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  • Published: 24 May 2022
  • ISBN: 9780807055557
  • Imprint: Beacon Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $35.00
Categories:

Boyz n the Void

a mixtape to my brother





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

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

  • Published: 24 May 2022
  • ISBN: 9780807055557
  • Imprint: Beacon Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $35.00
Categories:

Praise for Boyz n the Void

"Asim’s astute social commentary, poignant storytelling, wit, and solid music criticism will appeal to punk and nonpunk readers alike."—Kirkus Reviews
 
"G’Ra Asim’s Boyz n the Void is 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. Asim is attentive to small acts of intimacy and solidarity and vulnerability—a punk kid parting the curtain of his mushroom haircut, or learning to love the sweat and leather of a mosh pit—even as he dissects and illuminates, with searing, razor-sharp brushstrokes, the daily brutalities and hidden curriculums of structural racism. I’d gladly read anything by ’Ra the Exhorter—for his brilliance, his wit, his heart, and his electric illuminations of those forces of love and rebellion that might be able to remake our broken world."—Leslie Jamison, New York Times best-selling author of The Empathy Exams
 
"G’Ra Asim takes up a familiar form and brings it to new heights. His critical engagement with coming-of-age reflection adds refreshing depth, humor, and social commentary to a genre made immediately richer by his presence. Boyz n the Void is 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

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