Song Exploder - Key Change: Hanif Abdurraqib on The Clash

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

My guest today is Hanif Abdurraqib, a poet, cultural critic, and New York Times bestselling author of books like They Can't Kill us Until They Kill Us, Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest, and A Little Devil in America, which won the Andrew Carnegie medal for nonfiction. I've been a guest on Hanif's podcast, Object of Sound, and I just love reading and hearing his thoughts about music. When I first started toying with the idea for this Key Change series, I was specifically excited about the idea that it could give me the chance to have Hanif on as a guest.For more, visit songexploder.net/keychange. You can listen to "Lost in the Supermarket" by The Clash here. 

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirwe. I would like to be in awe of something that I did not know existed when I woke up that morning. This is Key Change, where I talk to fascinating people about the music that transformed their lives. And my guest today is Hanif Abdurkeeb, a poet, cultural critic, and New York Times best-selling author of books like, They Can't Kill Us Until They Can't. kill us, go ahead in the rain, notes to a tribe called Quest, and a little devil in America, which won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for nonfiction. I've been a guest on Hanif's podcast, Object of Sound, and I just love reading and hearing his thoughts about music. When I first started

toying with the idea for this key change series, I was specifically excited about the idea that it could give me the chance to have Hanif on as a guest. So Hanif, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you. I feel like you have an encyclopedic knowledge of music, and I know there's a lot of music you care deeply about. Which song are we going to talk about? A song from the Clash, from the classic album London Calling, the song lost in the supermarket. When did you first hear the song? Okay, so I was excited to talk about this because to talk about this now feels like I am describing another planet entirely. But for folks who grew up a certain way of a certain age in a certain time, they may recall a point in time where the public library,

libraries had listening stations, which for me in my corner of East Columbus, Ohio, it felt like a spaceship. And I thought about it like a space. Not only did it aesthetically look like a spaceship in these libraries where it was like these pods that were all lined up next to each other. And you would sit in them. You know, you put on headphones and you would transport yourself to some elsewhere that was defined by the musical experience you were immersing yourself in. And so in Columbus, Ohio on the east side, and Livingston branch of the Columbus Metropolitan Library, I, as a lonely and anxious kid, love these listening pods because it was like you were sealed off from the rest of the world.

The other thing about these listening pods is that if you were a person who was not wrecked by your own anxieties, as I was, you could curate your own listening experience. You know, these were back in the days of CD. So this is a CD changer. The CD changers would be filled by the workers at the library, which meant that you were at the mercy of someone else's tastes or interests or excesses. excitements, right? Most people would say, well, you take out this CD so I could put in this CD that I like, but I was always so anxious and so nervous to do that. I don't know why. I mean, I was a kid. I was 11, 12 years old, but I was like, well, what if they laugh at the thing I want to put on or what if they? And so every day that I went to the library, I was very much at the mercy of whatever the library worker placed into the CD changer. And so I first heard loss in the supermarket because one day, I went into the library and the first album in the CD changer was London Calling.

And I didn't want to ask you to change it. And about a couple songs into the record, I didn't want anyone to change it. I was so enthralled by it. And, you know, lost in the supermarket is maybe track eight or nine. And so I was pretty deep into the album when it struck me. I remember going to the library and listening to CDs, but you'd have to go get the CD, like figure out what you wanted. there wasn't like a preloaded CD player or CD changer where I love that. It's like your librarians are more like the folks at the record store who say, listen to this.

I could tell when someone really cared, when someone was like, I am going to really thoughtfully select five CDs that tell a story. And this also mirrored my life. I mean, I'm the youngest of four in a house with people who had very defined and clear music taste. very different music taste. And I was always at the mercy of everyone else's, you know, when you get in the car as a 10-year-old, if you're in your older brother's car, you're not touching the radio, you know? Yeah. And so the library experience was an extension of that in my finding of the clash was a great extension of even that because as much as I love the clash now, I would have come to them much later, I think, had I not come to them that day in the library. Were you born in Columbus? I was. I was born East Columbus, Ohio to parents who listened to so much.

