As the adage goes, music marks time. We’ve all had formative experiences to different soundtracks. In No Sense In Wishing (Atria Books, July 8th) author and cultural critic Lawrence Burney sharply expresses his life and times in a powerful collection of essays. The book traces what he’s learned from his musical journey; Lupe Fiasco was his entry point into a kind of Blackness he initially thought was “corny as shit,” while the music he shares with his daughter makes him realize how hip-hop has shifted generationally.
Burney, a Baltimore native who’s about to head out on an East Coast book tour, succeeds at crafting a work that’s as much a poignant reflection on his life as an ethnomusical study. The reader walks away feeling like they’ve learned about him as well as Baltimore heroes like Young Moose and Lor Scoota. Burney reflects on those two artists in the chapter “Two Pillars,” which also explores how Dipset and Boosie fandom among him and his college friends spurred him to interrogate regional distinctions of Blackness. Read an excerpt below.
Around the time Obama took office, I spent most of my afternoons in Dennis and Izzy’s room in the arid Conolly Residence Hall on Long Island University’s Downtown Brooklyn campus asking myself, What is it about French Montana that these niggas love so much? I’d already gone through the trouble of asking members of our cohort, whose headquarters were in this thirteen-by-twenty-six rectangle, what they saw in his music, but I was behind enemy lines. Izzy was a Bronx kid who had migrated from Port-au-Prince in his preteens. Dennis was from somewhere in that Uptown vicinity. Glen was from the Mission Hill Projects in Boston’s Roxbury section and spent his last two years of high school hooping for a basketball powerhouse in Jersey City. Akil was from Staten Island. Joel repped the Lower East Side. Erik was from Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood. Khalid was raised twenty minutes from the school grounds. These were inhabitants of the Real East Coast who, even in the late 2000s, were still under the impression that hip-hop’s having been created in their territory granted them indefinite dominion over how the genre’s rhythm and presentation were supposed to feel. Never mind that a child phenom from New Orleans had grown into the form’s most feared competitor at this stage. Or that Atlanta was about a half decade into innovating this thing of ours in ways that no city had since its South Bronx genesis. Or even that French Montana, a Bronx dude who was born in Morocco, had a vocal style that teetered between a forged Southern drawl and Big Apple punch lines.
In this crowd, if it was your turn to control the aux cord and you craved near-unanimous approval, any member of Dipset — even niggas whose connection to the collective was peripheral at best — passed inspection. The ability to recite an obscure Lloyd Banks verse earned you some prideful grins or, even better, earnest assistance with your performance. And if you could go to Youtube and land somewhere around the exact time stamp in which a battle rapper from the URL channel comedically unpacked their adversary’s shortcomings while gripping a shorty of Henny, your credibility stood on solid ground. Playing anything from folks raised south of Philadelphia, though, was never a wise decision. By sheer virtue of my existence, I was deployed here with the task of disrupting the homogeneity of these jam sessions.
Before the fall of ’08, I wasn’t particularly privy to the political implications of Black America’s geography. Everywhere on earth felt far from East Baltimore. Even the Westside. But I understood New York enough to speak their language, albeit choppily. Occasional weeklong stays in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights during school breaks with my uncle Derrick, an artist who moved up in his early twenties, familiarized me with how to swipe a MetroCard with relative ease. I knew how to fold a slice of pizza with one hand to effectively eat while swaying through speeding bodies on the street. And I recognized enough names of stops along the Manhattan-bound C train route to pretend like I knew what was going on. My sister, eight years older, spent her pre-adulthood under the spell of New York’s hip-hop reign, and I eavesdropped on what she rapped and sang along to in order to identify what was worthwhile. During my middle school years I snuck into her room to fiddle through CDs for field research: Jay-Z’s The Blueprint. Total’s self-titled debut. DMX’s discography. A life lived atop the concrete was where I could relate to the guys in that Conolly Hall dorm, but the beat to which Baltimore bounced made it feel so much farther than the four-hour drive that separated us.
