Lawrence Burney’s latest, No Sense in Wishing, is a book in which the famous phenom and dark horse share equal weight on the page. It’s also a love letter to Baltimore – to its artists, its crabs and its streets – and a Bildungsroman that finds its heroes in Lupe Fiasco and Frederick Douglass alike.
Burney, a Baltimore native, culture critic, and essayist, guides us through a memoir about the art, whether films or paintings or song lyrics, that have informed his personal and professional trajectory. He writes about growing up amongst artists with Black family traditions rooted in the Chesapeake, his journey through fatherhood at 19, and then to New York, where he helped spearhead Vice’s coverage of lesser known rap and hip-hop artists otherwise left out of mainstream media coverage.
The book, which gets its title from a phrase from the documentary Girlhood, comes at a time when the country is facing a crackdown on cities, including Baltimore, on art, on culture, on education, and on attempts at racial reckoning. Burney sat down to talk about his writing journey, and what his memoir means in this moment.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
There’s something always inherently political in talking about Baltimore. But it feels even more intense this year when cities are under attack by the actual president. You started this book before the election, but how much of that factored into how you wrote it?
At least for the past 30 years, Baltimore is always politicized and heavily racialized. As I get deeper into my craft and my knowledge and just my maturity, I feel like I’m always talking about the same things with Baltimore.
In my early writing career, it would be more passion and anger behind it. The first time I wrote anything about Baltimore to the mainstream media was in 2015 when the Freddie Gray situation happened. I wrote about police violence – a very short essay about how I had already [gone] through this in my own family. My stepbrother had been beaten pretty [badly] by the police in 2013 or [2012]. It was caught on camera, and he sued and didn’t get any money from it even though it was documented pretty clearly.
Now I try to write about it more from a historical lens of when this city became majority Black. It has deep segregation. I think it was the first city to legally implement redlining in 1910. You can still feel that now. You can go one block away and see a complete universal change. But it has this public facing image that you just know to not be true when you live in it.
It does have a lot of societal ills, but it’s not as widespread in every second of the day that you would think from watching the news. I always tell people that Baltimore has probably the worst PR of any city in America. There could be great art coming out, it could be really interesting music coming out of it, but if it doesn’t hit those targets, it’s like, we’re not even interested. And I find it interesting. It’s unfortunate, but I think it’s a good case study for just America in general, the way that it’s framed.
Building on that, you created True Laurels, a zine, to platform the artists and voices of Baltimore. But you also write for some of the biggest publications in the country. What kind of writing feels truest to yourself?
The perfect mixture of all my interests was probably a story I did for Vice in 2017 about this rapper from Baltimore named Young Moose. He was one of two of the biggest rappers in the 2010s in Baltimore from the same side of town that I’m from. It was very clear that the police were kind of railroading him because he’s from probably a top three worst neighborhood in the city.
He was about to open up for Lil Boosie, who was kind of his mentor, and the police locked him up the day before that show and threw some phony charges on him. He was locked up for maybe six to eight months.
So, I was doing a story on getting him out and I knew about the cop that put him in jail because he would rap about him. This guy named Daniel Hersl. But while I was reporting that story, those cops, Daniel Hersl and the rest of the country’s taskforce got indicted on federal racketeering and robbing citizens and selling drugs and defrauding overtime and all this. The story went from this rapper trying to find their way back after being railroaded to this rapper calling out this cop who’s actually being indicted by the feds.
I was like: ”This is perfect.” This is something I know to be true and it just so happened that these cops got indicted while I was doing the story. It’s about Baltimore, about anti-Black policing, and anti- poor policing, which is also important to say because all Black communities aren’t terrorized to the same degree.
The emotional tone of each chapter is so different – sometimes devastating, sometimes funny. I was really struck by when you talk about the car accident you were in – the ramp up to it is almost funny and lighthearted and then it just hits you. How much did you think about how you balance tone and emotion throughout the book when you were writing those chapters?
I wouldn’t say I focused a ton on tone. But I did focus a lot on kind of emotional range because when you absorb whatever [cultural] production you absorb, it strikes an emotional chord that sometimes sticks with you more than something being like: “My god, what amazing prose in this book or what amazing cinematography in this film.” All of that is amazing and it shows a level of skill, but I think none of that comes close to just emotion.
I know a lot of people remember a time in their lives when they were trying to belong or trying to find their footing as they went from adolescence to early adulthood. A lot of straight young men deal with this whole: “How do I present myself in terms of masculinity? How do I not identify myself as a mark within this society” And I wouldn’t say I felt those things, but certain things just kind of stick with you throughout time. Why do I feel like Lupe Fiasco’s music was so crucial to me? To a lot of people he just might be like a cool rapper, or maybe even kind of cheesy to some people, but to me I think he actually changed the course of my life.
One of the interesting things here is you’re challenging the perceptions of Baltimore and it’s parallel to you challenging the perceptions of yourself. Like you just said, what it means to be “hard”, but you’re also going to church, you’re going to before [school] care and then you talk about later being perceived as “country” when you’re in New York. What was it like writing about that vulnerability? Were there moments where you were like: “I can’t believe I’m telling everybody this?”
A lot of that stuff I think I’m so far removed from it that it can’t really hurt. Me going to church – I mean most Black people go to church. The before care part was like – I guess that’s kind of embarrassing. That’s not a thing that was acceptable. Even though I went for two years and I hated going even when I went, I felt extremely insulted in terms of my ability to navigate the world as a kid. Maybe I felt like I was being sheltered, but when I back away as an adult now, I’m like any parent that would try to prevent their kid from getting on public transportation at 11 years old at night. I saw people get robbed at gunpoint. I saw people get jumped or preyed on. I understand why my father did that for me.
The only thing that I felt vulnerable about as I was writing was fatherhood, and navigating what it took for me to take [a job in a different city] and to break away from my young daughter. On the one hand, I’m used to being around her almost every day, but I’m miserable professionally. And then I had this opportunity to really break into this field that I’m extremely passionate about. I chose the harder option, but I felt like it had the potential reward at the end. Talking about those emotions wasn’t easy. That essay probably took me three months to even crank out a first draft ’cause every time I sat down to write it, it was just like eating me inside.
This book feels so intimate in talking about your hometown, eating crab legs at your grandmother’s house with your family, but I feel like it’s equally intimate when you talk about Johannesburg and Lagos. Why did you feel like it was important to cover those journeys in the same book?
Being at a place like Vice and observing people jet set and go all around the world every day basically, I was like why wouldn’t I take advantage of this? The reader has gotten to know me fairly intimately, they know the place that I’m coming from. I think that informed my experience in Lagos or Johannesburg, me being a person from Baltimore ending up there felt extremely unlikely.
Also being from a place like Baltimore that has this mixture of dilapidation and development and segregation and two groups of people [living] completely different lives really prepped me for understanding a place like Johannesburg.
That’s why I say I think Baltimore is a good microcosm, not even just for the social aspects of America, but the social aspects of the western world in general. It’s a good primer for understanding class conflict, racial tension, so on and so forth.