much music that I sometimes feel like my first sonic memories are not of their own voices. They're certainly not of their speaking voices. I think I have this memory embedded in my head that is an early memory of my mother singing Whitney Houston. And you're the youngest of your siblings? I'm the youngest, youngest of four. So I have a brother who is 11, about 11 years older than me, a sister who was nine years older than me and a brother who I am about, you know, like 17 months apart from. And so, you know, the other great thing about my childhood is that I was coming up with older siblings and being exposed to music in a way where your older siblings were saying, not even really intentionally forcing things on you, but saying, I heard something that I like

and I am going to listen to it in your presence. That's kind of delightful. Did you think that they were cool? Did you like their tastes? Well, the thing is, I didn't know anything. So I liked everything. I liked everything that anyone who I wanted to impress liked, you know? Yeah. My brother and sister, my sister was listening to Grunge and punk and my brother was listening to like metal. And of course, hip hop. Hip hop was the anchoring genre that kind of brought us together.

When did you start going to the library? Well, a fascinating thing is the library didn't exist for me at first. Like literally, physically didn't exist. It was built when I was eight or nine years old. And to have a library walking distance from my house was like, such a huge deal, you know? Do you remember when it opened? And was it a big event?

Oh, it was huge. It was massive. You know, it was now, I think, like library openings, perhaps don't have as much fanfare. But this was, this was huge. You know, I remember it because it was next to a rec center where if you were a kid in my neighborhood, that's where you played basketball, that's where you took swim classes, etc., etc. And the library opening that day, I was at a summer camp at the rec center. And we got to have a break in our day to go to the library.

and see the grand opening and there were teddy grams. I distinctly remember getting a bag of teddy grams and we got to walk around it. And it's funny because as we speak, the library is being renovated for the first time since it opened. I drove by the other day and it's closed down for renovations. But when it opened, it felt like it was like state of the art because it was at that time, especially for the neighborhood I grew up in, which didn't get things like that, you know? Yeah. But I did not start going alone until I was.

maybe 11. You know, that's when my parents, I think, trusted me to walk down the street and go to the library and spend time there. They saw it as a safer space. And for me, that was one of the only places I could go on my own. And so it represented this real sense of freedom. Okay, so you come into the library and you sit at this listening station. Did you know what CD you were going to be listening to when you hit play that day? No, you never knew because you couldn't see. You could see, if folks remember old school CD changers, you could see the kind of silver edge of the CD. But you couldn't see what the CD was. When I pressed play and heard the clash, I didn't even know I was listening to The Clash. I didn't know who the clash was. I knew I was

listening to the songs that I liked, but I had no idea who was making them. Did you have at that time any kind of context? You mentioned, you know, that hip-hop was sort of the anchoring genre, but you all listen to other stuff as well. Like, at 11 years old, did you have an understanding of different genres and could you place the clash into some category that made sense to you? Oh, absolutely. I mean, my genre understanding at that point was pretty in depth. And I think I most likened the clash to like the louder stuff I'd heard my brothers and sisters listening to. My brother really liked metal. My sister would listen to a lot of punk and riot girl stuff. But additionally, my mother was listening to like South African music.

I actually, I was like, oh, the elements of percussion in here don't sound that far off from Mary McCabeo records or Hugh Massacela records or there's a real relentless propulsion and chugging along to the energy of it. I always say that I wish I could go back and hear London calling the song for the first time. Yeah. I mean, hearing that song for the first time was like, as an 11-year-old, it felt like, you know, It felt like I was being dragged to the edge of a cliff and being shown a world I did not know existed. Yeah.

One of the things that is interesting to me is that, like, that's the first song on London Calling. Yeah. But you've chosen to focus on Lost in the Supermarket, which, as you said, is like track 8 on the album. So I'm wondering, like, what happened at that moment? What was it about that song and when that came on that felt transformative? Every payday for my parents, which is every other Friday, we would go grocery shopping. We could afford to get groceries once every two weeks. We get groceries that would last two weeks and then you go grocery shopping again.

And the kids, usually me and my other brother, we would make the shopping list. We would get home for school, make the shopping list, and it would be a pleasure and a delight to go out grocery shopping with my mother on Friday night. And she would break the list out, you know, equal parts. We would go find things. And there was this real level of autonomy in that process of saying my mother saying, here's 15 things, you go find them. And then, you know, at the end of it all, we would get to get ourselves a treat as long as it was under a dollar, which back then, you know, those boxes of little Debbie treats were a dollar. But what I'm most saying is that like when I was a child, I never considered myself lost in a place.

