Still Here at the End of the Broadcast

Reading this from Dublin, I'm struck by how precisely it renders a loss I can only partially understand — the end of a shared American frequency. The prose has a gravitational pull; sentences accrue weight without announcing their ambitions. The Don Cornelius section is masterful: moving from the Soul Train line as democratic space to the aunt's shattered iced tea to Cornelius's suicide in three seamless pivots, each one reframing what came before. And that closing image — 'a kid on the bus playing something on his phone without headphones, which is rude, which is inconsiderate, which is also a broadcast' — earns its tenderness because the essay has spent its whole runtime defining what broadcast means. The ending lands. 'Love, peace, and soul' as a final line would be sentimental in lesser hands, but here it functions as both quotation and prayer. Exceptional work.

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An accomplished essay that nonetheless reproduces a familiar problem: it positions Black performance as America's redemptive conscience without interrogating why that burden falls where it does. The Didion critique — she 'could not hear' Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Aretha — is sharp, but the essay then occupies precisely the listening position it claims Didion lacked, as though correcting her omission resolves the structural issue. Who is this narrator? The biographical markers are thin. The aunt's living room in Columbus, the Oakland studio apartment, the Silver Lake flat — but the essay's relationship to the Black cultural production it venerates remains curiously unlocated. The catalog of performances (Prince at the Super Bowl, Beyonce at Coachella) risks becoming a canon-affirming exercise rather than the destabilizing criticism the fragment form promises.

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The central argument is sharp: Black performance as the broadcast's engine, conscience, and betrayal simultaneously. And the structural critique of Didion — she 'could not hear' Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Aretha — is valuable. But the essay's political analysis stays at the level of cultural consumption. The broadcast ended, yes, but it ended because of specific economic decisions — deregulation, consolidation, the monetization of attention — and none of that appears here. The algorithm in the Oakland bar is described as eerie but never as extractive. The essay mourns the loss of shared signal without asking who profited from its fracture. From where I sit, this reads as an elegy for a commons that was always privatized; the essay knows this intellectually but cannot bring itself to follow that knowledge to its structural conclusions. The prose, I will say, is very good. The Cornelius section alone justifies the read.

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The fragment form works well here, better than in most American essays that adopt it, because the breaks mirror the argument about signal loss — each section arrives as if tuned from static. Los Angeles is rendered not as setting but as psychic condition, and the Santa Ana winds do real structural work, opening and closing the essay like a breath held and released. I appreciate the restraint of the Cornelius section, where the personal anecdote about the aunt's living room stays small enough to carry genuine weight. My reservation is familiar: the first person is relentless. Every observation routes through the writer's body, the writer's phone, the writer's apartment. A Korean essayist handling this material might have found ways to let the performances speak without the constant mediation of a watching self.

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The Didion critique in the middle section is the essay's sharpest move — identifying the two broadcasts running on the same frequency, the entropy Didion could hear and the Aretha she could not. That paragraph earns its authority. The Don Cornelius section, too, is genuinely good: the aunt's line about checks and feet becomes a working definition of criticism without announcing itself as one. Where I hesitate is the catalog sections. The Prince-in-the-rain paragraph, the Beyonce-at-Coachella paragraph — these read as devotional inventory rather than analysis. Abdurraqib can pull this off because he earns it with granular specificity; here the specificity is gestural. The closing benediction works emotionally but the essay never quite resolves whether the end of the broadcast is a loss or a liberation, and I suspect that ambiguity is intentional but it reads, in places, as evasion.

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The opening sentence borrows from Didion and then extends the metaphor through a house key that no longer fits any lock, which is one clause too many — the key was enough without the pocket and the living somewhere specific. This is the essay's recurring problem: sentences that earn their length about sixty percent of the time. The Marvin Gaye paragraph in the second fragment is genuinely good, that image of a country asking a question it does not want answered. The fragment about the Oakland bar and Solange is the best-paced section. But the catalog of performances near the end is a list dressed up as an essay, and the parenthetical asides multiply as the piece goes on, which suggests the writer trusts the reader less with each page.

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The fragment form does real work here — the horizontal rules aren't decorative, they enact the signal loss the essay is about. That said, I wanted more formal risk. The Didion ventriloquism is precise (the house key metaphor in the opener is almost too perfectly Didionesque), and the Abdurraqib warmth lands in the Soul Train section, especially the aunt's line about writing checks your feet can't cash. But the catalog sections feel safe. The partial catalog of phone-watched performances is a list, and lists are the easiest fragment to write. Where the essay truly earns its form is the Oakland bar scene — Solange's 'Cranes in the Sky' becoming a spontaneous broadcast among strangers, then the algorithm moving on. That's the essay thinking through its body, not just its argument. I wish the closing had that same embodied risk instead of resolving into benediction.

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I finished this and sat with it for a long time. The ending — "Love, peace, and soul" — is one of those closings that makes everything before it click into place. I kept thinking about the aunt in Columbus saying "your body is writing checks your feet can't cash" and how that one line carries so much tenderness and humor and truth about what it means to love something you can't fully participate in. The Solange section in the Oakland bar made me tear up, honestly. Five strangers singing off-key for ninety seconds. That's the whole argument in a scene. I'm going to recommend this at our next reading series.

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Good parts, slow parts. The bit about Don Cornelius — the kid falling on the floor trying to dance, the aunt's iced tea shattering — that's real writing. I believed that. The stuff about the Santa Ana winds and the broadcast as metaphor got a little thick for me. You can feel the writer working hard to be smart, and sometimes you wish they'd just tell the story. Still, that scene in the Oakland bar where strangers start singing Solange? That hit me. I didn't need the ten-dollar words around it to know why it mattered.

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