Hanif Abdurraqib on one of my favorite albums from my senior year of high school. (Jesus, I am old.)
I believe, very deeply, in the urgency of the opening. When the song closes, when the poem closes, when the day closes, you are not obligated to be who you were at the start, but who you were at the start does matter. It can be the first, most immediate thought. It can be the thing that has weighed on your heart for what feels like as long as you’ve been alive. It can be the most vulnerable place you’ve ever been willing to go, and you can shout it into an empty landscape and then build a small world around it. The voice of Sade Adu, also one of our greatest poets, arrives slowly on “Is It A Crime,” the opening track of Sade’s 1985 album, Promise. It waits about 25 seconds, for Stuart Matthewman’s saxophone to blare itself to a sense of calm, a steady moan. And then, she enters: This may come, this may come as a surprise, but I miss you.
This is one of my favorite lyrics to open any album in the history of albums and in the history of lyrics, in part because it isn’t only the language itself, but how the language is presented. Adu’s voice beginning light and airy in the first two fragments, before dipping, suddenly, when we arrive at but I miss you, the final sound in you stretched out for a few seconds, creating a brief tunnel of oooohhhh that isn’t mournful or even revelatory, but more a sigh. It is what it is. Against all of my better instincts I have surrendered to my own heart, and this is where it has dragged me. It matters a great deal what comes next, but it also doesn’t. Sade Adu has presented a dilemma which is uniquely hers, but it could be yours. Might have been yours, at some point before this one. Yes, the man is a liar; yes, the man lays with someone else. You know the type, or you’ve been the type. You have been the criminal, or you’ve loved the criminal and, through your loving, you become them.