“What am I driving at? At this idea: that no one colonizes innocently, that no one colonizes with impunity either; that a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization — and therefore force — is already a sick civilization, a civilization which is morally diseased.”
— Aimé Césaire
The unclassifiable, genre and boundary breaking musician/poet/performer/activist Moor Mother recorded The Great Bailout during a very fertile Covid lockdown period (alongside Jazz Codes and BRASS), and it’s only seen release this year. The Great Bailout was created originally as a stage show with the London Contemporary Orchestra; all her work is made in collaboration — and all of it is about liberation from confinement and oppression, about violence and celebration. About time and its linear confines. Always intense and dense, electric crackle and organic soul, always storms, water, death by longitude, living on borrowed time, stolen time, the Master’s Clock ticks faster.
It’s a challenging record; it’s a blistering dirge, a bleak lament; it’s ominous, dense and overwhelming. It’s whispers in the crypt, clanking chains, jingling coins, a stamping machine, the pistons and gears; underwater, in the dark, it’s like putting your ear to an urn, bone break fever delirium. It rumbles and drones, it’s a funeral hymn but also an exhumation and an autopsy. What’s the difference between an elegy and a eulogy and a liturgy? Moor Mother takes an emotional, impressionist and fractured approach, her spat fury weaved over and under drone and cacophony.
If Jazz Codes was a love letter, Bailout is an op ed written with a poison pen — like she said back on Fetish Bones: I’m bell hooks trained as a sniper. In a discography that always has a fist in the air, the album both zeroes in and widens out. It takes its title and anchoring point from Britain’s 1833 Slavery Abolition Act — ‘freeing’ those enslaved in the British Caribbean to a four-year ‘transition’ of unpaid forced labour. And the 1835 Act, through which 46,000 former slaveowners were compensated, annually, all the way up to 2015: £20 million, with interest. This loan was 40% of the Treasury’s annual income. In today’s money, it’s about £17 billion or $22 billion US. British taxpayers paid this off for 180 years. Where’d they get all the money, the money, the money? Who paid it back? Who burned it? How long did it burn? Who had to breathe in the smoke? Who had to chase the smoke away?
12.5 million people were enslaved from Africa from the 16th to 19th century. It’s estimated that Great Britain owes $24 trillion in reparations to fourteen countries. All these numbers, staggeringly huge numbers, incomprehensible numbers. We can’t feel pain from these numbers, they have no faces, they have no voices. We can’t process these figures except in the abstract. Taxpayers of erasure, of relapse, of amnesia. Paying the crimes off. Did you pay off the trauma?
“We have yet to truly understand what enslavement means, what it does to people,” Moor Mother said in 2017. “It’s programmed within us, there’s no way to escape it.”
The album isn’t about the atrocities and the horrors; we’d turn away. We can’t face it or comprehend it. There’s a tension in trying to create art about something this horrific and huge: too panoramic, the pain is lost; too particular — one person, one story — the scope is lost. The record is about how countries and peoples see themselves and others, through the clouded lens of obscured history: through ocean fog, London fog, the fog of history. It’s an atrocity exhibition of amnesia, erasure, things stolen. A criminal conspiracy mandated by the state, pure corruption for moral corruption. Compensated emancipation. Constipated plantation. Who’s gonna take the weight? Who’s gonna weigh the take? Who’s gonna take the wait? Who’s gonna wake the fates?
“What are a slave-woman’s dreams? What are a servant’s prayers?”
— Sumerian proverb
The Sumerian Code of Ur-Nammu was written about 2100 BCE and includes laws regarding slaves. The settling of nomads in the Neolithic Revolution — into cities, states, what we call civilization — required a lot of cheap or free labor for building and farming. Civilization is founded on slavery. It doesn’t exist without slavery. Only 4% of the history of human civilization hasn’t had institutionalized, state-led slavery — the past 159 years. For the other roughly 4,000 years it was a basic societal structure.
In God’s Ghostwriters, theology professor Candida Moss gives credible evidence that the New Testament was transcribed, translated and disseminated by slaves. From the start, Christianity was enabled by forced labor and bondage. Plato’s Republic and Thomas More’s Utopia both posit at length how to create the perfect society. Which includes slaves. So much money. So many cowards. So many handshakes, so many contracts. All the money.
