My City Need Something by Christopher R. Rogers

I don’t know what’s going on / But I know that something’s wrong.

Moving between word and image, the call-and-response collaboration between writer Christopher R. Rogers and photographer Karim Brown improvises a contemporary portrait of present-day Black Philadelphia, replete with the unfinished activism present since the transnational upsurge of the George Floyd Uprising.

And I know that lately / My city has been crazy.

Arriving five years after the crucible of that period, this experimental essay-as-LP challenges Black Philadelphians to prioritize the urgency of reckoning with our own hang-ups and half-steps and to reground ourselves within the daily, prefigurative life-work of rehearsing Black liberation. This is a hyperlocal, future-forward recommitment to ongoing principled struggle and a hopeful model of contemporary self-criticism.

And I don’t know what it is but my city need something / I swear we need something different but I don’t know what it is.

The title takes its inspiration from the late, beloved Uptown Philadelphia rapper PnB Rock, whose successful mixtape single “My City Need Something” challenged us all to strive for clarity in a ubiquitously-consumed, and altogether presumed, Black suffering in a city resplendent with Black joy.