories as a way of fighting back.

“When I hear the President of this country ask, dismissively, why women would wait to come forward and call women who make allegations “really evil people,” it feels like a slap in the face. And then it reminds me why so many women never speak up at all, even now, but instead let our memories curl up into a deep place inside us, until we can almost believe we’ve forgotten them.”

* * *

Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir of running and illness.

Raised by Hip-Hop

Alex J. Berliner/abimages) via AP Images

Juan Vidal | Rap Dad | Atria Books | September 2018 | 37 minutes (7,440 words)

 

Depending on your perspective, there was a time you might have considered me an outright goon. Not a goon to the level of Bishop from the movie Juice, but one with savage tendencies nonetheless. When I was eight, the school principal sent me home for wearing a shirt that read “No Code of Conduct” in bold, black script. Ma’s English was shaky then, so its meaning was missed by her. I can’t say I fully understood its message either, but you wouldn’t have known it by the way the shirt corresponded to my general posture.

I was drawn to the counterculture. Music and art and skateboarding made me want to live louder, turn my life up for the world. Often that meant exposing my ignorance in the process. Like the single time I sported denim backwards because Kris Kross made it seem fresh for a stint. It wasn’t, and I got clowned. When you’re young, it’s permissible to have these gaps in your logic, to act out and never bug over potential repercussions. Everything is about the moment, and how to squeeze more out of it for its own sake. One more swig of the Cuervo; a last hit of the blunt; a bike to jack because I need a ride home and that red Mongoose looks like it flies.

* * *

Weeks before my parents’ marriage officially dissolved, my father showed up with a gang of bullet holes in Ma’s Accord. That was it. There was no more hanging on to blind hope, or attempting to make excuses for his behavior. Ma knew it, everybody knew it. My grandfather could have killed the man, and maybe I would have forgiven him if he had.

After they split, my father shoved off to the motherland. By now he was on the run—from his enemies and from the law—and had to leave the United States permanently. Ma lost the house and we moved into a small, two-bedroom apartment in Fort Lauderdale. Our first day there, I was blown away by the large community pool and half-court basketball setup. What seemed like dozens of kids my age roamed freely about the complex, on BMX bikes and scooters. Many of them were first-generation Americans like me and my brothers. Their parents were from Haiti, Brazil, the Dominican Republic. Some worked construction, others in restaurants or the night shift buffing floors at the local hospital. Our building sat just behind the school I was to attend for my last couple years of elementary. “Here we will build a home,” Ma said. “Just the four of us.” The next day Ma took the belt to my ass after she found out I’d sprayed shaving cream all over the exercise equipment in our new gym.

I realized that my first language was inextricable from who I was and how I should perceive my place in the world.

Now I had no choice but to share a room. To save space, Ma found a triple bunk bed on the cheap. I was on top, Alejandro in the middle, and Andres on the pull-out with the built-in drawers. Sometimes Andres slept in Ma’s room, like a sweet, protective boyfriend. He was just a few years old, but he made a ritual of checking the windows and making sure the doors were secured at night. Time passed and not much changed. The three of us boys still stayed up late sipping sugary drinks and feasting on questionable television. When my brothers fell asleep, I’d sneak out to the living room to watch Def Comedy Jam and Spic-O-Rama in the dark. I’d found a hero in John Leguizamo, whose rage and distrust of authority mirrored my own. While I generally loved my Latin culture—from our food to our music and celebrations—I wasn’t always self-assured enough to embrace certain aspects publicly. I hated to stand out when I was younger, unless it was for some commendable deed I’d performed. Nothing bugged me more than when Ma spoke Spanish in front of my boys, even though most of them came from Spanish-speaking homes, too. It wasn’t until I saw Leguizamo’s one-man show that I came to fully own my identity. I realized that my first language was inextricable from who I was and how I should perceive my place in the world. Anything less was self-hate.

Anyhow, me and my brothers never talked about our father. They were too young to comprehend everything I’d seen. As far as I knew, they were never brought along on dates with side pieces. They didn’t watch our father get blitzed in the kitchen or witness his longtime friends turn homicidal. These were my secrets to own and interpret however I chose.

* * *

Soon, Ma began taking on more hours at the nail salon. With my father ghost and contributing nothing monetarily or otherwise, the pressure to earn more money grew heavy. Her tips went to food and utilities, her meager paychecks to everything else. There were times she would mail the check for the car note or the phone bill and purposely leave off her signature. The check would get sent back a week later with a reminder to sign and return, which bought Ma extra time to get her paper together. She couldn’t afford to pay a sitter when she upped her hours, so Ma now had to take us to work with her two nights a week. She’d pick us up from school and drag us to the salon; a client would wait as Ma got us settled in the back. For the next four hours or so, we’d yell obscenities, get into fistfights, ruin homework, and make it almost impossible for Ma to work uninterrupted. One night, after he’d scribbled over someone’s class project in permanent marker, Andres bolted onto the main floor, blood dripping from his mouth. The women looked on, their eyes wide with shock. Ma lost her cool and time suddenly moved slower. Point is, we could be terrible then, and I recall many bloody nights and total pandemonium. “Where is their father?” I heard a bemused client ask once in a voice just above a whisper. Long gone, I thought. Long gone.