Slavery’s history is civilization’s history, but African slavery was on a global, industrial scale — all trades and all countries and all economies linked by it. The Industrial Revolution doesn’t happen without slavery. It’s crucial to remember that the motivation for African slavery wasn’t racism, really: this was an initial and nurtured justification. The point of slavery and colonialism was the maximum extraction of goods and resources and profits at the lowest possible cost. The dehumanization and brutality was just a means to enact that. People go in and sugar, tobacco and cotton comes out. Census, map, museum. Gun, clock, chain, ship. Death by longitude, death by the Atlantic. All aboard. Back to Africa, on ships of antiquity. (When we go to these phones, people are going to tell you to do just that, Chuck.)
The phrase “down to the nitty gritty” means to delve deep and tackle the hard facts, the crucial details, the difficult truths. Some sources say it comes from the dried-up shit at the bottom of slave ships’ hulls — because they were kept below decks for the whole voyage, and there were just spaces between the planks for this. Chucked down in the galley, chucked down in the galley. Other sources say it’s a corruption of the French ‘nigritique,’ as the colonists called African slaves and creoles, meaning to mix with them. Many others wave these meanings away, that it’s of unknown origin. Many things are waved away out of history.
Britain has a very different relationship with race and slavery than the US. For one thing, slavery and colonialism happened overseas, far away, unseen and invisible to white Britons — cotton and tobacco and sugar and wealth flowed back, but there weren’t plantations and then a freed population in the homeland. Generally speaking, British people like to see their main role in the slave trade was its abolition. But there were 46,000 British slave owners and hundreds of monuments to them still stand. Empires falling down, bells falling down. The storm keeps raging.
The death of George Floyd and the global Black Lives Matter protests that followed saw about seventy statues, monuments, plaques and other commemorations of slaveowners and slave traders removed — most visibly, activists toppled the long-controversial statue of slave trader Edward Colston, and dumped it into Bristol Harbor.
Within and without British communities of color, there’s not even an accepted terminology, it’s shifted from ‘Black, Asian and minority ethnic’ to ‘Black, minority ethnic and refugee’ and so on; currently there’s no widely agreed phrasing. Britain in general isn’t as actively, violently racist as the US, but there’s an erasure, an unspoken pretense, a complete silence on the bloodstained history of slavery and colonialism (less than 1% of secondary school students study a book by a person of color, for example). At its height in 1913, the British Empire dominated a quarter of the world population and its landmass. There’s never been a national reckoning. The Irish still call the British flag “The Butcher’s Apron.” Who builds death like this?
So many living Lords and MPs, including former Prime Minster David Cameron, owe their wealth to inherited riches and land from their slave-trading ancestors (1614, in the House of Common evils. The House of Lords, the House of Reptiles. Money folder. Gladstone is the holder of a boulder).
In May 2024, Kemi Badenoch (now the leader of the Conservative Party) said that Britain’s historical wealth and success has nothing to do with “colonialism or imperialism or white privilege or whatever.” Kemi Badenoch was born to Nigerian parents. (The Conservatives have specialized in recent years in having ministers of color say the quiet part out loud.)
Over the summer, the country was wracked with nation-wide anti-immigrant riots. The recently elected Labour Prime Minister recently refused to apologize once again for Britain’s role in the slave trade to a meeting of Commonwealth countries. The whitewash keeps painting over and over and over the bloody wall. Let freedom wring. Thinking of a master race, there ain’t nothing but sweat upon my face. Nothing but blood upon their hands. Because they’re paid in full.
“So much of the work of oppression is policing the imagination.”
— Saidiya Hartman
There is no doubt The Great Bailout is an important, accomplished and flawless album. But how is it meant to be listened to? It’s not for when you’re cooking or folding laundry. (I always end up listening to Moor Mother on the rocky coast, the grey waves unceasingly crashing. The sea is history. The sea remembers what the country forgot.)
It probably ought to be experienced as it originally was: in a darkened theater, wholly focused on its performance, that voice, those words. Are we supposed to, allowed to enjoy it? How are we meant to process the unprocessable, the unfathomable? To recover, and aid the recovery, of the unrecoverable? How are we meant to respond to it? In part I think about places I’ve been, sites of great atrocity and death: slave market memorials, Holocaust museums, the Cambodian Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng prison. You try and take it in, for as long as you can, to learn and feel and imagine. Then, it’s done. And you have to decide what’s for lunch.
