After The First Purge (2018) and in the pandemic 
i had to start looking at people for real

Joivan Wade and Lex Scott Davis as siblings Isaiah and Nya in The First Purge, directed by Gerard McMurray.

Joivan Wade and Lex Scott Davis as siblings Isaiah and Nya in The First Purge, directed by Gerard McMurray.

A question is whether Kendrick’s “Alright” is / was its own moment or rather a cue for many moments of one predominant kind. The praise break, for instance.
Moment into which you can be unindividuated as any single serif in the paragraph, provided you keep moving. 
Moment you don’t need to know all the words for and would be forgiven making up your own.
A moment nonetheless you are presumed enthused to participate in no matter what music it’s known you’d rather have move you.
Because the mo(ve)ment doesn’t appear to be about Kendrick as a mover, just as the spirit is not your great-great-grandmother’s slaver’s god—though it matters as much in either case who is absent and not invited to be touched in its midst. In the communal mo(ve)ment, a contract is drawn toward the conditions of ecstasy. Its terms are, roughly: 

I come in. I carry experience in the flesh like a water cone filled to the lip, and then I begin to sway. We each get in the sway til all us shake, experience spilling over and out of and over into. You could be thus emptied of what you come in here with, or I could help you carry it.

I think that to misperceive this mess of experience, this wet destress, as a fluid exchange of struggle, strife, or shakeoffable devil is an overconfidence in the success of colonial terror. Some people just have so much joy yet to spare. I’m fucked up, homie, you fucked up / I told the storm to pass. 
“Alright” occurs like a change in air pressure. It augurs a particular weather. Everyone hears alls my life i has to fight and makes preparations to visit the opposite of fight upon one another. 
What does a film that smells this lamb’s blood in “Alright” hope to say about itself by ending there? Black movie with its Black director in which the federal government as the lone gunmen as the Klan do everything to onscreen Black folks as Black folks off screen already know the federal government of the lone gunmen of the Klan been doing to Black folks forever, some times for the screen, and all within an hour and a half. A trap lord hero needs a good Christian woman, but at least Spencer Williams didn’t write Staten Island, and we are thrilled to see ourselves as Black Rambo picking off a small militia after this movie Dylann Roofed a whole congregation—sound effects considered so completely you hear the screaming down an alley the other end of the street—because Y’lan is fine, and don’t you want a veiny fist that can throw three fat asses around at once? The resilience with which he steps over every hashtag bleeding out down the halls of the high-rise projects, my god. 

Y’lan Noel as the film’s action-ready antihero Dmitri.

Y’lan Noel as the film’s action-ready antihero Dmitri.

One thing about representation is people swear they want to be shown face, and what they mean is hold that pose. How they do. They can’t actually see you, and I don’t mean because it’s necessarily impossible to see anyone, but because at the risk of truly recognizing how unimpressively sad and ramshackle of spirit it is perfectly possible to be in this world, at this age, they might see how, for all that good, impeccably paratactic shit they talk about overcoming sadness like a brush fire chewing the ass of a hedge maze, it hasn’t diminished the solitude of that waterlogged park bench in the center with the sagging slats. To them, if you can cock-strut in front of a ruin, no one gets to call it devastation. But won’t you celebrate with them.
“Alright” at the end credits of The First Purge is an apology with Bruh Man’s slouch and grin, or my actual brother’s usurping anyone’s horror with his own humor, like my bad but that shit was slick, and he sure thinks so, or But did you die?
No. Not every mo(ve)ment in commune is divine, and some of that spirit is parasitic. And you know what? I’m sick of y’all. 
Your mentorships and highnesses. Your creepy righteousness after assault, euphorias you extract from draggings. Your but-did-you-dies. Big dawgs, swinging your black care. 
You want everlasting gratitude for keeping the kids sick. You like the sweet, sweet fever on their foreheads, how it steams. You dream like the Department of Education and no one can leave who feels good as hell gettin paid. I get it: we eatin, so why the fuck am I trippin? I get to stand next to you in debt to your self-services, but you don’t wanna look the part. You want it to be about the art, but no one who stands close to that really gets put through it. Humph. Strungalong and bitched across the good glistening walls because who’s gonna do for us like us? You ugly because I’m ugly. All my life I had to fight my life. But we present one front, one people, one proudly limping panther the camera eye-fucks with its gaping frame, slum we loyally forgive you for loving to see gutted. And no one juking to protest music watches you follow me inside, where you say I make you do this. Follow me inside, I mean.

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Justin Reed