My father was born in 1953 in the town of Moniquirá, about ninety miles north of Bogotá. The second oldest of six children, he lived with the burden of birth order on his shoulders. He and his older brother, like many older siblings, were strongly urged to look after the others—and mandated to throw fists when necessary, at school, or the yard. Petty disagreements often came to blows, and their skin grew thicker by the grade. For them, everything came second to preserving their name. Had they let someone slide for disrespecting a Vidal, it might have been perceived as charity, and so they took no shorts. They would never know any other way.

Nestled in the province of Ricaurte in the department of Boyacá, Moniquirá is surrounded by rivers, hills, and coffee plants, its fertile lands producing many natural resources. Bocadillo, a Colombian confectionery made with guava pulp and panela and wrapped in leaf packaging, is among its most well-known exports. My father’s father worked in the fields until he moved the family to Bogotá in search of opportunity.

Bogotá in the 1950s could be described as idyllic, depending on whom you ask. People might speak of the extravagant parties and dances and the magic of youth. Perhaps they would tell of their long treks around lush valleys and their weekends spent at a relative’s finca up in the mountains. But between 1948 and 1958, hundreds of thousands were murdered in the partisan warfare that came to be known as “La Violencia.” Like my mother, who was raised to the south in Santiago de Cali, my father was bombarded by the daily reports of bloodshed around the country. Though censorship from the government did what it does, and though the threats against journalists and news organizations became heightened during that period, there was no way to ignore what was happening—the chatter in the streets, the paranoia of schoolteachers who had loved ones on the outskirts of the city. But violence has seen varying levels of intensity in Colombia. More than fifty thousand lost their lives in the Drug Wars of the 1980s, during the reign of Pablo Escobar, and in the guerrilla warfare of the 1990s.

* * *

For my father, with time and age came anger. And many of his experiences helped breed a deep distrust in the law. Though he may have been a merciless shield for his brothers and sisters, it didn’t compare to how frantically my father protected his mother. When he was seventeen, he served his first bid in jail following an altercation. One afternoon, when he and his mother were coming back from the market, a man in his thirties directed a sly comment at my grandmother. My father, barely out of high school, confronted the stranger and demanded he retract his words. When he did not concede, my father saw red and beat the man stupid in the street, nearly killing him. The police came and they put my father away for two months. They said he was crazy.

While my father sat in lockup with slabs of torn flesh under his fingernails, Ma, three years his junior, excelled at Colegio María Auxiliadora, a private Catholic school for girls in the Valle del Cauca. The middle child in a family of five children, she was beautiful and studious, tall and thin with big brown eyes. As a teen, my mother made grown men stop mid-conversation. But it hadn’t always been so. My mother was such an ugly baby that her parents, wonderful as they were, hid her for the first year of her life. When friends tried to make plans to visit, my grandparents would find a way to evade their requests. The baby is very sick; the baby is sleeping. Their list of excuses piled up until they finally deemed it safe to parade my mother around like they’d done the others. By the time anyone saw her outside of her immediate family, my mother was already walking and showing off teeth.

As the years went by, my father would demonstrate his contempt for superiors and the simple functions of responsibility. He was bright and warmhearted at the core, but he was also a menace. He scolded well-meaning administrators, defied every order. It seemed jail had changed him for the worse. Instead of accepting those months behind bars as a wake-up call, he dwelled on the sweet reward of exerting control over another’s body if they deserved it. He’d tasted the essence of supreme power, and he concluded that it was good.

* * *

Never mind the agony inflicted; never mind the emotional scars that poor bastard would have to endure long after his bandages were removed.

Never mind the violence that reminded onlookers of the civil war in which their country was entrenched.

Never mind that parents and their small children were made to gaze upon a madman who equated justice with suffering.

Never mind the warm sun and the breeze that earlier that day had signaled to all the makings of a perfect afternoon.

* * *

My father’s contempt for authority got passed down to me, like a piece of jewelry I didn’t ask for. In time, I made a sport out of testing the olds. Teachers, guidance counselors, school security guards. Most got the gas face from jump. I didn’t thrive on their instruction; I seldom trusted their judgment and I questioned their intentions at a fundamental level. Where this suspicion came from wasn’t always clear. But part of it, no doubt, came from witnessing plenty of scum take advantage of their high positions. They were the broken pieces to a power structure we did our best to resist. Basketball coaches were the occasional exception, but they weren’t immune to our contempt either. If they said to go right, I might still break left, through the legs and behind the back. My boy Carpio, in an organized city league game one summer, snuffed a kid clean in the jaw for scuffing his Spike Lee Jordans. He got ejected and had to sit out the next game. It would have been easy to defend Carpio’s right hook had the two not been teammates. Homeboy was a damn savage.