Turner’s painting is based on a real incident, when 132 slaves were jettisoned, casually murdered, to claim property insurance. Turner was an abolitionist, and when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1840, he added a poem, which ends:
Hope, Hope, fallacious Hope!
Where is thy market now?
But the painting is like all Turner paintings: it’s a contemplation of light on clouds, on seawater—with those sinking chains, the hands blurred in the peaks of waves and that one anonymous leg giving only an inkling of horror. Screaming and throwing up their hands, some of them just trying to swim across, swim across the water.
The Nigerian-British artist Yinka Shonibare’s 2022 Decolonised Structures series takes shrunk-down replicas of public sculptures of British colonial figures and replaces their bronze patina and stately marble with the colors and patterns of Dutch wax print, inspired by Indonesian batik and West Africa. It swathes these figures in color, in flowers. Rather than dumping them into the river as with Colston’s statue, he reclaims them, beautifies them, and also makes them ridiculous, popping with zany hues.
But the dissonance is one-note; it’s a psychedelic Churchill, but clearly him, glowering, those jowls; a pop-art Victoria, but instantly recognizable, the imperious droopy eyes. It’s trying to sop up the blood they’re soaked in by smothering them in African fabrics; redecoration isn’t quite reclamation, and it’s not replacement (as many have been calling for with slave monuments) or restitution. It cuts them down to size irreverently, but there’s no sense of the bones they walked on. When and where do the ancestors speak for themselves?
“To define a people’s past is to influence their future,” the Nigerian-British writer Ben Okri wrote recently. “Can there be anything more intolerable than to be told you have no history to speak of and no civilisation, and then to have a new language and civilisation imposed on you?”
“All of that art-for-art’s-sake stuff is BS. All good art is political! There is none that isn’t. And the ones that try hard not to be political are political by saying, ‘We love the status quo.’ We’ve just dirtied the word ‘politics,’ made it sound like it’s unpatriotic or something. That all started in the period of state art, when you had the communists and fascists running around doing this poster stuff, and the reaction was ‘No, no, no; there’s only aesthetics.’ My point is that is has to be both: beautiful and political at the same time. I’m not interested in art that is not in the world.”
— Toni Morrison
On the one hand, Moor Mother focusing a project on the slave trade is surprising, since her work is usually broader, cutting across time, space, past, present and future. But as a Black artist whose work centers race, it’s the inescapable subject.
I’ve been mulling over artistic responses to injustice, the efficacy of political art. Is it the most meaningful method, particularly that an individual can make? Artists can’t create on the scale oppressors can bomb and choke and loot and raze. Taking part in a mass movement is impersonal and only requires putting your whole self in when it’s highly sacrificial — getting arrested, burning a police car, being part of a guerilla cell, self-immolation. (I mean Britain has recently imprisoned people for throwing soup on a Van Gogh to protest…climate change? But I think both the act and the punishment are incredibly stupid.) You’re one drop trying to wear away an implacable stone of political power and indifference. And recent mass protests have shown nothing like the impact as in the ’60s — Black Lives Matter achieved little; the nationwide Gaza campus protests resulted in disproportionate crackdowns.
And where is the unity and mass movement of the left now? It’s fractured, decentralized, split on key issues. Things fall apart indeed. Is this because our identities are more fractured, more cobbled together and associative, more performatively online and isolated rather than linked centrally with anything larger than ourselves? What does it even mean to be political anymore? Putting watermelon emojis in your display name?
As an artist, you’re not effecting real world change, but emotional/mental change in your audience — hopefully. You’re enabling people to comprehend the incomprehensible, make them feel it, parse the numbers, channel the stunning pain and injustice in a way monuments or museums or documentaries or marches and placards and even government apologies can’t affect or touch us. Because it’s the lack of those feelings — empathy, rage, what they went through — was what enabled it all to happen in the first place, and still does. And art gives voice to the voiceless, remembers the forgotten. Smells like Black spirits. We can’t anchor our souls, we need anchorites.
