They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us: Expanded Edition by Hanif Abdurraqib

They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us: Expanded Edition Reviews

• 
  claire

  i don’t have words yet to accurately describe the impact this book has had on me. but never fear, my desire to yap will overpower my inability to do this book justice SOON
  
  *returns 2 weeks later*
  
  it was silly of me to think i could ever fully describe the value that lies within this masterpiece, but that doesn't mean i cannot try. hanif abdurraqib somehow makes use of language seem incredibly easy while also making it seem near impossible. how am i supposed to use the same words he uses when i know it will never be nearly as profound?
  
  this essay collection covers subjects near and dear to my heart (namely fall out boy and my chemical romance), while also tackling universal experiences of grief and loss. it's analytical without being boring. it's personal without being self-aggrandizing. it's poignant without being pretentious. whatever pitfalls may awai an essay collection, hanif manages to expertly dodge. hanif can write an essay about the rapper future, someone to whom i have never dedicated more than two seconds of my thoughts before, and suddenly i am deeply invested in how heartbreak manifests itself in his music. because hanif is simply that good!!
  
  i killed a highlighter in the process of annotating this book, fully drained it of life. there were simply too many lines to mark. no matter the subject matter, the brilliance and insight jump off the page. from a heartbreaking essay detailing the loss of his mother and missing the sound of her laugh, to a more lighthearted tone in writing about the experience of having a crush, i was able to take away something of value from every single piece.
  
  i will read literally anything and everything this man writes ever again <3
  
  also, i left this book as a carly rae jepsen fan, so do with that information what you will!
• 
  Kate

  Hanif's writing is so beautiful and I love the way he talks about music and art.
• 
  Charlotte

  godDAMN this man can write!!!
• 
  Luis Velasco

  What is there to say about Hanif Abdurraqib’s writing that hasn’t been said already: beautiful, honest, tragic, funny, and, above all, real.
  
  It’s hard to find authors that make me feel less alone in this world. Mostly, it’s my fault because I intentionally avoided books outside of the ones forced down my throat in college, just begging for a respite from It all. Despite all of that, and in my new pursuit for voices/words that I can feel in my bones, I am truly thankful that I found his in such a developmental point in my life.
  
  You will read this collection of essays, and it will serve as either: a foundation for finding your own voice and a guiding light to finding what you want to write about, no matter the subject, or as words that will make you put the books down and think about the heaviness of subjects and beauty/precision of the words used in it.
  Best case scenario, and most likely one, might possibly be both rising and coexisting.
  
  He’s an author I will always search for, no matter what he releases.
  
  I was going to make a list of my favorite essays, and I have marked them on my physical copy. But there will be no fruit from that labor for you (the person reading this) because I have marked all the titles in the “Contents” section. So, devour it all, the literary feast brought by this collection.
• 
  Katherine

  These essays ran clear and sharp like freezing water, which meant I had to read them in pieces and maybe lost parts of the greater arc of this book (as it wraps, brilliantly, around Marvin Gaye’s life) so that I wouldn’t go numb to it. The way Abdurraqib writes about music and performance—particularly Black performance, both the person and the magic they make (because even tennis, or a presidency, can be about a person performing) as one vibrant shining display—is incredible. And the way he writes about performance as linked to affect and commodification and protest in ways that do not forget the raw feeling of experiencing these things, that don’t turn awful things into things you can dissect in an academic paper—a handful of sentences from this book can clean-cut you like a fish. And yet it’s also a reminder that joy—sudden, everyday joy—can cut you open the same way grief can. This is an essay collection that loves life and celebrates it, and carries an ethos of kindness even when it’s funny and biting and passive aggressive. There are a few uneven patches if you look at this as a book with an arc (and I think maybe too much is crammed in here to avoid diminishing any of these essays’ power), but I can see in this book someone whose work will win a Pulitzer, and a MacArthur Grant. Very excited to (hopefully, finally) read A Little Devil in America in 2024.
• 
  Jeffrey

  I can’t remember how I stumbled across this title, precisely – maybe it was fumbling through Goodreads – but I know I saw Abdurraqib compared favorably to Chuck Klosterman. I guess that’s fair. On the surface, these are two contemporary essayists that use music and pop culture as a vehicle for discussing bigger societal or emotional or personal issues. Kind of.
  
  It was exciting to think I could get a younger take that focuses on a different era of music (let’s face it, there’s a reason Klosterman’s last book of essays was so focused on the Nineties that it was titled The Nineties) and a Black perspective instead of spending another four hundred pages seeing what an older white guy thinks. But Abdurraqib is not just a younger blacker Klosterman.
  
  Hanif Abdurraqib is, first and foremost, a poet. Kosterman is an essayist through and through. The essays in this book are all just a couple of pages long and often (especially the in the first hundred pages or so) deal with an immediate impression and reaction to a specific band or album or musician or, very often, a specific concert experience. Abdurraqib absolutely broadens his analysis while diving into this stuff, often considering how race relates to a fanbase or a scene or a place or a lyric, but he doesn’t make enough room for all that expansion and it’s largely based on his experiences rather than the researched kind of faux-academia vibe that Klosterman brings to his work.
  
