My City Need Something

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.

Author Biography

Christopher R. Rogers, Ph.D is a Philadelphia-based cultural organizer and educator hailing from Chester, PA with more than a decade of experience in supporting radical arts, culture, and community-building. He’s currently a Facilitator with the W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction and co-coordinates the Friends of The Tanner House, incubating a revitalized National Historic Landmark rowhome that Dr. Carter G. Woodson once dubbed the “center of Black intellectual life in Philadelphia.” He’s previously published with Common Notions as Lead Editor for How We Stay Free: Notes on a Black Uprising (2022) alongside novelist Fajr Muhammad.

karim brown is a documentary photographer and teacher from Philadelphia. He has roots both in West and North Philly where he has been committed to documenting Black folks ways of knowing and doing. Keeping the Black Philadelphia community and its people at the forefront of his mind, karim uses photography to intimately engage with folk in the community.