Boyz n the Void

a mixtape to my brother

Author G'Ra Asim
Look inside
Hardcover
$24.95 US
On sale May 11, 2021 | 288 Pages | 9780807059487
Writing to his brother, G’Ra Asim reflects on building his own identity while navigating Blackness, masculinity, and young adulthood—all through wry social commentary and music/pop culture critique

How does one approach Blackness, masculinity, otherness, and the perils of young adulthood? For G’Ra Asim, punk music offers an outlet to express himself freely. As his younger brother, Gyasi, grapples with finding his footing in the world, G’Ra gifts him with a survival guide for tackling the sometimes treacherous cultural terrain particular to being young, Black, brainy, and weird in the form of a mixtape.

Boyz n the Void: a mixtape to my brother blends music and cultural criticism and personal essay to explore race, gender, class, and sexuality as they pertain to punk rock and straight edge culture. Using totemic punk rock songs on a mixtape to anchor each chapter, the book documents an intergenerational conversation between a Millennial in his 30s and his zoomer teenage brother. Author, punk musician, and straight edge kid, G’Ra Asim weaves together memoir and cultural commentary, diving into the depths of everything from theory to comic strips, to poetry to pizza commercials to mapping the predicament of the Black creative intellectual.

With each chapter dedicated to a particular song and placed within the context of a fraternal bond, Asim presents his brother with a roadmap to self-actualization in the form of a Doc Martened foot to the behind and a sweaty, circle-pit-side-armed hug.


Listen to the author’s playlist while you read! Access the playlist here: https://sptfy.com/a18b
Introduction 

There’s a sullen and brooding six foot two, 240-pound pres-ence in my parents’ house, and his shadow looms large over the otherwise placid nest. The presence is among the most timeless of American bogeymen—a black male in a state of rapid physical maturation. My folks regard the presence in a fashion that is heritage in their country of origin, which is to say, the presence is making them nervous. Having already reared three boys and one girl to satisfactory adulthood, my folks fancy their home as a factory of black excellence, and the lone remaining straggler on their well-trodden conveyor belt defies the troubleshooting best practices they’ve devel-oped over thirty-four years on the job. My youngest brother, Gyasi, is a capable but disinterested student. Where other teenage boys chase girls and alcohol, Gyasi predominantly lurks indoors like some Wi-Fi–empowered Boo Radley. His communication with my parents is minimal, and when he does deign to acknowledge them, he alternates between with-ering sarcasm and charged silence.

Gyasi teases my parents  with glimpses of his intellectual and artistic potential but is recalcitrant when pushed to put his talents to use. Fourteen years apart in age, he and I are respectively the second- and fifth-born children of five and have always enjoyed a strong rapport, but even I have been of marginal help in allaying his malaise.The familiar chorus of my mother’s vexation is “I’m worried he’ll be living in my house until he’s forty.” In fair-ness, it was not long ago that my mother fretted over a similar prognosis about me. I, too, was an academically withdrawn malcontent with an allergy to authority. My angst was both formless and easy to explain.

I don’t presume that Gyasi and I are exactly the same per se, but I can imagine he might be suffering from a crisis similar to the one that afflicted me as a teenager: an inability to envision a future in which a person such as he can fit comfortably into a ruthlessly competitive, anti-intellectual, anti-black society.He could not be blamed for sensing the jarring disconti-nuity between the climate beyond his front door and the one in which he has been carefully incubated.

Our father is an author and writing professor and our mother is a playwright, actor, and homemaker. Being raised by artists has not only shaped my and Gyasi’s aesthetic leanings but also framed our perceptions of the American story. Our parents, both prod-ucts of inner-city St. Louis, dropped out of Northwestern University in the late 1980s to return to the ghetto to raise my eldest brother and me. When not evading gunfire, Mom and Baba wrote and produced plays, organized poetry readings, and published literary magazines with their young sons play-ing at their feet. Our household was a fecund micro-bohemia situated incongruously within a warzone. As my parents’ cre-ative triumphs accumulated, our circumstances improved enough to move to the comparatively posh suburbs of Silver Spring, Maryland. Gyasi was born there. He’s in some ways a beneficiary of a middle-class upbringing but is acutely aware of the Herculean feats it took for our family to produce such an environment and the precarity of sustaining it. After the economic downturn of the late aughts, our family relocated from Silver Spring to urban Baltimore.