* * *

At Silver Lakes, I was a lost one on an uncertain path to middle adolescence. No purpose, no plans. The only things we chased were girls, ill beats, and cannabis, which we got for the low from the Haitians on 10th Court. We filled our days with violence and whatever mischief we could find. We lifted from convenience stores like I’d done as a kid and picked fights with derelicts from other blocks. We bled; we pounded the pavement. When the summer temperatures cooked us like carne asada, we took to the Boys Club, with our raps and our sticky weed. It wasn’t long before I started slanging. I reached out to Carpio, who was the plug, and asked him to help me get rich. He mapped out some territory, and soon I was flipping nickel and dime sacks by the racquetball courts. I listened to Onyx and scribbled lyrics of my own invention on scraps of loose leaf as I waited for the burnouts to show up with cash. Admittedly, I was a horrible drug dealer. Nobody taught me how to not be careless with money and I could never save up. It was all dollar slices, movie tickets, and cassette singles. My only real currency was my friends, who I’d have died for if it came down to it. Although we showed love and cherished our brotherhood, we never fully realized just how dependent we were on one another. We rolled in packs of threes or more, at the ready for anything. We organized cyphers, slap boxed outside the bodega. We spent hours unpacking the gems of that day’s Rap City, who wore what and who unleashed the phattest 16s. Together, we represented power in numbers. We were rappers, poets, skaters, dope pushers, misfits, and sneaker heads; all attention-starved. Our lives revolved around hip-hop and what the music had helped birth in us: an appetite for more, more, more. I grew up with a hunger so big I thought of nothing else. Hunger for food, yes, but mainly for significance. Hunger for meaning. I looked for signs in everything; the nugget of truth in the dirty joke, the broader message in the freestyle. When an older boy, bent on proving his grit, put a knife to my neck at a bowling alley, I wondered if there wasn’t something more at play. Was this yet another sign that I was destined for jail or an early grave? I was, after all, my father’s son.

I’m not sure why, but to this day I have a fear that I will someday end up in prison. I don’t break the law; I pay my taxes. And yet, there’s this nagging fear that prison—and I realize the absurdity of this fear—will simply happen to me, regardless of my attempts to live well and right.

Anyway. Hard as Ma tried, she couldn’t get through to me back when. I gleaned what I could from those not much older, those heroes who, though not fully formed, seemed to occupy thrones and preside over planets. No one then epitomized the contrarian spirit better than the rappers and skateboarders we idolized.

* * *

In the Eighties and Nineties, skateboarding and hip-hop were the most natural of marriages. In their own way, each provided a kind of escape from the world we saw crumbling around us. Fathers went missing and mothers strove to keep their homes intact. Us kids, we went Casper, too, only on four wheels. We were aimless but we were free. And freedom was our faces to the wind.

My first board was the Marty Jimenez Jinx deck with the bat design and hot pink grip tape. It was damn beautiful and, for a while at least, I guarded the thing with all of my might. That is, until I got lazy and thought I could leave it outside the front door overnight. Someone caught me slipping and the goods were his for the taking. Thinking back, I can respect it to a degree. As much as it angered me then, and forasmuch as I’d wanted to punish the culprit, I knew better than to slip like that. I didn’t even deserve it if it could be taken from me that easily.

Skateboarding and hip-hop are institutions that, at a point in their respective histories (they’ve since been more heavily commercialized), spoke directly to the rebel soul of youth culture. They questioned systems, they asked the why of things, they railed against popular opinion. They encouraged individuality and valued personal expression. For those who felt shunned by society or by their parents and needed an outlet, these institutions were there. Skaters were the rejected geniuses who made a playground of the earth around them. They manipulated surfaces to serve their own needs. Groups like Pharcyde, Freestyle Fellowship, and the Beastie Boys helped define an entire era of hip-hop. They provided the soundtrack to the streets. Concrete Jungle, a 2009 documentary by Eli Gesner, encapsulates how both art forms helped inform each other—and how each went on to influence the masses in ways no one could have imagined.

Skateboarding and hip-hop are institutions that, at a point in their respective histories, spoke directly to the rebel soul of youth culture.