I always considered myself at the mercy of my own eagerness and curiosities, which would lead me to something that felt familiar and good. I love the song lost in the supermarket because it was the first song I heard. I didn't even understand it thematically, right? The song actually means something different than what I received it as, which is just the way that music goes. The way you receive it changes as you age or changes as you understand more. But as an 11-year-old receiving it, I thought, oh, wow.

This is a song that makes me feel like I feel on a Friday wandering a supermarket, shopping with my mother, but not with my mother. Shopping with my mother, but not alongside my mother. And in those moments, you know, we used to go to Meyer. And I would feel like the whole store was mine, even on Friday night, if it was crowded, even if it was crowded, it would feel like the entire store was mine. And that song feels like to me, even as I listen to it now, my first instinct is, wow, sonically, in the kind of whimsy that is presented in the lyrics,

it feels like this is a small child wandering aisles that are taller than they are, looking up and feeling like they own it all. Do you feel like there's a before and after in your own life from hearing it? Oh, gosh, yeah. I mean, I sometimes think with songs there is the difference between how it moves you an emotional way and then what it is presenting in a literal way. And so I'm still kind of moved to this sense of, you know, Lost in the supermarket, the lyrics, Strummer's writing about growing up in the suburbs and not being

able to see over the hedges in his parents' home and trying to escape to a place. And so there's all those emotional elements. But also, I don't remember the transformation point, but I remember being a teenager. And I had that song in a mixtape for a girl I liked. And we were talking about the clash. And I was like, yeah, you know, lost in the supermarket. I love it because it makes me feel like a kid when I would. go grocery shop with my mom and this and this and this and this.

And she was like, yeah, yeah, sure. But also that song is about how much consumerism fucking sucks. And it was like I was hearing the lyrics, like that magic eye trick where you pull something away and you never stop seeing it. And I remember being like, oh, yeah, I mean, I guess this is about how relentlessly someone who wanted to come to a familiar place for escape is really dismayed by the manner in which in the volume and velocity at which they are just being. sold things that they do not have any desire for. And it's a song that is deeply about alienation, about what it is to grow up in a suburb. Like, honestly, that is at the core of it.

And at the time I first heard this song, I didn't really know what a suburb was. I grew up in a neighborhood that bordered a very big suburb. Yeah. And I felt like that was like another planet. I mean, truly another planet. And I did not meet kids from the suburbs until I was a little older playing soccer. and the way that they seemed so bewildered by what it is to grow up in a community where everyone kind of cares for everyone, where it's like this person who is disciplining me is not my mother, but in a way, she has the blessing of my mother. So in this role, she's acting as a mother to me. You know, this community is full of elders. This community is full of parents. This community is full of children, reaching out for anyone who will reach back towards them as someone will. It felt to me, like when I met more and more people from the suburb, They had like no understanding of an ecosystem of care that looked like that.

Because so much of the ecosystem was like, oh, yes, we are in this big house and I have everything I need. Therefore, you never need to leave. Did you ever live in the suburbs? I lived briefly in a suburb in the northern part of Columbus. How old was it? I had to be like 19. At the time, it was hard because no one I knew lived down. out there. I don't even remember what brought me out there. I think it was just cheap rent,

honestly. When you were living there, would you think about this song? All the time. To be fair, though, that was at a very clash heavy time for me. The clash, London Calling, it should be said, is one of my favorite albums ever made, and The Clash is one of my favorite bands of all time. And I really think I familiarized myself. I was so deep into them in that era. I was so immersed in the punk scene, the Midwest punk scene, the hardcore scene, too, which at that point, like a lot of the kids I was rolling with were not into the clash because they thought it was there to mainstream to all this stuff. And I was like, cool, cool, yeah. I mean, I'm going to the same shows y'all are. I understand what's, but at the same time, I would go home and I would be so deep into their

catalog, you know? And lost in the supermarket for me was massively soundtracking that very specific era of feeling for me because I lived in an apartment complex that was just monochromatic. You know, one of those ones where it's like everything looks exactly the same. And my window did not face the street or the outside. It faced the rest of the complex. And there is something a little bit devastating, I think, about waking up in the morning, sitting up in bed, looking out the window, and seeing everything look like everything. For me, after a while, it made me think, like, there actually is no world outside of this one.