Whenever the aux at Dennis and Izzy’s room found its way to me, I accepted the opportunity as a guided performance. Sharing music with people you don’t know is a tacit agreement to find ways of appealing to the room’s sensibilities while still steering them to places where they’ve yet to spend a considerable amount of time. Somewhere you know intimately. I’d cue up Yo Gotti’s I Told U So mixtape from DJ Drama’s Gangsta Grillz series, rapping along. Nothing more than a few head nods were reciprocated. I’d offer some Lil Boosie deep cuts from the Bad Azz mixtapes. In response, somebody would vacuum the oxygen out of the space with “Ain’t this the ‘Wipe Me Down’ dude?” When Gucci Mane and OJ Da Juiceman’s “Make the Trap (Aaaye)” came on back home, no one I knew could contain themselves amid DJ Supastar J. Kwik’s obnoxious sirens and Juice’s zapped ad-libs. But at LIU, besides some amused half smiles from Glen, the most heartened reply I got was from Akil, who, midway through one particular aux residency, stood up, grimaced, and spat, “This is poison. This is what y’all playing down there?”
Might as well have called me a bama.
I’d been getting subtly tried for the bulk of that first semester at LIU for my perceived otherness. One evening, after running around the city, I returned to campus and found the guys down in the cafeteria and asked what time they planned on heading to the dorms. “What. Tiiiime. Yawww niggas. Goiiinnn. Baackk. Upstaaaas,” Glen mocked. “God damn you talk slow as hell. Country-ass nigga.” It took until the third time Joel held out two fingers to ask me “How many?” before I realized he was making fun of the Baltimore accent that, months prior, I’d no knowledge of having. Another time, I was hanging out with a girl in my own room talking about our schooling experiences before we got to college. “You say ha school, not high school.” She giggled. I shrugged in annoyance. My self-perception was being dismantled as more time passed and I eventually had to ask myself, Am I country?
Where I was from, country as folks might have been, country was a slur. Despite everybody’s country Grandma and that we regularly headed one state down to rural Virginia to break bread with the family we’d left behind for industrial employment generations prior, or that we filled church buses, led by our country pastor, to deeper parts of the country for fellowship. Country, in our Maryland minds, was reserved for people who were unaware of their perceived quirks; too free in their command of language and expression to adhere to uppity, subtle wannabe-white laws like the citified negroes had been doing since they resettled in the metropolises. But at LIU, I started to realize I was of a more hybridized, urban Upper South existence — of a people so reg larly reminded of their country-ness that they develop an antagonistic denial of it. A denial I was no longer afforded in the North. To New Yorkers, anything south of Jersey is country, so they’re a bit unqualified when it comes to geographical distinctions. But what I think they’re getting at, culturally, when they dish out those labels is that they don’t come from a culture that is informed by just the Black American experience. New York City is the world’s mirror, populated by Black folks from what feels like every corner of the African diaspora. Or every diaspora, for that matter. What was brought up to their wide avenues during the Great Migration isn’t as in your face as in other places in the country.
Lawrence Burney, Baltimore, 2025
SHAN Wallace
Country-ness is informed by the stories and experiences retained — physically and spiritually — from the heartland. It is often an innate way of being rather than a concerted effort. Hanging on the porch while my grandparents swung in their rocking chairs and swatted flies was my favorite childhood pastime. Buying a mouth full of golds with the first check from your part-time job (if not earnings from the dope hole) was the goal of kids in my orbit. My lackadaisical slew-footed stroll was a common mode of transportation where I came from but looked alien on fast, big-city streets. To appear enlightened I was quick to mention to my college friends that I didn’t eat pork but omitted that I’d just recently stopped and had had enough Spam sandwiches, scrapple, pigs’ feet, and fried fish for breakfast to hold me over until the afterlife. It’s also worth noting that I had a Boosie fade during this time. The brothers from LIU either missed out on these experiences or were hiding them to fit into their public-facing reputation.
Truth is, I elected to play musical poets from Louisiana, Tennessee, and Georgia in Dennis and Izzy’s room for show-and-tell because those storytellers felt the closest to home. The churchiness of it all. The jubilant vulgarity. The soft assuredness. It’s what my older cousins played when they started letting me tag along in their car rides and hangout sessions — like in that Meherrin, Virginia, motel room. It’s what blared out of speakers on Ramona Avenue. It’s what me and my friends rode from one end of Baltimore to the next broadcasting. I could’ve played a Baltimore rapper like Smash or our native club music for the guys, but the context I’d need to provide for artists so tightly insulated within a microworld felt like a burden. It’s the same way that Glen could have played E. Burton, a rapper from his same projects in Boston, but instead went for Cam’ron and French Montana. You rode with whatever titans best reflected you and your hometown’s self-image. I just happened to be surrounded by young men whose Mecca was outside the dorm’s windows. And for as many battles as I fought on those university grounds to stand firm in my sonic associations, the ease of assimilation eventually began to caress my shoulders in the right places.