The best track ever to center on skateboarding is Lupe Fiasco’s 2006 breakout “Kick, Push.” Essentially a love song, “Kick, Push” focuses on the oddballs who found their freedom in skating and in one another. It’s the classic scenario: boy meets girl, they hit it off, girl leads boy to secret skate spot, cops shut it down. But even though cops ruin almost everything, the single, and the video, brought Lupe’s distinct perspective to the forefront. “Kick, Push” instantly became an anthem, a rallying cry for skaters and a certain breed of rap head. But Lupe made it known early that he never wanted to be seen as a face for the sport. He wasn’t rap game Lance Mountain speaking for a subculture. For him, “Kick, Push” was about exploring the relationship between hip-hop and skate culture, and the sense of community they foster when the two coexist. Embracing the power of juxtaposition has always been at the root of Lupe’s oeuvre. But his star status has often seemed at odds with what he was taught to value as a boy growing up in Chicago.

In “Hurt Me Soul,” another number featured on his debut album Food & Liquor, Lupe, born Wasalu Muhammad Jaco, addresses some of this tension and the conflicted feelings he once had toward rap. Because he was taught to value women and girls, he took issue with some of the first records he was exposed to.

Now I ain’t trying to be the greatest

I used to hate hip-hop, yup, because the women degraded

As an artist, Lupe has always existed between two worlds: the sacred and the profane. “I grew up juxtaposed,” he once told Entertainment Weekly. “On the doorknob outside of our apartment, there was blood from some guy who got shot; but inside, there was National Geographic magazines and encyclopedias and a little library.”

* * *

In my youth, I’d have related to this idea of juxtaposition, but somewhat in the reverse. Inside there was chaos and enmity. But outside, while there were side-eyes and stickup kids waiting to pull your card, there was also a world that felt beautiful and endless. There were other blocks in other cities in different states. And though I couldn’t touch them just yet, I took heart knowing they existed, and that someday I might set foot on them. Perhaps that small sense of hope sprung from lessons I was taught in Sunday school, the few times we attended. Though we didn’t grow up in what you might call a religious setting, Ma would tell you that ours was a Catholic home. Una casa Católica. She would make the sign of the cross over us before we set out for the world each day. But in ways, that’s where young Lupe’s path and mine would cease to converge. Lupe’s conviction calls back to his upbringing as a devout Muslim, and as the son of a Black Panther. Both of his parents saw to it that, no matter how harrowing the world was outside, there was always balance.

Before Lupe’s father passed away in 2007, he extended just one charge to his son, which he spoke to Lupe’s sister Ayesha. In a conversation with Cornel West at Calvin College’s 2009 Festival of Faith & Music, Lupe shared this charge.

“Tell Wasalu to tell the truth,” his father said. And then he died.

The truth: it’s what my friends and I were searching for in our brazenness, and in our misplaced rage. It’s what our mothers wanted us to encounter before it was too late, before violence and bitterness grew in us like a virus. When Lupe talks about living on the fringes, and when he rhymes about the teens kicking and pushing in pursuit of something real, it all rings true inside me.

The truth: it’s what my friends and I were searching for in our brazenness, and in our misplaced rage.

For my father, though, the idea of truth, and what it means to be invigorated by it, existed merely in the abstract. From the time he was young, ducking bullets—both real and figurative—became the norm. And manipulation was his tool. My father bent reality like that supervillain Mad Jim Jaspers. You might say it was passed down from his own father, whose penchant for deception saw no end. He was a creature of the bottle. My grandfather started his days with a tinto at sunrise and slowly worked his way up to the harder stuff, which he slammed back periodically until sleep. He lied, verbally abused his wife, neglected his kids. He didn’t model truth to his sons and daughters, like my father didn’t model truth to me and my brothers.

As junior high progressed, our circle grew smaller. People began to drift, relocate to other districts. Some got shipped to their parents’ country as a form of rehabilitation. Ma always made threats, but I never believed she would follow through. You’ll never, I said, after I’d gotten bagged for doing graffiti not far from our house. Domingo was with me, but the cops let him go since it was me they’d caught with the spray can.

* * *

I always made low marks in school, beginning around the sixth grade. One excuse was that the majority of my instructors rarely made the material compelling enough to keep me engaged. Again, Ma spoke very little English during these years, so the help I got at home was limited. The same was true for many of my friends who lived in homes where English was the second language. Even as our folks prized education and admonished us about its value, this was just a fact of life. We were mostly on our own. Few of us got any extra aid in our studies, whether from parents who were too busy keeping us alive or tutors who charged by the hour. Having a tutor was a privilege that not many people I knew had.

Things at school got progressively worse. Ma was getting summoned for parent-teacher conferences every couple months. I was either fighting, flipping off teachers, or napping through their lessons. And even though my spelling and vocabulary skills were on point—Ma loved to brag about my way with words—she knew something had to be done. In the middle of my seventh-grade year, the assistant principal was called upon to intervene. It was usually just Ma and a crabby old woman with horn-rimmed glasses, but this time it was more grave. As soon as Ma walked into the room, she could tell something was different.