Gyasi briefly attended a public elementary school there until my parents grew so frustrated with the threadbare curriculum that they pulled him out in favor of homeschooling.For the Asim children, living at the mercy of the eco-nomic peaks and valleys of my folks’ artistic lives yielded a kaleidoscopic view of excess and indigence, oppression and opportunity. As a result, a grasp of heterogeneity is seared into all of our makeups. Gyasi and I, especially, are native dwellers of liminal space, and our experiences have often in-volved the exposure of unlikely confluences between distinct traditions, cultures, or ideologies.My youngest brother and I lean on each other as intel-lectual sparring partners, creative collaborators, and confi-dants. We can’t really afford not to. We’re a generation apart but identify more with one another than anyone in either of our respective peer groups. The Asims are not unlike a twenty-first-century edition of J. D. Salinger’s Glass family. 

Like the clan that starred in Nine Stories and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, we’re a close-knit but contentious family of bookish eccentrics struggling to reconcile our bohemian sen-sibilities with the prevailing norms of our era. My mother’s unease about Gyasi’s prospects for assimilation recalls Bes-sie Glass’s concern for her youngest daughter in Franny and Zooey. When I reflected on Gyasi’s coming of age, I thought of the Glasses’ parallels and noted how the critical interven-tion of Franny’s like-minded older brothers helps Franny to recover from an existential breakdown. In the book’s conclu-sion, Zooey comforts Franny by explaining that even if no one around her appreciates her attempts to defy the insensi-tivity and superficiality of 1950s Connecticut, Jesus notices, and she must continue to lead a virtuous life to maintain the smile on His holy countenance.

Cue record scratch.

That’s not the kind of sentiment likely to galvanize my stringently empiricist baby brother. So what might our own version of the game-changing sibling-to-sibling pep talk look like? Even our parents seem to underestimate the vastness of the chasm between the value system of the house we grew up in and the broader culture in which we reside. Navigating that divide is no small task, but punk rock has been my unlikely lodestar.I am not compiling a mixtape for the sake of indoctrinat-ing my brother, of turning him into my mohawked spitting image.

I’m making the mixtape because punk is fun, because a robust engagement with counterculture can serve as a vi-tal antidote to soul-sucking normalcy, because remembering that you have predecessors who wrestled with many of the same riddles that you may wrestle with can help you feel that a roadmap to self-actualization exists. The result is part Nick Hornsby, part Ntozake Shange: my All-Time, Top-10 Angst-Neutralizing Punk Songs Because the Rainbow Clearly Isn’t Enuf, Bruh.
“Asim’s astute social commentary, poignant storytelling, wit, and solid music criticism will appeal to punk and non-punk readers alike.”
Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

Boyz n the Void is provocative, opinionated, and fun.”
Shelf Awareness

“With Boyz n the Void, [Asim] uses the virtues that have been used against him—his skepticism, shrewdness and liminality—to assert his existence, as a young Black man insisting to be acknowledged in a world that either cannot or refuses to see him.”
The Washington Post

“Like any great mixtape, Asim’s compilation is the most personalized of gifts. . . . Written with love, erudition, and the utmost respect, Boyz n the Void is a genuine keepsake.”
—Paul Beatty, author of The Sellout

“There are just some voices that stop you cold, as resonances of some familiar brilliance but also of something so original, so compelling that you have no choice but to take notice. G’Ra Asim is one of those voices.”
—Mark Anthony Neal, author of Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities

“A spellbinding odyssey and a magnificent debut for an exciting young author and thinker.”
—Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, cofounder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum

“Full of dopamine hits and heartbreak. You don’t want to stop listening, even when it aches. It becomes part of you. These essays are rigorous and tender and funny all at once, charged with humor that doesn’t deflect from difficult honesty so much as it takes you deeper into the maze of truth.”
—Leslie Jamison, New York Times best-selling author of The Empathy Exams

“A critical ethnography of growing up black and punk in the aughts. Asim strikes a balance between total immersion in the scene and the intimacy of a letter sent between brothers. . . . Boyz n the Void is essential reading for black weirdos, punks of all ages, and those invested in impeccably rendered American history.”
—Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, author of Slingshot