That was hard for me. So, yeah, the supermarket does represent a physical and literal supermarket. Yeah, so the supermarket is also the monochromatic apartment complex. The supermarket is also the strip malls that have the same things and never change, you know? My conversation with Hanif Abduakib continues after this. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length. And this is the first one that will be out under my own name, Rishi Kesh Her Way.

I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these. incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists, and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Rope.

I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzukas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikash.co, or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net

slash live. Thanks. Could you map for me the relationship that you had with the clash in between hearing that album for the first time at 11 or 12 in the library and the time that you're describing when they're a huge part of your life? Like, did they immediately become one of your favorite bands after sitting there in the library, or did it take a little while for it to percolate? It took one week of listening to that album in the library over and over again, and this is what I did. This is funny. I was afraid to ask, who is that band?

I was afraid to seem like I didn't know something, even at 11 years old. Thankfully, I've massaged that impulse out of the album. But after two days, I listened to it for two days in a row, and then it was gone. And so what I did was, I went up to someone on that third day and said, can you put the CD that was there yesterday back in it?

It was in the first slot. And at that point, you still didn't know the name of the band. Didn't know the name of the band. And I think I said something like, I think it was in the first slot, but I don't remember. And they were like, oh, was it London calling? And because I could glean the name of the song from the first, you know, I said, yeah. And they gave me the CD. Back then they didn't have cases.

They were in the little plastic. And that is how I found out who the clash were. And so I, for the next three days, just kept asking for it. Did you get to check it out and take it home or did you have to listen to it in the library? Well, we could have checked it out and taken it home, but we didn't have, you know, my home was not very CD forward. This is a very funny thing. We were a cassette family for a very long time, you know? So I wasn't sure, you know, I thought about this when thinking about doing this episode, I was like, when did I first check out a CD from the library?

But it wasn't back then. And that, to me, also made it. That is how I fell in love with the band. I fell in love with the band because I could not take the band home. Right. I fell in love with the band because there were nights where I was thinking about them still and I could not roll over and press play. I fell in love with the band because they existed in this like two hour window of a day that I would have to leave behind every single day and then get back again the next day. That I think is how affection can be born is to say I'm falling in love with this person place thing that I don't have unlimited access to.

Right. And the denial of that access is allowing me to romantic. I don't emphasize the time that I do have with them or that place or that thing. And that is how I fell in love with the clash. It was very much like, you know, affection by refusal. Do you remember the first person you talked to about the clash after that? Oh, for sure. When I was like 11, 12, 13, you know, I was really fortunate in that the kids I was in school with,

like in middle school with were all deeply music curious, you know. Maybe not about the same stuff I was curious about, but everyone was just passing songs to everybody. And so I remember my pal Tyler. We used to sometimes do this thing at lunch where we would trade headphones. It was one of those things where it's like, I won't tell you what I'm listening to. You won't tell you you're listening to. Let's just swap headphones.

And I played London calling the first song for him because I thought he would. You know, I feel like that's a hard song not to at least be jarred by. You don't have to like it. But I think it's a hard song to not be like, what the hell is this? Yeah. And he was indeed like, what the hell is this? Gosh, back then the most rewarding thing for me, was to show someone something

and have them love it nearly as much as I do. But I remember that specifically because the clash felt like the first band in my life that I found entirely on my own. And of course not on my own. I was guided there. But the band that wasn't passed down to me from a sibling or a parent,

it was really my own close listening that allowed me to fall in love with this band and to offer that up to a person and say maybe I'll like this as much as I do and feel it land like that. Yeah. I was 12 years old, and it was, I remember distinctly, it was during Ramadan. You know, Muslims, you know, raised Muslim, so I'd do Ramadan.

And when I was, the reason I remember this distinctly is because when I was in school, elementary middle school, during Ramadan, teachers so that I wouldn't go to the lunchroom and, like, see everyone eating. Yeah. Teachers will let me stay in the classroom and play Oregon Trail. So, which is like a pretty sweet deal, I guess. Yeah, it's not bad. And Tyler was one of my earliest and best friends that I knew he would be a good friend.

because he would stay behind with me. Oh, wow. You know, this dude who, like, could eat his lunch whenever, would ask to go to the bathroom right before lunch and then sneak eat his lunch very fast in the bathroom and then stay with me during the actual lunch. That's such a sweet friend. Yeah, truly the best type of friend.