“Hello, Ms. Vidal. I’m Mr. Albert.”

“How are you? Yes.”

“Good, Ms. Vidal, but we’re concerned about Juan.”

“Yes, yes. I very concerned.”

“He just can’t seem to stay on top of his studies. He’s a smart boy, but he seems to be showing very little effort.”

“Yes, it’s true.”

“Ms. Vidal, have you heard of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder?”

Ma freaked. You’d have thought Mr. Albert had told her I’d contracted some rare and incurable blood disease. Not to mention, Mr. Albert’s heavy Creole accent made matters seem all the worse.

“Oh my God! Is he sick?”

“No, no. Ms. Vidal, it’s OK. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is actually fairly common.”

“OK. OK. What do we do? Please tell me what do we do.”

“We, Juan’s teachers and I . . . well, we think he should be tested. This will help us determine next steps to ensure that your son succeeds academically going forward.”

ADHD cases climbed like mad in the late eighties and early 1990s. All across the country, rowdy teens were being tested routinely on the recommendation of agitated teachers and administrators. Doctors were diagnosing kids without blinking. Spacing out in class? Must be ADHD. Constant scrapping and undermining of those in command? It’s probably ADHD. Depressed? Sounds like ADHD to us. It was never the teachers and their lack of creativity that were the issue. According to them, it was the fault of the hormone-crazed students who believed they had better things to do than squeeze into a musky portable classroom and be fed half-truths.

A week after the conference, me and Ma sat in a cheerless doctor’s office waiting to be called in so I could take my Psychological Assessment. They asked Ma to come back in a few hours since the examination was going to take time to complete. The doctor hit me with mad questions out the gate, asking about everything from my relationship with my parents to my thoughts on life and my supposed inability to concentrate in Math. As he talked, I found myself trailing off, distracted by a number of things. To start, his mustache made him look like a square and sad sexual deviant. There were drab paintings on the walls—dolphins and badly drawn whales—and a candy bowl without any candy. Soon, I called bull on the whole thing.

“Juan, have you heard of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder?”

“Have you heard of Wu-Tang?”

“Yes. Do you like Wu-Tang?”

This instantly bothered me.

Not anymore, I said.

“What else do you like?”

With that, I decided to probe and test his knowledge of Shaolin’s finest.

“Ah, doctor, you know, the usual: ‘Runnin’ up in gates, and doin’ hits for high stakes / Makin’ my way on fire escapes.’”

“Really? Can you tell me more about yourself?”

“‘I was a man with a dream with plans to make cream / Which failed; I went to jail at the age of fifteen.’ ”

He finally caught on.

“Oh, these are song lyrics?”

“You said you knew the Wu, right? Well, I’m quoting ‘C.R.E.A.M.’ and you don’t know what’s what.”

“My apologies, I don’t know what a Wu-Tang is. Juan, let’s talk about school.”

He’d already lost my respect, and I saw no reason to give anything else he said much credence. When Ma returned, I was in the hall, ready to jet. She went inside to settle things with the doctor, and when she came back out, she seemed irked. She handed the woman at the desk a check and scheduled another visit for the following week. The next meeting was more of the same. The doctor went on and on and I quoted Fat Joe and Queen Latifah. Eventually, he saw that he was getting nowhere with me. As we were leaving, he offered a sincere goodbye, probably confident that he would never see me again. I channeled Montoya Santana from the movie American Me.

I said: “You know, a long time ago, two best homeboys, two kids, were thrown into juvie. They were scared, and they thought they had to do something to prove themselves. And they did what they had to do. They thought they were doing it to gain respect for their people, to show the world that no one could take their class from them. No one had to take it from us, ese. Whatever we had . . . we gave it away. Take care of yourself, carnal.”

Ma elbowed me in the ribs and the man stared into me blankly.

On the way home, Ma explained that because her insurance didn’t cover the full amount of the doctor visits, she had to come out of pocket for $600. She barely had that in her bank account, she said, and the rent was due. I was regretful for having made a joke of the whole mess. “I did this for you,” she said. “But you know I can’t afford this.” She told me they’d prescribed some drug called Ritalin, which, according to them, would help me focus and fight off distractions. Ma told them she would be in touch, but she had no intention of giving me drugs. She’d researched it and heard stories about the side effects of the medication—vision problems, insomnia—and decided to hold back.

“I’m not going to give my baby any damn pills,” she said. After that declaration, I never heard another word about ADHD or pills again.

