My first mistake is always trust, trust was your first mistake, I’ve been told, the streets is watching, I’ve been warned, believing that any rain drop could be turned Holy, that, with love & light, we could bend any storm to our will—then you’re forced to fight for your life, one way or another, & trust seems like a cinder block snug around your ankle.

        I’m not saying I don’t trust—friends, I trust too much—but that when you build a pedestal so high clouds kiss the stone curlicues on top, you’re going to fracture, maybe shatter, a few bones before you even land.

        I was never really hard enough for the other dudes selling dope round the way. At the time I thought I had to conceal myself, duck behind cars or dip into alleyways, the smell of piss & maybe blood forcing me back into the cold city streets.

        Hard enough isn’t the same as hard as, which I definitely wasn’t, these guys had seen combat I’d only witnessed from a project building window, thinking when I was a toddler it might have all been a game, my mother telling me to get down from that windowsill, did I want to fall out that window did I want to die did I— 

       Of course I was in those streets on some level because of her, whether through supplication or duress. There’s more than one way to ask for something.

        I don’t remember how “Hard For” fell into my lap. I hadn’t been properly introduced to Kevin Gates yet & the song wasn’t a single, maybe Pitchfork or one of them wrote a track review, but either way, it stayed in heavy rotation—well, it has ever since. It took me a minute to listen to the rest of Islah because I couldn’t get past “Hard For,” his dangling guard like a guiding star.

        In the song, Gates is torn between worlds, torn between the will to be good & the will to do good by his people. It’s a conflict as ancient as two bodies touching & then slipping away, by necessity, by faith, by the sword, back to own their camps, having gone out for a bite maybe or to take a walk by the East River, but no never I’d never fuck with them. How could you even ask me that?

        Gates is tired of the grind, tired of always looking over both shoulders. He wants off the streets. It is a desire we hear in a lot of rap & sometimes wonder whether it’s a genuine longing or a momentary lapse, a minute to exhale & think on a life that never was. Even when these MCs aren’t in battle or shooting pleas on an arrow to the heavens, they are telling you, with noirish attention to detail & a grunt only a decibel or two away from howling, this life ain’t for you. 

        At least that’s what it felt like, what it sounded like, when I was caught between those divergent worlds. There were rappers, rappers whose tongues turned divine, whose bluster & braggadocio masked a pain so ancient it’s Holy. DMX is the big one for me, his conversations with God quite literally taught me how to pray. 2Pac is another, heart on his sleeve even with a glock in his palm. & now, Kevin Gates, claiming that birthright, wears the same armor with so many chinks they sparkle like a thousand suns. 

        A lot of people who have no ear for rap, or condemn its violence, miss the humanness in it, because they don’t see rappers as human, because the state has taught us that they’re the source of all society’s ills rather than victims of the state they’re unwillfully upholding. Sooner or later, somewhere down the line, we’re all victims of whatever sovereignty may be hanging over us—or dwelling inside. 

        I don’t blame people, I blame systems. There’s a complex history to the genre but to its roots in oral tradition, as well—think of Homer’s epics & how poetry passed them down through thousands & thousands of years—but also in telling a story in which you may be the villain, in which you may strive to be the villain, because it is what you needed to do to survive. There’s more than one way to ask for something. 

        While my mother could never entirely villainize herself—her heart was too big, too voracious, spread too thin—she was in a lot of ways my anti-hero. As I began taking bigger risks to augment her meager income, she didn’t exactly stop me. Eviction notices were shoved in our mailbox & sometimes I wonder if it weren’t for my grandparents whether we would have eaten at all & all our clothes had previous owners & were too big or too small & our shoes had holes in them & this was the lesser evil, I was told, this was the sin which necessity invokes, which comes pre-pardoned. 

        I don’t blame her. How can I? Our home was filled with hunger but it was a hunger past corporeal, one that couldn’t be sated by money, food, or, sorry, even Love.

        I been misused, what the fuck you want my heart for? Gates asks, unsure of who, really, he’s asking. Ostensibly, it’s a woman, but we know better. Vulnerability requires great capacity, the strength of seven seas to summon the angels who slay the sirens. It can also be your undoing, splinters of wood the only proof you were ever here. There’s more than one way to ask for something. 

        On the streets, it is deadly. It exposes you. Gates is damaged & he has been damaged for quite some time—he’s seen his boys locked up, he visits them when he can—but he’s still hustling, wants to stop, change over, but those who flag the fragile pretense of right & wrong as an easily distinguishable choice have certainly never lost their names when pressed to canonize their worst sins to stay alive & do not have smooth, ugly scars gleaming from their knuckles. 