I moved back down to Baltimore the following summer with the kind of excruciating self-awareness that no teenage human is meant to possess. I wouldn’t admit it to Glen, Joel, Izzy, Dennis, Khalid, Erik, or Akil at LIU, but I didn’t enjoy being singled out. And I recognized the power and ease that came with being part of a cultural powerhouse while spending time in their backyard. I turned their good-faith jokes and shortsighted views of people below the Mason-Dixon back onto myself upon my return home. I tried to play up my New York City connection, acting like I was socialized there way more than I ever was. The weeklong childhood stays with my uncle in Brooklyn got multiplied by a few more weeks when telling people about my make-believe dual-city upbringing. I adopted an unsuccessful NY accent, contorting my local ew sounds to the pedestrian oo. The shame of small-town ness was knocking me off my square.
Years before I reached the LIU campus, a series of DVDs circuated through barbershops, apparel stores, and shopping center parking lots in Baltimore, all loosely tied to the city’s underground rap scene. Stop Snitching, from 2004, achieved the most notoriety and polarity because on top of having people from respected pockets of the city freestyle on camera, other subjects of the film used their brief appearances as an opportunity to out confidential police informants who were fucking up their flow in the street. Those exposed started to get hurt in real life. BPD actively opposed the film’s messaging; tensions were still high from barely two years before, when a man, woman, and their five children were killed in an East Baltimore firebomb because they reported the drug trafficking in their neighborhood. Carmelo Anthony made a six-minute cameo
in Stop Snitching, and local politicians subsequently campaigned for his punishment. The Atlantic even surrendered pages to its folklore with writer Jeremy Kahn reporting in 2005, “The metastasis of this culture of silence in minority communities has been facilitated by a gradual breakdown of trust in the police and the government.” Its hype, while intoxicating, eventually wilted away with the passing seasons. No real winners in sight, save for our collective lust for Black-male chest-beating.
Conversely, the Baltimore Real Talk series added a more thoughtful slant to the local DVD ecosystem. It did the dirty work of trying to frame an aspirational scene within the landscape of a city where rap was second-in-command. Local rhymesayers, in the minds of most, were cornballs and attention whores, strivingfor something that just wasn’t meant to happen. Truth be told, we were house music niggas raised on maniacal BPMs — light on our feet and loose in our hips. But playful, electronic reimaginings of Grandma’s feel-good tunes and funny pop culture sound bites weren’t getting us anywhere past Havre de Grace. So some people deviated and became carbon copies of rappers in New York, Atlanta, and Philadelphia, hoping to catch a buzz, denouncing club music as some goofy, borderline-gay movement that didn’t properly demonstrate how hard we went. It never really worked. In ’05, the second edition of Baltimore Real Talk brought this dilemma to the fore by featuring Tim Trees, who was already a local legend and one of the only rappers in the city to actually sound like a Baltimorean, from his accent to his choice to work with club music producers. The cameraman asked if Trees thought the city was gonna be the next place to blow in the hip-hop sphere. He made it plain:
“Hopefully it will, man, when niggas stop tryna sound like they from New York. And trying to sound like they from here and there. Niggas say I sound like club music, but, nigga, your shit sound like you from New York. It sound like you from down South. This is not Compton, nigga! This is East Baltimore.”
What could’ve been processed as a jab from Trees was more of a plea, a wishful thought that, if people considered his criticism in good faith, it could lead to a unified scene with more widespread visibility than what local parameters afforded them. After his evaluation, the musical tide did start to gradually shift toward a more original aesthetic, but mostly due to the continued rise of regional rap cultures achieving brief moments of national spotlight rather than folks taking Trees’s words to heart.
Excerpted from No Sense in Wishing by Lawrence Burney. Copyright © 2025. Available from Atria Books, an imprint of Simon and Schuster.