* * *

I made enemies in those days. I could be cold and sharp-tongued, but I told myself it was mostly for survival. After Ma and Joe—yes, that Joe—had been dating for some time, we all moved in together. Soon they decided to pull Joey out of private school and have him join me at Silver Lakes. Joey was whip smart and athletic, and the Puerto Rican dimes couldn’t get enough of his spikey blond hair. They’d point and gawk and he’d turn red. At first, people would refer to Joey as “Juan’s White Brother,” but that stopped once he flexed his quarterbacking skills on Field Day. One of the few white boys on the intramural team, Joey was beastly when he snapped back to pass. Nobody was nicer. Before long, he had a rep, and he’d sometimes get asked to things I knew nothing about. Though we were as tight as brothers could be, in time we ran with different crews.

Toward the middle of the school year, Joey got invited to a party he wanted to go to and asked me to roll. I had my reservations. Life had taught me to be selective about the places I went without proper backup. None of my boys were going, and a jam with an unfamiliar crowd, in my view, called for more support. At the same time, I didn’t want Joey to go alone. The day before the party, I still hadn’t made my decision. “Well?” Joey shot during dinner. Ma broke the silence, promising that if I went with him, she’d cop me some new gear for the occasion. That was the end of the matter. An hour later, I was at the mall getting laced with denim and a Georgetown Hoyas T-shirt and matching Starter hat. As we approached the mall’s exit across from the Chinese spot, I saw a familiar face grilling me hard; it was a short and stocky Filipino kid who went to my school but was one grade above. He was standing around with his swarm of eighth graders. When me and Ma got closer, suddenly they were all staring me down. I didn’t know why. I knew they weren’t going to initiate a scuffle then and there, but I was prepared, my fist cocked at my side. The hate in their eyes seemed strange and unwarranted. In the car, I racked my brain trying to recall if I’d flapped my gums at anyone different that week. Nothing stood out.

‘Juan, have you heard of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder?’ ‘Have you heard of Wu-Tang?’

The party was at the clubhouse of a development called Heathgate. I knew the area well but I never had much reason to visit, not until now. Ma dropped us off and Joey and I made our way inside. My Hoyas fit was fire and I felt fresh and clean. The music was pumping; there were strobe lights, streamers, and tables with an assortment of fare and refreshments. Boys and girls played the wall with their cliques. I thought, This isn’t so bad. At the least, I got some new digs just for stepping up. The DJ played decent mixes, and soon I built up the courage to hit the dance floor. There were girls from wall to wall. Later, when I was cooling down by the spread of cold cuts and soda, I caught a few boys eyeing me. At first, I didn’t make much of it. I soon realized it was the same crew I’d seen the day before, outside the Panda Express. Then the Filipino kid came into focus and I was seized with regret. I knew this had been a bad idea. We needed to leave, and swiftly. I walked over to Joey, who was talking to the DJ, and told him it was time. “Trust me,” I said. “Just c’mon.” Joey knew this wasn’t a drill, and he followed my lead without hesitation. I didn’t want to seem frightened, so we moved toward the door casually. The kids noticed that we were jetting and they gathered like moths to the flame. Everyone else was grooving, not a gripe in the world. Me and Joey speed-walked down the street in the direction of a nearby shopping plaza. I turned around and saw the boys in pursuit. There were six of them. We didn’t run; they didn’t run.

“Who are those guys?” Joey asked.

“I have no idea.”

“Why are they following us?”

“I have no idea.”

While I didn’t know much, it was clear that their intent was to stomp me out.

By the time we reached the plaza, we’d lost them. We snaked into a department store and disappeared through the back, where we climbed a wall that led into an adjacent neighborhood. When it was safe, we called Ma from a pay phone and she scooped us up. We never mentioned it again, and I never made the same mistake twice. Trouble seemed to always find me, even when I wasn’t looking for it. Sometimes I came out unscathed, and other times I wasn’t so lucky. But there was always a lesson; I just had to trust the voice in my head.

* * *

by eighth grade, Domingo, Tomás, and I had become inseparable. Tomás would boost liquor from his mom’s boyfriend and we’d hop on the bus for God knows where. The local bus was a gift for that season of our youth. As a practical measure, sure, but also as a window into human behavior. I saw it all on the number 52: violence, intercourse, every drug imaginable. Most people kept to their books or tunes, but others were far less reserved, mumbling to themselves or feuding with their lovers. The occasional brawl landed a little too close for comfort, but it was all telling. And while I stupidly got lost on a few occasions—I took the bus alone from time to time—I always had my Walkman. I learned to appreciate Dr. Dre’s Chronic for the masterpiece it is while adrift in the middle of downtown Miami.

The cyphers we’d hold in the back row are some of my fondest memories of riding public transit as a teenager. It went like this: Domingo would kick the beatbox and Tomás and I would take turns coming off the top or reciting lines we’d penned earlier. We’d wax poetic about each other’s mom, bust on a stranger’s off-brand shoes, and go into long tangents about how our skill was superior. I tapped into something valuable on those rides. For the first time in my life I came to see my voice as a kind of weapon, the most effective instrument at my disposal. I used it to dazzle my small audience with epic roasts and wisecracks about whatever came to mind. It was a remarkable thing to learn, even as I couldn’t fully know the doors it would open later.