Like, I just imagine him, like, eating a sandwich really fast in a bathroom stall. But that is, you know, during Ramadan because we were playing Oregon Trail switching headphones. And I thought he was just being nice, you know. But the next day, He was like, can I listen to that again? It's interesting that you'd switch headphones without introduction or anything.

In a way, you were kind of recreating for him the experience that you'd had. Absolutely. Do you seek out that kind of experience still, you know, where you can discover music with no introduction or context? All the time. I mean, I listen to so much new music every year. So, for example, I mean, I make a master, massive list of my top albums at the end of every year that sometimes years into 100. I think last year was like 118. And I do math.

I have spreadsheets. Last year I listened to like 800-something hours of new music. Yeah. You know? At least 15% of that is stuff I don't know anything about. So much of my process is, huh, this band I don't know anything about, but I like the look of this album.

There's something about this band name or this aesthetic or I heard one note of this band elsewhere. That is, to play me, like that's the type of shit I'm into. I'm like, I would like to be, in awe of something that I did not know existed when I woke up that morning. I have to say, I was a little bit surprised. Maybe I took it wrong.

But there was a note in your voice when you said, back then, you loved getting someone to fall in love with something that you were in love with. And you said in a way that was almost like this used to be a big thing in my life, but maybe not so much anymore. I was surprised by it

Because to me, I think of you as a great ambassador of music in a way where I would assume that that is a primary motive for so much of what you do is to specifically have that feeling of getting other people to fall in love with the thing that you're in love with. It is, and I do, I'm still very excited about it, but the difference is I don't, I don't hear about it as much. There's ways I do it in a very real material way when I was younger. I could say, take these headphones and hear this, or I made you this mixtape, or I made you this playlist, or I made you this, I made you this. And I could see that kind of individualized reaction to the end result. Yeah. Now, for example, every week I make a playlist called songs I love this week that are just songs straight up that I love this week.

Yes. And I make that largely for me, like to keep track of what I'm listening to and to keep track of what excited me. And I do hear people say, oh, man, I'm into this band now because I saw it on your playlist. And so there's a frequency with which that happens and that's delightful. But I kind of don't get to see it in real time. And I think that's maybe the thing that excites me is being witness. to someone falling in love with something for the first time.

Yeah. But there's something about like, gosh, I wish I were there when you heard the specific part of that song that made you love that band forever. Yeah, yeah. Slater Kinney is one of my favorite bands of all time, right? But like, the first Slater Kinney song I heard was called The Doctor, ever. The first song I ever heard, it's called The Doctor. I was 12 years old or something.

And I was like, I'm not into this. So, you know, the first three acts of that song, I was like, I am not into the, you know, Corin Tucker's voice. I was like, this isn't working for me. But then that thing happens at the end of that song where it just kind of explode. and Corrin and Kerry doing that kind of tug of war. And I remember being like, oh, wait a minute, I love this band. You know, like, I'm going to listen to everything this band does from now on.

And that's the moment. You know, those are the moments I want to be present for, I think. To go back to London Calling for a second and the track listing, in my memory, lost in the supermarket is when it appears, it's the gentlest song so far on the album. Oh, extremely. Yeah. How did that affect you?

You know, hearing something less abrasive than everything that had come before. Did it feel like a surprise to you? What was your feeling about the shift in sound? I was delighted by it, but also, I mean, like, yes, it is the perhaps softer song, but

London calling by track 8 traverses so many genres. Like, Rudy can't fail is, you know, like a ska, like a dub song. And I remember getting to, like, Rudy can't fail after brand new Cadillac and Jimmy Jazz and thinking that the CD change or switched.

Where it was like, okay, I think this is the same band, but it feels like a different album. Yeah. So by the time I got to Loss in the supermarket, I probably thought this was some kind of compilation. Every single song sounded different. And I remember being like, oh, this is like an R&B song. And that ignited me in a real way because that is the genre that they were dabbling in that I was most familiar with. And it felt like a kind of comforting call. This might be an impossible question to answer, but do you think that you would have responded

as strongly to the song if it didn't have the word supermarket in it? No. The word supermarket sets up everything else. Again, like, obviously I was not thinking this in depth about it, structurally at age 11. But you hear the word supermarket, and as the song goes on, you are to understand that the supermarket is a reflection of a broader societal issue. And you get to the end where it's like Jones and Strummer are doing that kind of vocal layering thing where atop you just keep hearing the report.

the repetition of I'm all lost, I'm all lost, I'm all lost. And so lost is really the anchoring word. But for me, as an 11-year-old, you need a touchable word. You know, like you need a word that makes you feel familiar in supermarket. It was absolutely that word. There were things that there were thematically being traversed on that album that I didn't really understand. Like Spanish bombs is about like the Spanish Civil War. London Calling has this heavy political even that I didn't understand.