Political music can influence people, arguably, more strongly than other forms of political art. And hip hop has always been political — reclaiming voices, reclaiming stories, no longer hiding the messages as they were coded in gospel for instance, but instead coding the language to exclude outsiders. From the start, it was split between political and not, “Rapper’s Delight” vs. “The Message.” But any rap that is about poverty, structural inequalities, police brutality — and even that which celebrates success, excess, wealth, against all odds and barriers — is inherently political, defiantly and uncompromisingly Black.
The other vein of explicitly political rap is incorrectly remembered as ‘conscious rap.’ People forget NWA were not just gangsta rappers, they were investigated by the FBI. Ice-T, Schoolly D, Ice Cube: all explicitly political, at times. Even the Geto Boys had “Fuck A War.” Nas has that (really awful) slave skit at the beginning of “It Was Written.”
People forget how influential Public Enemy were — and how popular. “Rebel Without A Pause” and “Fight The Power” were blasting from every car stereo, every boombox across their respective summers. They opened the eyes of so many — of all colors — to defiance, to Black radicalism, to a sense of rebellion. In an interview with RBMA, Moor Mother talks about seeing the 1989 Fight The Power tour:
I went to that tour. That changed my world. When Terminator X was like, “Put up your fists”…I’ve never seen anything like that. It was all these black people with their fists up, and my little fist [was up]…It was little, but it was strong. I’ve never been that young and felt so strong in my life.
There’s an argument that political rap fell out of fashion, that it was co-opted by major labels wanting to keep the music safe. It’s true that Public Enemy could be successful when they weren’t competing with multinational corporate rap. But we had dead prez and Immortal Technique right up until Obama’s election (whatever happened to those guys though?); up until 2006 for example we had a wave of songs about Sean Bell’s shooting. Where were the George Floyd, the Sandra Bland songs, the BLM anthems?
What’s been on my mind is: we’re in times that are more political than ever, where is all the goddamn political rap? In other countries, rap is still a dangerous and defiant form of political protest; in Iran, they sentence rappers to death. Yes, OK: Paris, who had a song where he assassinates George Bush, is a stockbroker now. KRSONE performed for…Eric Adams. Ice Cube is a Trump supporter who hangs with Tucker Carlson. Boots from The Coup makes really political movies and a TV show but which was…bankrolled and streamed by Amazon (even though it climaxes with Gentrifier Iron Man’s defeat by a Black woman community activist using Communist superpowers). Common is now just a terrible, terrible actor. Talib Kweli is a toxic online troll. Worst of all, Chuck D…is a US Global Music Ambassador for the State Department — really baffling, since he’s smart enough to know how long and even recently they’ve used music as soft power to achieve foreign policy goals.
Please don’t say Kendrick is a political rapper; he’s at best political-flavored like that grapefruit-infused bottled water. Please don’t bring up Killer Mike. Even at the fringes of the underground where I lurk, you’ve got just a few cats no one has really heard of, like Ghais Guevera, Difference Machine, Carnelian. All these years of Donald Trump, and we only got one “FDT”? A year of worldwide protests about Palestine, and all we got was…Macklemore? No “Stop The Violence.” Not even a “We’re All In The Same Gang.”
(On this topic, Moor Mother’s own response in 2021 is that she thinks more artists need to get into the blues, free jazz and gospel, as liberation technologies: “We have to redefine what music is to ourselves — what we can do with this music.”)
On the one hand, I wondered if maybe there were too many huge issues confronting us that a political anthem could wrap around, or if the old school political lyrical miracles were too polemical. “Fight The Power” is so dope that we don’t ask: fight which power? And how exactly do we do that? But no one’s going to jam out to “Collectively Bargain for Fair Living Wages and Affordable Housing Access to Overcome Increasing Income Disparity and Concentration of Wealth in the Hands of the 0.1%.” YEAAAAAHHHHHH BOYYYYEEEEEEE. But I don’t think that’s really it.
I thought about maybe it was The Five Cigarette Problem — that is, as billy woods once said: five cigarettes says the revolution won’t change shit. That in the end, a nation of millions did hold us back. That we’re all so worn out, so disheartened by the boot stamping on our face, forever. But the continuing, year-long momentum about Palestine doesn’t really track with that.
There was a wave of handwringing on the loss of politics in hip hop last year during the 50th anniversary wave, pointing the finger at its co-opting by corporate synergy, major label dominance, absorption into mainstream pop music and the loss of a vibrant counterculture. (See also: Olympic breakdancing. Then you can’t unsee it.)