* * *

The last summer before high school would begin, Domingo perfected his blunt rolling technique and Tomás got a job stocking shelves at Publix. I filled entire notebooks with lyrics and got away with more than I could hope to remember. Before I was fifteen, I’d been jumped twice and arrested three times; petty theft and vandalism. After that final arrest, the one for tagging, Ma’s patience was spent. She drove to the station in tears. The night before, she’d found a nickel bag in my wallet, so this was the start of my ending. She’d made a decision in her mind, another thing I wouldn’t know until later. On our way back home from the station, Ma told me the arresting officer, something Gugliotta, had said I was a good for nothing little spic and was headed nowhere. Naturally, Ma told him off. She’d defended me in principle, but I knew things had to change. I knew that if the officer, who supposedly represented some idea of honor and morality, felt this way, I should take heed. A month later, Ma came upon an article in the Sun-Sentinel. The same officer, Gugliotta, had been charged with two counts of burglary. Cops ain’t worth a damn, I thought to myself.

We were blazed on some North Lauderdale bud when Domingo said, “Look.” He took to the coffee table, corn chips snapping under his feet. Some of our boys were in third period by now and we laughed, pitied them in their lockdown. It was the year Black Sunday dropped and the Hill was showing out. “I Wanna Get High” rattled trunks all across a scorching Miami and shook our core type heavy. Compulsive truants, we’d ditched class that day to sing their praises, B-Real and Sen Dog’s raps emanating from our bodies like a spell.

“Look,” Domingo said, standing on his mother’s furniture. “It’s no secret that you’re all in need of something meaningful to believe in. I mean, really believe in,” he said. “It goes like this around these parts. You got it all. You’d think, what with your sunny beaches, your platinum and endless gold, your drive-thrus and stocked mini-marts, you’d be satisfied. Wrong. All this and you’ve fallen to boredom, toking all day and yearning for something lasting; a well-paved road,” he said, “a narrow path. More sex, more noise. Less of you people, though. You damn degenerates with your fast and random ways. As your leader, I’ve come to understand this,” Domingo said, “that perhaps we’ve been going about this all wrong. Forgive me,” he said. “What might be necessary is a fresh cause. A thing without the pitfalls of institutional belief,” said the ex-churchboy. “You know what I’m talking about. What we need, I’ve come to accept, is a new religion. Yes, gentlemen, lend an ear. One with better music, see, more beats; more electric guitar, maybe, more oboe. One for which our devotion might be better understood, shared by every heathen with a heartbeat. See what I’m getting at? Let’s shake things up. I’m hinting at a place. Some place where you would not be scorned when politely requesting a second fix of that delicious communion bread. Sound good to you fools? I’m talking merchandising efforts that dazzle, campaigns that tug at the core. We for something raw and revolutionary, something for us, who are far from prophets but evangelists of a new day. Talk to me. I’m preaching up in here and I think you love it.” We said, “Chill,” but he didn’t let up. “You love it.”

For the first time in my life I came to see my voice as a kind of weapon, the most effective instrument at my disposal.

“We bear witness, we picket,” he said. “We stumble into crowded supermarkets, high as all hell. High on life, we make eyes with fly strangers, the hope in our faces burning bright. Up, down, and around the block, winning lost souls in some holy dance. It’s bigger than man’s stupid reasoning, trumps pop psychology with the flick of a verse. It’s the brand of sainthood you’ve always desired and didn’t know it. Am I right? I’m bringing it right now and you love it. I know you do. Talk to me. You want a movement? Well, here it is. It’s time to stand for more than your inebriated self. Think about it. Find yourself immersed in something great, the sort of thing that might pull a poem out of you, maybe even a good one, with meter, like iambic or something. This thing we’ll fight for, this magnificent monster of a movement complete with mad bumper stickers and quality tracts, anointed handkerchiefs and ink pens; this thing with more grape juice concentrate; this thing that offers what no gang ever could, not ever; this with no name as of yet, more on that later, but a soul and heart that supersedes definition and encompasses belonging. Friendship and camaraderie,” Domingo said. “Cookouts and sing-songs. This thing, this bloody beautiful thing we build, could be undeniably, unequivocally, the jam.” I laughed my head off, Tomás made the sign of the cross. Domingo bowed and ran for the toilet. This is the kind of foolishness you spew when you’re dumb high and a poet.

