“Lithonia.”
The summer that I moved to Atlanta, I went with my friends to a Black punk festival. It wasn’t Afropunk (which I still would love to go to), but something smaller. Smaller in the sense that it wasn’t sprawling with people in attendance, and it wasn’t exactly a fashion show like Afropunk seems to be, but not smaller in heart, I guess, not smaller in how people were showing up to it. I hadn’t been to a punk show before, and I think someone warned me beforehand of the mosh pits, of how people might be all elbows in your face, which made me wary. But I love an all-Black anything, including and especially a Black concert, so I was there.
There was something especially moving about these Black people, screaming, raging, yelling into the microphone. There was a release there that I understood, identified with, a revving up that was aimed toward the people holding you down and toward your own people, even, if they tried to keep you from this very specific and very gorgeous rendering of yourself. It was a release, and the people on stage were expert at it, and the people in the crowd were too—jumping and screaming and moshpitting in a way that made me want to get elbowed in the face if it was by people who were both Black and this free.
Donald Glover has gone through so many renditions of himself, and his latest is my favorite. I love Atlanta, but Swarm was even weirder, slipping into places that only after Atlanta might he be able to go. “Lithonia” is like that too. Weird, something that slips into places otherwise inaccessible. It’s from his upcoming album, which from what I understand is the soundtrack for an apocalyptic movie he’s in, and the song, it’s apocalyptic in its yelling and in its drums and in what feels like a total release from the expectations of those around him. It feels like the kind of lack of self-consciousness one might have at the end of the world. You can scream and you can come face-to-face with other people, with yourself.
It’s the kind of release, that, say, Alanis Morissette gives, and in that sense the song reminds me of me and my siblings and my mom at my brother’s wedding, screaming the lyrics to “You Oughta Know” because we can, because here we are at the perfect peak of something so what else can we do but scream-sing full-force?
I love the full forceness of “Lithonia.” I love its strangeness. How I have no idea what Donald Glover’s talking about, and at the same time, I know exactly what he’s talking about, to the point that I accidentally left this song on repeat while I was cooking dinner and then proceeded to listen to it on a loop for thirty minutes straight. I know what he means so I scream-sang the song to my boyfriend in the car, even though I’d only half-memorized the lyrics at that point, thought “Cody LaRae” was Glover singing “Caught in the rain,” which to me made perfect sense.
A song that does not hold back makes perfect sense, can say and mean different things to different people but can mean a lot to everyone. A Black person not holding back but scream-singing and crescendo-ing and fully letting go is a perfection to witness, a motivation to the rest of us to— just for a second—let down our guard.
Image: Donald Glover
