Just as Frank Wilderson cites the propensity of the black performance to obscure and evade black life and reality and calls for a more “direct reflection” on the “ghosts and grammar” that haunt the enactment of black subjectivity, Jared Sexton’s critique of Fred Moten’s optimism lies in the latter’s emphasis on the “fugitive ontology” of blackness, an ontology that has the black always on the run from the structures that govern a priori the antiblack world into which it would pretend to escape. Consequently, the challenge of afropessimism is to imagine, amid the afropessimist negation, a black movement that is not or other than performative, something more than a “narrative strategy hoping to slip the noose of a life shaped by slavery,” but instead a more visceral apprehension of and engagement with the structural violence against blackness as “a grammar of emergence and being.” Therefore, the question this chapter attempts to answer is whether hip-hop, as an aural component of blackness, can discern just such a movement and apprehension.