I felt like this missed the point in a couple of ways. While there’s a lot of anodyne dominant major label rap, it’s more possible than ever to reach listeners, have a viral hit — so if someone cut a banging “Fight The Power 2K,” it could easily take off. “Fuck Donald Trump” was that jam for a hot minute. It got a remix even. And…people listen to Noname, right? I mean, just not in Beyoncé sized portions.
Second, there are loads of rappers outside the corporate label system with reasonable-sized audiences whose work is political, just not in the way we are used to. Armand Hammer, billy woods, ELUCID — clearly, blatantly political; just not polemic, not anthemic, and increasingly their work is mixed with artistic aims, personal journeys. Open Mike Eagle’s Brick Body Kids Still Daydream? Mach-Hommy’s Haiti tetralogy? Ennals x Infinity Knives’ King Cobra? And so on. They are political, just not didactic. They’re more exploratory, complex; drawing on wider influences than slogans and fighting powers more insidious, more entrenched, internal as well as external. If race, and discrimination based on race, is ever going to be eliminated it has to be treated for what it is: a social construct.
And their work is more deeply personal. Even billy woods — the guy who doesn’t let his face be shown — is rapping about his young son on the swings. The problem with most political art is that it’s not at the scale of the human, making it impossible to emotionally connect to except with rage, despair and shock.
Moor Mother has yet to get personal, and in a lot of ways, she is the last defiantly and unapologetically political musician we have — carrying the mantle of Chuck D and others, the same fury and authority. But their work is always intensely felt.
As Ben Okri writes:
“The colonial enterprise was one great act of erasing the reality of a whole people’s existences. Writing was an act of making their history and reality real. The central task of writers of the colonial or the Black experience is to claim back their humanity…There are many Black writers who are not just writing back, but writing in celebration, wildness and freedom that have nothing to do with colonialism and empire.”
In “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” James Baldwin excoriates Uncle Tom’s Cabin for its sentimentality, its self-righteousness, its catalogue of violence. But he goes on to say that Native Son is “a continuation, a complement of that monstrous lesson it was written to destroy” — that Bigger Thomas and Uncle Tom are locked in a loop of hatred and race, and this is the essential inadequacy of the protest novel:
But our humanity is our burden, our life; we need not battle for it; we need only to do what is infinitely more difficult — that is, accept it. The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and cannot be transcended.
We need to hear wider narratives than guns and butta. The more subjective experience, complexity and nuance are explored, that’s pushing beyond hashtag activism. And the furthest beyonds are space and the future. I mean, even W.E.B. DuBois wrote science fiction.
As Marcus J. Moore wrote recently about Irreversible Entanglements (the quintet for whom Moor Mother is the vocalist):
I’ve begun to understand that protest doesn’t always combust violently; instead, it can be a whisper, a dance, a subtle nudging towards love and deliverance. Sometimes, that liberation looks like bravery…Protest doesn’t just filter through our mouths, it radiates from the soul and the bones, powered by the blast of the horn, the pluck of the string, and the stomp of the drum. The music illuminates roads through the dark, outlining paths that weren’t always visible.
At the same time, we cannot forgive or forget, and we must not forget: because the scars of history and empire haven’t begun to heal. So for Moor Mother to continue to excavate, to excoriate, to explicate as she does here: we need that too. It’s more urgent and crucial than ever.
The night after Trump’s re-election, I saw Moor Mother perform in a dim venue in London — the sun set decades ago on the British Empire, and now the sun had set on the American one. There were no stage lights, no introduction; she wandered on stage, opened her laptop and picked up the mic. She launched into “Vexed” and chanted down Babylon, mic filters and distortion bubbling up from some ancient swamp, you better run from me, who gonna fuck with me, motherfucker I’m vexed.
Up there in the dark, dreads covering her face like a Medusa, hunched over the mic, an Onyx Galas. Spotlights played over the crowd, like we were in a prison yard, kettled in a midnight uprising with drones circling overhead, Ghetto Birds 2049. A witch, a sorcerer, calling out the Devil, Harriet Tubman having a prophetic vision. She turned the seven stages of grief into the five fingers of death. She cracked the city open and dumped it into the Thames like Colston’s statue — the river passes, London passes, everything passes.
