A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance

Abdurraqib considers the effects of beefs, slang for fighting and feuds. Some beefs are over territory—these result in deaths. Others are over the difficulties of romance—these are the ones that Abdurraqib experiences most often.

Dance can become a part of romantic beef. When singers James Brown and Joe Tex performed at the Amateur Night at the Apollo Theater, emcee and tap dancer named Sandman Sims functioned as an “Executioner,” pulling poor performers off the stage. A former boxer, Sandman had won Amateur Night 25 times, inspiring a new rule that limited performers to four wins. After Joe Tex won four times, often using his signature mic stand move, James Brown stole this move and one of Tex’s songs. Brown’s career exploded, while Tex’s did not.

A violent scene in the film New Jack City is an example of winning at all costs. In it, during a wedding, the movie’s kingpin character uses a young girl as a human shield; he survives the fight despite the massive collateral damage. The scene aroused outrage, and parents forbade their children from seeing the movie. Abdurraqib connects the scene to Tex and Brown’s beef over singer Bea Ford, a feud that ended her career and escalated to violence. The beef only ended when Tex faded into obscurity and inconsequentiality.

Dance battles were prevalent in movies in the 2000s. They occurred in real life too: Sandman Sims, even as an old man, walked the streets of Harlem looking for the chance to challenge someone to a tap battle. However, the changing nature of beef left Sims behind.

In this essay, Abdurraqib delineates the difference between actual fearlessness and the performance of fearlessness. Abdurraqib describes boxer Mike Tyson’s intimidating and regal presentation during his match with James Buster Douglas, contrasting it with Abdurraqib’s reluctance to physically fight and his vulnerability to heartbreak. He contrasts Tyson’s real fearlessness with Bernie Mac’s performance of bravery during a Def Comedy Jam appearance, which Mac opened by declaring that he wasn’t scared of the audience.

Mac’s success with the audience leads Abdurraqib to compare Muhammad Ali and the Islamic prophet Muhammad, from whom Abdurraqib gets his middle name. He most likes the name because it reflects his desire to move quickly and avoid fighting.

In the Douglas-Tyson match, Douglas’s intense training, motivated by his mother’s death, was apparent. In contrast, Abdurraqib considers Tyson’s personal life, pivoting to the spectacle of Tyson’s then-wife, Robin Givens, describing the domestic violence she experienced at his hands during an interview with Barbara Walters. As Tyson sat beside her, he did not respond, visibly struggling to suppress his rage. Tyson lost his fight with Douglas.

Abdurraqib holds up Douglas as an example of how to overcome fear in a fight; he points to Mac for lessons on wielding fear as a mirror and humor as a shield to counter fear. Abdurraqib ends with two personal reflections: his fear of plane landings and his weariness of mass shootings around the world.

In dated entries, Abdurraqib describes moments of softness in his life and the evolution of the hip hop group the Wu-Tang Clan.

The first entry describes the day of his mother’s funeral and connects it to the music Wu-Tang released that summer. Wu-Tang members fashioned themselves as hyper masculine and aggressive, but this image contrasts with Ghostface kissing Raekwon on the forehead at the end of the video for the song “Triumph.”

The second entry builds upon the encounter with the barber described in the Movement’s first essay. After the rapper Young Thug wears a dress on his new mixtape cover, Abdurraqib avoids getting his hair cut.

The third entry looks at the connection between violence and tenderness in the context of Abdurraqib’s physical fights with his friends, which get beyond the limits of language and the difficulty in expressing motions. He puts this alongside the frustration Wu-Tang members felt when Method Man gave all the answers in interviews.

Abdurraqib examines the complexity of his relationship with his brother. They lack the language to express their love for each other and their grief at losing their mother. As a result, they often physically fight. Abdurraqib contrasts this difficulty with Raekwon’s declaration that maintaining friendships is as simple as loving his friends.

In the next two entries, Abdurraqib describes a night out with friends. As he hugs them and tells them loves them, his words become bees. He describes the last Wu-Tang album and the fracturing of their relationships, linking this to the science of colony collapse disorder, which is killing bees around the world.

In the last entry, he mourns his dead friends and regrets not showing them more affection.

The songs of the Black punk band Fuck U Pay Us express both rage and hope. Watching the band makes Abdurraqib feel uniquely energized. The collective experience feels supportive and safe. Abdurraqib considers the origins and effects of Black rage. In friends’ families and his own, anger was often an expression of love and tenderness. Punishments were the result of love.

The punk scene is overwhelmingly white, and Abdurraqib expresses his frustration at being a Black man in the scene. Demanding space and safety at these concerts is difficult, so he hesitates to tell Black kids to attend punk shows. But he also hesitates to tell them to abandon the hope of changing the scene. The collective rage of a Fuck U Pay Us concert creates a safe space absent from other scene shows.