* * *

When I think of my old crew, I also think of Odd Future. Led by Tyler, the Creator, Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All is a kaleidoscope of talent, wits, and defiant disorder. Since first making a name for themselves as teenagers in 2007, they have remained outliers, a few dozen in-your-face skate rats with little regard for rules, pop tradition, or anything formulaic. They have been protested against and attacked incessantly for their lyrics, which frequently make references to murder, sex, and drug abuse. Tyler, Earl Sweatshirt, and a few others in the collective have come to represent disruption as a calling card. They are young and rich and free, they “skate hard and thrash black hoodies.” They won’t be tamed or bent against their will. They are skaters through and through. The ways in which they’ve challenged authority, especially on their early records, and in interviews, is on par with so many of the youth I know who came of age in challenging circumstances. They can be terrifying for those who don’t understand them, but affirming for those of us who do.

Odd Future more or less disbanded after members gained notoriety and started to branch out as single entities. But the same criticisms have followed Tyler and Earl, specifically, years into their successful solo careers. Neither has shied away from including violent and gruesome subject matter on their albums. As is often the case with these things, there is far more to unpack than what can possibly be understood at the surface. Both rappers, in fact, have attributed much of their anger and disillusionment to the void left by their absent fathers. The pain of abandonment is something the rappers still carry, however explicitly, as they have settled into adulthood. Much of their material explores these frustrations candidly, their deft and cutting verses serving as portals into the broader epidemic that is fatherlessness in America. But this is what ultimately powered the creative spirit of Odd Future when they started. “It made for good music when we were angsty teens,” Earl told the Los Angeles Times. “Daddy problems are tight when you’re trying to make angsty music.”

For them, it was about confronting personal demons while also creating something that resonated on the level of art. It becomes increasingly clear that, had OF members not gravitated to the counterculture early on, there might have been nothing else to help light their paths. In these art forms, they found a kind of refuge, a vehicle for their aggression. But this is the reality of millions of youth everywhere, not just rap stars or skaters raised in fractured homes. Every day boys and girls are left to make it work, to try and build their lives with pieces that don’t fit neatly together. This is why fathers on a whole have such positional power. Everything a father does matters. Their words, and their silences, are universes unto themselves.

To let Earl tell it on “Chum”:

It’s probably been twelve years since my father left,

left me fatherless

And I just used to say I hate him in dishonest jest

The counterculture took the place of a father I could no longer touch. Since things like school and religion couldn’t get through to me, I was being trained up outside of organized institutions. What I gravitated to were these movements that not only felt redeeming, but also freeing. They were almost everything I needed.

***

Excerpted from Rap Dad: A Story of Family and the Subculture That Shaped a Generation by Juan Vidal. Copyright © 2018 by Juan Vidal. Reprinted by permission of Atria Books, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

The Women Who Help Immigrant Women Escape Domestic Abuse

AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez

Many undocumented women fear that reporting their husbands’ abuse will get their children deported and cause retaliatory violence, so many Latina farm-workers keep quiet. For The California Sunday Magazine, Lizzie Presser writes about Mily Treviño-Sauceda and Valentina, part of the growing network of women who have stepped in to help empower these victims and end their silence. These women aren’t social workers. They are people who empathize, often from their shared experience as victims of rape, wage theft, racism, and violence, and they take risks by letting women stay in their homes, learn their rights, and connect with social services.

Valentina began waking up at dawn to drive to Santa Maria, more than 100 miles away, two or three times each week. She set up appointments at health clinics, food pantries, and churches, and Elena watched as Valentina took down numbers and asked questions. Elena had felt confined by the street Spanish she spoke and started learning words she hadn’t known. Valentina took her window-shopping at the mall or belted Mexican folk songs, dancing in her seat, when Elena seemed down. After several months, Elena took the lead. She held meetings with women in homes across the city, Valentina sitting by her side.

Within a year, Elena was taking women in. She was nervous about the strangers, reminding her 10-year-old daughter to stay in her bedroom and lock the door, but after the first few came and went with their kids, she loosened up. In the morning, she woke up early to make breakfast and scouted for apartment listings. At her peak, 20 people stayed in the house at once, kids’ arms dangling off the leather sofas. Her daughter slept in the bathtub.

Around the same time that she opened her home, Elena told Valentina why she had been interested. She sat across from her on a bright afternoon at an outdoor table of a coffee shop. “I think I was in a worse situation than you,” she started. Elena began to tell Valentina about the father of her child. She explained how he had raped her at work when she was a teenager and how her parents had pressured her to be with him afterward. She talked about how he would treat her like a piece of paper that he could do whatever he liked to. She said that, after they had a child together, he tried to kill her, running the blade of a knife across her neck.

When she decided to go to the police a week later, they didn’t help. She felt paralyzed, as if her mind had dissolved. She hadn’t known her rights or that she qualified for a U visa. Instead, she kept quiet and hid out at her sister’s house for a year, working 13-hour days picking strawberries and peppers. “How stupid I was,” she said over and over. Valentina wrapped her arms around Elena. “Chaparrita,” she said, “we didn’t have any experience.”

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