Hanif Abdurraqib is one of my favorite authors currently writing. The way he writes about music in his first two works of prose, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, and Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest will change the way you listen and hear music blasting from your speakers, or even a speeding car whizzing by. Hanif is back with a new book, called A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, a collection of essays surrounding performances big and small. Each essay is lyrical, brings the reader closer to the performance than ever before (even if they’ve never seen it or heard it before) and is all ultimately celebratory, even among its darker passages.
A Little Devil in America
So it’s only fitting then, that when Hanif and I chatted, he wanted to recommend books that were celebratory in nature. Hanif told me that he “likes a book that praises a person, as much as [he] likes a book that praises sadness, fear, or allegiance.” He added, “Mostly what I’m getting at is history in some way—whether it’s real, conceptual, or emotional—all of these things are riding under these books and what’s really being celebrated is the histories we’re trudging through.”
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