Boyz n the Void is many things—an impassioned paean to high-stakes cultural invention, a brutally honest excavation of the twenty-first-century color line, and a work of brotherly love—but it also marks the emergence of an important black artist.”
—Chris Lehmann, editor of The New Republic

Boyz n the Void is the Black punk bildungsroman of your dreams: it’s as if Bad Brains had written the smartest book in the world, only better. Asim guides us to the borders of American Blackness and beyond in this debut that’s so mesmerizingly smart and so unsparingly honest it will literally rewrite the playlist in your heart.”
—Junot Díaz, author of The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
G’Ra Asim is a writer, a musician, and an assistant professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. He has served as writing director at the African American Policy Forum and as graduate teaching fellow in Columbia’s Undergraduate Writing Program. His work has appeared in Slate, Salon, Guernica, The Baffler, and The New Republic. When not writing prose or teaching, he sings, plays bass and writes lyrics for NYC DIY pop punk band babygotbacktalk, who were named one of AfroPunk’s “Top 8 Punkest Bands on the Planet Right Now.”
Introduction

Africa Has No History:
An Annotation of Anti-Flag’s “A Start”

Evidence of Things Unscene:
An Annotation of Propagandhi’s “Less Talk, More Rock”

Marching Through the Mosh Pit:
An Annotation of Operation Ivy’s “Room Without a Window”

Ace Up My Sleeve:
An Annotation of the Matches’ “More Than Local Boys”

Mad Props to Madness:
An Annotation of Bad Religion’s “Pity the Dead”

Ever Since I Was a Little Grrrl:
An Annotation of Black Kids’ “I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance with You”

To the Edge and Back:
An Annotation of Brand New’s “Sic Transit Gloria . . . Glory Fades”

American Idiolect:
An Annotation of Fefe Dobson’s “Stupid Little Love Song”

PMA (Positivist* Mental Attitude):
An Annotation of Bad Brains’ “Attitude”

Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What Omnaut:
An Annotation of Masked Intruder’s “Take What I Want”

Acknowledgments
Notes

About

Writing to his brother, G’Ra Asim reflects on building his own identity while navigating Blackness, masculinity, and young adulthood—all through wry social commentary and music/pop culture critique

How does one approach Blackness, masculinity, otherness, and the perils of young adulthood? For G’Ra Asim, punk music offers an outlet to express himself freely. As his younger brother, Gyasi, grapples with finding his footing in the world, G’Ra gifts him with a survival guide for tackling the sometimes treacherous cultural terrain particular to being young, Black, brainy, and weird in the form of a mixtape.

Boyz n the Void: a mixtape to my brother blends music and cultural criticism and personal essay to explore race, gender, class, and sexuality as they pertain to punk rock and straight edge culture. Using totemic punk rock songs on a mixtape to anchor each chapter, the book documents an intergenerational conversation between a Millennial in his 30s and his zoomer teenage brother. Author, punk musician, and straight edge kid, G’Ra Asim weaves together memoir and cultural commentary, diving into the depths of everything from theory to comic strips, to poetry to pizza commercials to mapping the predicament of the Black creative intellectual.

With each chapter dedicated to a particular song and placed within the context of a fraternal bond, Asim presents his brother with a roadmap to self-actualization in the form of a Doc Martened foot to the behind and a sweaty, circle-pit-side-armed hug.


Listen to the author’s playlist while you read! Access the playlist here: https://sptfy.com/a18b

Excerpt

Introduction 

There’s a sullen and brooding six foot two, 240-pound pres-ence in my parents’ house, and his shadow looms large over the otherwise placid nest. The presence is among the most timeless of American bogeymen—a black male in a state of rapid physical maturation. My folks regard the presence in a fashion that is heritage in their country of origin, which is to say, the presence is making them nervous. Having already reared three boys and one girl to satisfactory adulthood, my folks fancy their home as a factory of black excellence, and the lone remaining straggler on their well-trodden conveyor belt defies the troubleshooting best practices they’ve devel-oped over thirty-four years on the job. My youngest brother, Gyasi, is a capable but disinterested student. Where other teenage boys chase girls and alcohol, Gyasi predominantly lurks indoors like some Wi-Fi–empowered Boo Radley. His communication with my parents is minimal, and when he does deign to acknowledge them, he alternates between with-ering sarcasm and charged silence.

