No sense in wishing Essays

The art that stays with us--music, photography, literature--often feels like it reached us at the exact moment in our lives when we needed it most. In this essay collection, Burney explores those encounters in his own life, from his childhood involvement in the Baltimore music scene to the career as a music critic he would build in adulthood. Burney's love of music is deeply intertwined with his friends, his family, and the Baltimore neighborhoods where he grew up. In each essay, he combines his personal connection to the art with a deep knowledge of the social contexts that surrounded each work's creation and shaped its reception. Burney's tastes are wide ranging: he's as apt to zoom in on the work of specific Baltimore neighborhoods as he is to explore the Nigerian artists making it big on the international stage. A frank and joyous celebration of Black art as well as a musical coming-of-age story, No Sense in Wishing will appeal to fans of Shea Serrano's Hip-Hop (and Other Things) (2021) and Danyel Smith's Shine Bright (2022).

Music journalist Burney delivers a stimulating debut collection that explores race, identity, and art's role in both. "In this life, we endure an infinite series of experiences that change us at the molecular level," Burney writes in the introduction. "This book is an exercise in mining the memory for those path-altering episodes." Moving from Burney's native Baltimore to the concert halls of Lagos, the essays cover his responses to the work of formative artists and musicians in his life, including Lupe Fiasco and Maryland painter Tom Miller. He approaches his subjects with the intensity of a fan and the discipline of a critic, capturing the rush of his first encounter with Fiasco's "Kick, Push" and examining how it--and music like it--helped him reinforce the "façade of a hard exterior" he kept up around his Baltimore peers. Elsewhere, he meditates on visiting Africa on assignments for Vice and The Fader and takes stock of Maryland's Black history. Cutting and clarifying in equal measure, Burney's essays combine sharp cultural analysis with lucid self-examination, resulting in a lively collection that slots comfortably alongside the work of writers like Hanif Abdurraqib. Readers will be rapt. Agent: William LoTurco, LoTurco Literary. (July)

A spry application of pop-culture criticism to "path-altering episodes" in the author's life. Working out of Baltimore, Burney begins this set of essays with a thoughtful piece on activist-in-song Gil Scott-Heron, who earned a master's degree in creative writing at Johns Hopkins. By Burney's account, Scott-Heron resented the fact that although he was still very much alive, by the turn of the 21st century he had been "conveniently relegated to the past tense," even though he still had much to say. Exploring Scott-Heron's life leads Burney to his own family, his mother a former singer and his grandfather a guitarist who once opened for Scott-Heron. That in turn leads Burney, in a winding narrative that never loses focus, to his experiments with bohemianism among "people who performatively smoked cigarettes, obnoxiously ate vegetarian crepes, and went to see seventy-year-old movies at the art-house theater." Burney's essays explore his falling away from organized religion, working with "no interest in excelling" in a stultifying desk job at the Social Security Administration (where, he confesses, he passed his time watching episodes ofThe Wire on his phone), and visiting South Africa, whose Black population "are the only ones on this landmass who constantly interact with white people at every level of society," giving them a point in common with American Blacks. While celebrating Black culture and icons (including the pre-deranged Kanye West), Burney dismisses Black supremacist claims such as the notion, advanced in a documentary film, that Japanese ninja culture originated in Africa, a bit of cultural appropriation about which he remarks, sagely, "It's a hard pill to swallow that we've been fucked over, but the answer to that dilemma isn't to go around and do it to other people." Fluent, sometimes nerdy, and often funny observations about the power of art to add meaning to one's life. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.