  I’m not saying Abdurraqib is bad because he isn’t Klosterman. I was excited to read him because of the ways he is different from Klosterman. But don’t go looking for Chuck here. And that’s probably a good thing. Abdurraqib is a poet and his language is often lyrical and beautiful and not as dry stuffy and pretentious and Klosterman can be. One essay (about the band Defiance, Ohio) is written without paragraphs – without a line break – and as much as this would be problematic if he was really trying to educate the reader about the economic and epidemic downfall of an Ohio town, it works for a REACTION to that downfall.
  
  Abdurraqib and I are the same age (I’m actually just a couple of months older), so when he talks about a genre of music I was into, we have substantial overlap. Here, of course, I’m talking mostly about that early 2000’s emo scene, though the specific bands he seems to have been most interested in (Fallout Boy, My Chemical Romance) weren’t the same bands I was especially into (Taking Back Sunday, Brand New), it was speaking to an experience I was familiar with. He gets really into rap and rappers too, and I was glad to read about it even if I never became a fan of the genre myself. When he wrote about Carly Rae Jepson with an almost reverent tone, though, I just couldn’t hang all the way on. (If, like me, you think the name Carly Rae Jepson is familiar but you can’t for your life remember why, I’ll tell you that you know her song “Call Me Maybe”).
  
  After the first half of the book, it does start to turn away from essays that primarily about bands and concerts and more explicitly about ‘important’ topics (being a Muslim in America after 9/11, during Trump’s Muslim travel ban, being black in America when Travon Martin and Sandra Bland are dying too soon, what America expects of Black people and how to navigate those expectations). I guess I would have preferred the book to be organized a little differently – maybe sprinkling the ‘less serious’ stuff around a little more instead of having what felt like a tonal shift in the middle. I like them both but it sort of played with my expectations when the book seemed to become something else.
  
  “It is summer and white people are sad on the internet about Black people dying again. This time, louder than usual.” This line resounded with me a little. I make a real effort to avoid performative anger – performative anything frustrates me and leads me to post a little less on the internet than some others – but I worry sometimes about what I’m doing right now. No one reads my Goodreads reviews, so that’s some comfort, but am I writing about Abdurraqib’s essays so people can know I’m reading Abdurraqib’s essays and that I’m trying to learn something from Abdurraqib’s essays and that’s what people ought to be doing? It’s better than not reading, to be sure, but I still don’t think I’m getting everything right.
  
• 
  Liz

  Listened to the audiobook at the same time with the author narrating, a lot of the essays were more lyrical so listening to it definitely made the message come across better. My favorite essays were:
  -A Night in Bruce Springsteen’s America
  -Death Becomes You: My Chemical Romance and Ten Years of the Black Parade
  -Fall Out Boy Forever
  -Rumours and the Currency of Heartbreak
  -Johnny Cash Never Shot a Man in Reno. Or, the Migos: Nice Kids from the Suburbs
  -On Summer Crushing
• 
  James

  Essays that spark your soul. Hanif Abdurraqib is magnificent in his ability to relay a story about being a Muslim kid in Ohio and make it relatable to a Buddhist kid from Maryland. This book made me feel alone, cry, shout, and laugh by the end of the book. I will be quick to check out more of his work!
• 
  Justin Johnson

  The way Hanif blends storytelling and poetry together is beyond incredible. Many parts of this book I didn't want to put down. It also opened my perspective to some groups and artists I hadn't considered even listening to
• 
  Hollie

  Such a beautiful collection of essays. Hanif has an extensive knowledge of music and his writing always feels like he’s bringing you in to learn and not that he can’t believe you wouldn’t know that. His writing is rhythmic ( I see you poet) and rich.
• 
  abbyobsessesoverbooks

  I listened to this and holy cow. The words are already great but listening to Abdurraqib read his writing? Absolutely fantastic. He reads with a rhythm that you can miss just by reading the words. I will read anything this man writes.
• 
  Tabbi

  It took me almost a year to read this. Not because I didn’t love it, but because I had to savor it.
  
  Every now and then you find something that simultaneously gives voice to and helps grow your worldview. This is that kind of book for me.
• 
  Homer

  4.5 actually! Each essay is beautifully written. Don't pick this up unless you want to dust off your 90's and early 2000's hip hop, punk, and pop albums...also I listen Fleetwood Mac's Rumors a little differently now.
• 
  Kayla Marie Gulbranson

  One of those books you wish didn’t have to end, one of those books you have to keep yourself from reading in one sitting so you can space out its loveliness.
• 
  Anna

  A re-read of the expanded version and still hits just as amazing as the first time I read it! Hanif forever 😂
• 
  Amy Del Rio-Gazzo

  Just as beautiful the second time around.
• 
  Erika, I Guess⁷

  Grief, as an individual and/or a community, is told through musical connections. Just living through universal, and not so universal, emotions with music as a backdrop.
• 
  Alyssa

  wow. just wow.
• 
  Brett Middleton

  Not what I was expecting - but I guess I really didn’t know what to expect. Enjoyed it all - but the pieces about Bruce, Defiance Ohio, Fall Out Boy and Jepsen stood out to me the most. It’s a book mostly about musicians and artists I don’t love, but I enjoyed it anyway, because I guess it’s mostly not about those musicians and artists at all.
• 
  Connor

  I so appreciate reading essays that treat the music I loved as a young person (and still do now) with reverence and importance. I have enjoyed reading through Hanif’s prose in reverse and look forward to his poetry. “In the Summer of 1997, Everyone Took to the Streets in Shiny Suits” and “Fall Out Boy Forever” were my two favorites from this collection but there is so much beauty inside.