Hanif Abdurraqib’s essays, criticism vibrate with soul

Kanye West vibrates like a ghost note throughout Hanif Abdurraqib’s essay collection, “They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us.” After Abdurraqib, a proud denizen of Columbus, Ohio, takes readers into mosh pits at punk shows, into cavernous arenas for rock and pop concerts and across the Great Lakes region for underground hip-hop sets, you’ll hear the opening salvo of West’s “Jesus Walks” a little differently: “You know what the Midwest is? Young and restless.”

The 34-year-old Abdurraqib’s writing springs from his own restless desire to capture American stories, especially musical narratives that help him consider “who gets to revel in their present with an eye still on their future, and who gets discussed as though nothing about them could be promising.”

A poet practiced at fashioning idea and image as compressed, musical expressions — he’s published a chapbook, “Vintage Sadness” (2017), and a book-length collection, “The Crown Ain’t Worth Much” (2016) — Abdurraqib has attuned his ears to the layered sonic designs of rock and pop.

Abdurraqib meshes personal writing with critique and punctuates his evaluations with poignant realizations. After listening to Bruce Springsteen perform each track from his 1980 album “The River” live in concert in New Jersey, for example, Abdurraqib revises his previous understanding of that recording, realizing that “this is an album about coming to terms with the fact that you are going to eventually die, written by someone who seemed to have an understanding of the fact that he was going to live for a long time. It is an album of a specific type of optimism — one not afforded to everyone who listens to it.”

This critic earns our attention through his ability to make his private musical tastes into necessary public interpretations. So even if you don’t find My Chemical Romance or Carly Rae Jepsen or Fall Out Boy especially significant, Abdurraqib communicates his exuberance as a means to opening his readers’ ears to the joy and emotional truth contained in those songs.

That said, Abdurraqib earns our admiration when his love of black music and concern for black life is central to his writing. His passionate critiques are shot through with his worries about the ease with which black people are killed in America.

Though he writes with laser acuity and forceful feeling about Kendrick Lamar, Migos, Serena Williams, Allen Iverson, Future and Chance the Rapper, it’s the dead who animate and haunt Abdurraqib’s critical vision here: the folks murdered at Mother Emanuel AME and Sandra Bland, Prince, Whitney, Michael and Biggie.

In three mighty pieces, “February 26, 2012,” “August 9, 2014” and “November 22, 2014,” Abdurraqib muses angularly on American gun culture, fear of flying, Ferguson, justice, Trayvon, Big Mike and black lives mattering.

Abdurraqib brackets these pieces with a painfully elegant six-section lyrical essay about Independence Day, fireworks, Marvin Gaye and soul. It begins: “When Marvin Gaye sang the national anthem at the 1983 NBA All-Star Game, he knew he was going to die.”

Soul may be exactly what Abdurraqib is reaching for with his focus on the dead. In “Nina Simone Was Very Black,” he explains, “Simone sang songs of protest even when she wasn’t singing songs of protest.” Her version of “Baltimore” became Abdurraqib’s soundtrack after Freddie Gray’s killing. The song arrived “just in time for a new, burning generation. ‘Ain’t it hard just to live. Just to live.’ ”

Simone’s blues sensibility undergirds Abdurraqib’s artful criticism philosophically: “They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us” is like a collection of death-defying protest songs for the Black Lives Matter era. Like Kanye’s ghostly, autotuned chants on the opening track of Chance’s “Coloring Book,” Abdurraqib’s essays say, just to live, “music is all we got.”

Walton Muyumba is an associate professor at Indiana University at Bloomington and sits on the board of the National Book Critic Circle.