Giant Steps, But Still Crashing
I only see the ocean when friends die.
The ritual is always different, yet somehow the same. On the people’s beach, I buried ashes at high tide, the waves rushing forward with an inevitability that felt cruel and tender simultaneously. Crabs moved in clawed applause, carrying particles of ash and memory into the sea. Granules to granules. Opened. For another friend, it was Beach 90, in front of Rippers. Yellow flowers in hand, I stood under the June sun, listening to the waves rise and fall like laughter. Each toss of a stem became an invocation, each crash a reminder that grief is both ceremony and aftermath, absence and return. Another friend, it was tears on photos, too cold for salt and sand, but a wave all the same.
My friend Sylver and I were talking about how here in the U.S., rituals feel hollow, often reduced to the shallow camaraderie of sports, food, or forced nationalism. Maybe it’s because American healthcare is basically a game show where you spin the wheel of “Will they believe me?” or “Can I afford this?” Or maybe, after years of not being able to get help, we’ve just decided that dying from health stuff is the most chill way to go—like, at least it's not like being abducted by a cult and dueling to death over the last granola bar. There’s no collective framework for grief, no care embedded in the nation’s cultural rhythm. Rituals exist in the fragments communities create to survive. The ceremonial dances of Indigenous nations, the sounds of brass of the second lines in New Orleans–traditions that celebrate life and death without apology. My own ritual lives through sound, word, and improvisation. An attempt into a sonic poetry that doesn’t flinch from the void but stares straight into it, daring it to bark back.
Grief is an improvisation; a dissonance, a snarl of time and space and memory that never quite makes sense. The kind that has me listening to Jeff Parker’s “Freakadelic” from The Way out of Easy on repeat as of late. The driving bass, reminiscent of A Tribe Called Quest’s “Excursions” feels both like the unyielding and spiraling sensation when caught in the weight of loss, and, like the determined need to push through and create. The synth to me is a world in itself, representing the harmonic glue, and how confusing being stuck to harmony when everything feels like it's falling apart around you. The melodies of both the guitar and saxophone are simple and expansive, that to me, is a boundless conversation. It’s good thinking music. I think about my recent loss, my friend Smack, and how we could always pick up the phone and begin our conversation right where we left off. It had been a few months since we spoke last, but we never left the conversation untapped for too long. When I found out about her passing, I sat and wrote in my journal for about a week different conversations we could have had.
The track doesn’t provide answers. While heavily rhythmic, the improvisation still feels raw. That’s how grief has felt in my life—cyclic, raw, wavy, and a little stanky, repetitive, and yet oddly generative. Each wave takes something, but it leaves behind something too: a new pattern, a different way of being in the world.
On the other end, Kendrick Lamar’s GNX has also provided the grit and flow I’ve needed to persist. While “squabble up” is undoubtedly our winter anthem, I have been drawn to the parallels in some of the other tracks. In “man at the garden”, Lamar asserts a deep sense of deserving, not from a place of ego or greed, but as a response to the losses and struggles he’s faced. “I deserve it all,” he repeats—acknowledging that grief and struggle don’t diminish his worth, but reshape it. He speaks of aspirations, of wealth, of peace, and of respect, but it’s all tethered to the shadow of loss—of moments that cannot be recaptured. This sentiment isn’t about claiming power or fame for their own sake, but about recognizing the right to embrace joy and success, even amid the pain (Second Lines- one more time for the people in the back!). It reminds me to hold space for grief and joy simultaneously.
“the heart pt. 6” delves into the intricate dynamics of his personal and professional relationships, particularly within his creative circle. The song traces the trajectory of his journey from humble beginnings, when the goal was simply to get his peers through the door, to the complexity of the fame and success he’s now navigating. His reflections on the relationships with his team, the sacrifices they’ve made, and the tensions that arise as success breeds competition reveal the layered nature of grief—not just for those who’ve passed, but for the dreams deferred and the personal transformations that success brings. I am lucky that almost all of my friendships activate creativity in me. The ones living can continue and together, we can define and measure what success is. It’s the ones that are dead that I am reflecting on how to make peace and take pieces of them with me in my art, my heart, and not with the lens of grief, but in foundation and in joy. The track becomes a meditation on what it means to lose parts of yourself, and your relationships, to a system that doesn’t always nurture those who create within it.
I don’t know if either Jeff Parker or Kendrick Lamar have thought of their music from this lens, but to me, there’s a kind of raw honesty in the way they approach these ideas. I think of Frank B. Wilderson III’s ideas on Afropessimism, apply them to these works, and see them as an acknowledgment that grief can be beautiful without being redemptive, or hopeful. It doesn’t need to teach you anything or make you stronger. Sometimes, it just exists, layering into your life the way basslines deepen a melody, or salt eats into stone.
Grief is as much about what’s absent as what remains. It’s the space between notes, the silence after a wave crashes. And if you listen closely, it may even sound like gratitude.
In memory of the one and only SMACK.
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