        These are the stories that make up much of America’s forgotten, or rather neglected, universe &, by extension, rap’s universe, & if you aren’t intimate with these environments, what’s slipped below the surface, what’s eclipsed by social mores & clauses of Upstanding Morality, you may miss how Gates accepts it all, sometimes by the exigencies of life in the hood, sometimes by straight up instinct, hauls it up on his shoulders & puts himself in the line of fire not for personal gain but as a burden of duty, shedding his armor like skin. Commitment-shy, I’m afraid of being in love, he sings, he doesn’t rap, he sings, croons almost, soft & searing, before confessing, shorty tell me she love me, I don’t tell her I love her back.

        I’ve seen men in the streets banged on for a lot less. If you’re soft, you endanger everyone. Who’s to say you won’t break under pressure? Weak link break the chain, an old-head once told me on a project bench. It was a lesson I would learn the hard way.

        I’ve always been soft. Even when I wasn’t, even when I was on those corners, in those hallways, I was soft. I didn’t step on any toes but a lot of those guys already knew that. I don’t for a minute think I outsmarted the entire drug trade in the sprawling housing projects of America, but they knew me visually from round the way & didn’t see me as a threat or, more importantly, as that weak link. That was a kind of respect in itself & I took it with pride. I was a guppy eating the crumbs left by sharks. 

        My mother tried to teach me softness. My mother, who folded at the sight of a single tear. My mother, who folded when anyone’s face crumpled. My mother, who folded when she saw her eyes in my eyes.

        But she also made me steely. There are the things in life we wish to do—stand up to injustice, say, or give back to our community or teach our children the way to a better life than the one we inherited—& there are times when the car breaks down on the side of the road & you need to roll up your sleeves & push the motherfucker, slip & slide & get dowsed in mud, take out a few roadside posts while you’re at it, get filthy to get by. 

        I’m not sure there is a difference between the wish & the will. Eventually, by instinct, they merge, seams melded over cleanly. There’s more than one way to ask for something. 

        My mother would crash out the gates all roaring, gnashing teeth to protect me, even when she was the one who put me in the line of fire. I don’t think a lot of her decisions were conscious but instinctive & her instinct meant, at 4’11", her attitude loomed & her tongue could lash the gravest authority figure down a peg or two. She didn’t take any shit. She couldn’t afford to. She’d take a cop down just as easily as a middle school vice principal. 

        My mother, so close to the ground, towered over me. She still does, even off this mortal coil. But when I cried, she caved. She couldn’t bear to see it, even when a lot of those tears were tears she induced. A warrior out in the world, a single mother raising more people than she should have been raising, in the projects, turned ruined saint bungling every prayer, turned lamb at home, bleating whenever I bleated, unable to tell sacrificial blood from spilled wine.

        My mother, through all her faults, or maybe because of them, taught me it was possible to be both soft & strong & that trust was foundational for both. 

        It’s a few wrong ways & they don't make a right, you can do both ways, ignorin’ wrong from the right, Gates sings, & he’s singing again, not rapping, he wants to be a singer not a rapper, a lover not a fighter, & this is the song where those conflicting wishes collide, where a heart needs to be broken & we all know what he already knows—it’s probably going to be his own. 

        Gates, of course, hardly hides the title’s implication, male prowess a dominant force not just in the projects of America but in every upper room across the country’s skyscrapers. It just manifests differently—one is a victim of urban development as a form of institutional & structural racism & class division & one is the developer of that system. 

        But I hear this title, & I hear the pleading Gates is doing—to his girl, to the streets, to God—& I hear a man softening, maybe a wish or his will, the only way he’s still hard, still bullish, is his promise—his chance—of dominion within dominion. There’s more than one way to conquer & that’s to be conquered. 

        My mother loved me more than I’ve ever seen anyone love a person & so I trusted her even when I didn’t. I know everyone says this about their parents or partner or best friend or sibling or dog, but my mother was renowned bordering on infamous for her capacity to love, she wasn’t called Ma Dukes round the way for nothing. With it she could power a mid-sized American city & every windmill spilling grain across the fields of the Midwest—with room to spare. 

        That love didn’t change that we had to eat. We needed a roof over our heads. She was doing her best & I had to trust her, I just had to trust her, please. She needed my help, she could only turn to me, her mirror, her shadow. There’s more than one way to ask for something. 

        The next time I heard Kevin Gates sing, through the robotic warble of Autotune & a billow of blunt smoke, he needed two phones.