And lost in the supermarket was the one. where I was like, oh, wait a minute. I at least understand the container in which this song is operating inside of. Yeah, fully understanding that, like, you weren't thinking about the commentary on capitalism and monoculture or whatever, just at a purely internal emotional reaction.

What feelings did it evoke for you? You know, these two things are perhaps at odds, but both calm and claustrophobia. You know, for me at first, I was like, oh, yes, this is relatable. And it, you know, I feel both small and large when walking through the supermarket on my own. I feel like it's all mine. And this is honing in on that.

But as a song goes on, I think sonically, it begins to feel like the walls are closing in. So it is like, imagine oneself walking down a very wide aisle in which you have room to bounce and spin around and throw things in a cart. And then the aisles begin to move and begin to shift and close in and close in. and you realize you're being overwhelmed by, yes, a few things you want, but much of what you do not want. And I think even at 11, it made me feel a little claustrophobic that it was like scary, but a kind of claustrophobia that made me understand it wasn't all quaint and joyful. One of the things that was so exciting for me, I think, when I was falling in love with music for the first time, was the understanding that a particular song could make me feel more than one feeling at once.

Yeah. I was like, oh, that's a thing that music can do. I can't separate these feelings and I also can't articulate all of them, but I can pinpoint that there are different shades all colliding at the same time. Yeah, and I feel like, you know, I didn't really allow myself that. Like, I think when I was young, I didn't always allow myself that until that song. Perhaps I didn't have proper language for it, but this song makes me feel, free and invincible and also deeply uncomfortable.

As somebody who writes beautifully about music and about artists and bands, was your love for The Clash, as you got deeper into your love for them, did it extend to like reading, writing about The Clash in a way that influenced your feelings about writing about music? Oh, yeah. One of my favorite pieces of music writing in history is the Lester Bang's profile in The Clash. He loved this band. You know, like he, pursued this band out of his own interest in them, his own kind of eagerness in them. They weren't the

biggest band in the world at that point when he went to go chase them down. They were still kind of ascending. It was December 1977, I think, when he did that piece. And he approached him with real curiosity and care and a deep critical eye. I mean, he was critical of them in that piece as well.

And I found that to be enthralling. And I read that piece when I was 15, I think. And I thought, thought, okay, a band can manifest one thing in their music and have politics that live outside that music that are maybe not entirely at odds with the music, but are sometimes fighting against the ideological purities required by the scene they exist in. That Lester Bang's piece was fascinating because it was someone who was so excited about a band and so curious about them

and so eager to learn about them, getting on a plane, crossing a body of water to see them, then realizing that they are human too. You could see him on the page coming to terms of the fact that these were just real people who happened to make something he loved. And because of that, he could approach them with a critical and generous eye, but a critical eye. To me, that's the entire ethos of my critical approach, is that if I love something enough to run to the page, I love it enough to be not only vibrant and fluorescent in my approach analysis. I require the kind of rigor that sometimes asks me to prioritize

humanness my own and the very real humanness of those who I set my gaze upon. Hanyef, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. It's always so good to get to talk to you. Truly, it's always a pleasure. You can learn more about Hanif's work and find links to his books, essays, and more on his website, Abdurakib.com. His most recent book is the critically acclaimed bestseller, there's always this year on basketball and ascension. And go to songexploder.net slash keychange for more, including a playlist with Lost in the supermarket and the other songs that Hineef mentioned in our conversation. We'll be back with the song Exploder episode next week. Stay tuned for more key change episodes in the future.

This episode was produced by me and Mary Dolan with editing help from Craig Ely and production assistance from Tiger Biscop. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at Radiotopia.fm. If you'd like to hear more from me, you can sign up for my newsletter. You can find a link to it on the Song Exploder website. You can also follow me on Instagram, and you can get a SongExploder t-shirt at songexploder.net slash shirt.

I'm Rishi Keshireway. Thanks for listening.