Gyasi teases my parents  with glimpses of his intellectual and artistic potential but is recalcitrant when pushed to put his talents to use. Fourteen years apart in age, he and I are respectively the second- and fifth-born children of five and have always enjoyed a strong rapport, but even I have been of marginal help in allaying his malaise.The familiar chorus of my mother’s vexation is “I’m worried he’ll be living in my house until he’s forty.” In fair-ness, it was not long ago that my mother fretted over a similar prognosis about me. I, too, was an academically withdrawn malcontent with an allergy to authority. My angst was both formless and easy to explain.

I don’t presume that Gyasi and I are exactly the same per se, but I can imagine he might be suffering from a crisis similar to the one that afflicted me as a teenager: an inability to envision a future in which a person such as he can fit comfortably into a ruthlessly competitive, anti-intellectual, anti-black society.He could not be blamed for sensing the jarring disconti-nuity between the climate beyond his front door and the one in which he has been carefully incubated.

Our father is an author and writing professor and our mother is a playwright, actor, and homemaker. Being raised by artists has not only shaped my and Gyasi’s aesthetic leanings but also framed our perceptions of the American story. Our parents, both prod-ucts of inner-city St. Louis, dropped out of Northwestern University in the late 1980s to return to the ghetto to raise my eldest brother and me. When not evading gunfire, Mom and Baba wrote and produced plays, organized poetry readings, and published literary magazines with their young sons play-ing at their feet. Our household was a fecund micro-bohemia situated incongruously within a warzone. As my parents’ cre-ative triumphs accumulated, our circumstances improved enough to move to the comparatively posh suburbs of Silver Spring, Maryland. Gyasi was born there. He’s in some ways a beneficiary of a middle-class upbringing but is acutely aware of the Herculean feats it took for our family to produce such an environment and the precarity of sustaining it. After the economic downturn of the late aughts, our family relocated from Silver Spring to urban Baltimore.

Gyasi briefly attended a public elementary school there until my parents grew so frustrated with the threadbare curriculum that they pulled him out in favor of homeschooling.For the Asim children, living at the mercy of the eco-nomic peaks and valleys of my folks’ artistic lives yielded a kaleidoscopic view of excess and indigence, oppression and opportunity. As a result, a grasp of heterogeneity is seared into all of our makeups. Gyasi and I, especially, are native dwellers of liminal space, and our experiences have often in-volved the exposure of unlikely confluences between distinct traditions, cultures, or ideologies.My youngest brother and I lean on each other as intel-lectual sparring partners, creative collaborators, and confi-dants. We can’t really afford not to. We’re a generation apart but identify more with one another than anyone in either of our respective peer groups. The Asims are not unlike a twenty-first-century edition of J. D. Salinger’s Glass family. 

Like the clan that starred in Nine Stories and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, we’re a close-knit but contentious family of bookish eccentrics struggling to reconcile our bohemian sen-sibilities with the prevailing norms of our era. My mother’s unease about Gyasi’s prospects for assimilation recalls Bes-sie Glass’s concern for her youngest daughter in Franny and Zooey. When I reflected on Gyasi’s coming of age, I thought of the Glasses’ parallels and noted how the critical interven-tion of Franny’s like-minded older brothers helps Franny to recover from an existential breakdown. In the book’s conclu-sion, Zooey comforts Franny by explaining that even if no one around her appreciates her attempts to defy the insensi-tivity and superficiality of 1950s Connecticut, Jesus notices, and she must continue to lead a virtuous life to maintain the smile on His holy countenance.

Cue record scratch.

That’s not the kind of sentiment likely to galvanize my stringently empiricist baby brother. So what might our own version of the game-changing sibling-to-sibling pep talk look like? Even our parents seem to underestimate the vastness of the chasm between the value system of the house we grew up in and the broader culture in which we reside. Navigating that divide is no small task, but punk rock has been my unlikely lodestar.I am not compiling a mixtape for the sake of indoctrinat-ing my brother, of turning him into my mohawked spitting image.

