Hanif Abdurraqib

speaker

144 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 21 Jul

Hanif Abdurraqib’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Dan Le Batard Show · There's Always This Year (feat. Hanif Abdurraqib) · 21 Jul 2026 podcast

And for a moment, I got to say, while all these people around me were like, oh yeah, I was his barber, or I knew his mom, or I got to say, I got to sit and watch him play basketball for a little while when he was in high school.

And this memory is arriving to me now when I'm in this place where memories don't really survive.

Yeah.

It's the begging song.

So most of my work, I mean, I think most people know me first as a, as a music critic, most of my work has evolved around music.

I think I'm very knowledgeable about music, but I also love basketball deeply.

And so I was looking for a way to shoehorn music analysis into this book.

And I thought about this ecosystem that existed when LeBron left Cleveland, where people were both angry with him, but wanting him back desperately.

And that plays into this kind of

real boys to men like or even to go back Otis Redding like approach of baby please come back to me but we actually don't know you know the function of a begging song is so often that you don't see or know what the man did so it's almost always a man you don't see or know what they've done before the person left you arrive to them as they are on their knees pleading but you don't see what they did to maybe push the person away and what people maybe don't remember is Cleveland fans before LeBron left

you know, to go to Miami, they were kind of pushing him out the door.

You know, he had failed in their eyes in the playoffs, and they were on some, you know, they were on that stuff where it's like, well, maybe we're just better off without him.

You know, we just need to rebuild.

And then when it got serious, when it was like, oh, this guy might really leave, then it was like, you know, come back.

Let me just play it around.

Yeah, you know, and so it was like, the begging song is perfect for that because you arrive to a Boyz II Men song and they're already on their knees in the rain in silk suits and no one's asking them the question of, well, what did you do to make her leave?

Because they don't ever have to answer it, you know?

And in some ways, the begging song, it's a mythology unto itself, you know?

It functions as, look at how vulnerable I am, please come back.

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