I’m making the mixtape because punk is fun, because a robust engagement with counterculture can serve as a vi-tal antidote to soul-sucking normalcy, because remembering that you have predecessors who wrestled with many of the same riddles that you may wrestle with can help you feel that a roadmap to self-actualization exists. The result is part Nick Hornsby, part Ntozake Shange: my All-Time, Top-10 Angst-Neutralizing Punk Songs Because the Rainbow Clearly Isn’t Enuf, Bruh.

Praise

“Asim’s astute social commentary, poignant storytelling, wit, and solid music criticism will appeal to punk and non-punk readers alike.”
Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

Boyz n the Void is provocative, opinionated, and fun.”
Shelf Awareness

“With Boyz n the Void, [Asim] uses the virtues that have been used against him—his skepticism, shrewdness and liminality—to assert his existence, as a young Black man insisting to be acknowledged in a world that either cannot or refuses to see him.”
The Washington Post

“Like any great mixtape, Asim’s compilation is the most personalized of gifts. . . . Written with love, erudition, and the utmost respect, Boyz n the Void is a genuine keepsake.”
—Paul Beatty, author of The Sellout

“There are just some voices that stop you cold, as resonances of some familiar brilliance but also of something so original, so compelling that you have no choice but to take notice. G’Ra Asim is one of those voices.”
—Mark Anthony Neal, author of Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities

“A spellbinding odyssey and a magnificent debut for an exciting young author and thinker.”
—Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, cofounder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum

“Full of dopamine hits and heartbreak. You don’t want to stop listening, even when it aches. It becomes part of you. These essays are rigorous and tender and funny all at once, charged with humor that doesn’t deflect from difficult honesty so much as it takes you deeper into the maze of truth.”
—Leslie Jamison, New York Times best-selling author of The Empathy Exams

“A critical ethnography of growing up black and punk in the aughts. Asim strikes a balance between total immersion in the scene and the intimacy of a letter sent between brothers. . . . Boyz n the Void is essential reading for black weirdos, punks of all ages, and those invested in impeccably rendered American history.”
—Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, author of Slingshot

Boyz n the Void is many things—an impassioned paean to high-stakes cultural invention, a brutally honest excavation of the twenty-first-century color line, and a work of brotherly love—but it also marks the emergence of an important black artist.”
—Chris Lehmann, editor of The New Republic

Boyz n the Void is the Black punk bildungsroman of your dreams: it’s as if Bad Brains had written the smartest book in the world, only better. Asim guides us to the borders of American Blackness and beyond in this debut that’s so mesmerizingly smart and so unsparingly honest it will literally rewrite the playlist in your heart.”
—Junot Díaz, author of The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

Author

G’Ra Asim is a writer, a musician, and an assistant professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. He has served as writing director at the African American Policy Forum and as graduate teaching fellow in Columbia’s Undergraduate Writing Program. His work has appeared in Slate, Salon, Guernica, The Baffler, and The New Republic. When not writing prose or teaching, he sings, plays bass and writes lyrics for NYC DIY pop punk band babygotbacktalk, who were named one of AfroPunk’s “Top 8 Punkest Bands on the Planet Right Now.”

Table of Contents

Introduction

Africa Has No History:
An Annotation of Anti-Flag’s “A Start”

Evidence of Things Unscene:
An Annotation of Propagandhi’s “Less Talk, More Rock”

Marching Through the Mosh Pit:
An Annotation of Operation Ivy’s “Room Without a Window”

Ace Up My Sleeve:
An Annotation of the Matches’ “More Than Local Boys”

Mad Props to Madness:
An Annotation of Bad Religion’s “Pity the Dead”

Ever Since I Was a Little Grrrl:
An Annotation of Black Kids’ “I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance with You”

To the Edge and Back:
An Annotation of Brand New’s “Sic Transit Gloria . . . Glory Fades”

American Idiolect:
An Annotation of Fefe Dobson’s “Stupid Little Love Song”

PMA (Positivist* Mental Attitude):
An Annotation of Bad Brains’ “Attitude”

Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What Omnaut:
An Annotation of Masked Intruder’s “Take What I Want”

Acknowledgments
Notes

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