Moor Mother: “Guilty” (feat. Lonnie Holley, Raia Was & Mary Lattimore)

Last night, I revisited Circuit City, an avant-garde theatrical piece by Camae Ayew, known by her sobriquet, Moor Mother. A minute into “Act 1 - Working Machine” goes by before Ayew, audibly distressed, states, “There’s been so much trauma!” A maelstrom of keys and brass, uptempo and relentless, communicates the urgency of her testimony, observations delivered in bold stanzas, frustrated and shaky. As Circuit City is meant to take place in the living room of an apartment whose landlord is a corporation, Ayew’s four-act treatise on the concept of property ownership is set in a future that seems all too present. It’s a message packaged in tension and gravity, like a warning.

“They way they house us. The way they make home… the way they make home… a dream. A wish. Anything but a human right.”

A new solo work by Ayew titled, The Great Bailout, is scheduled to release 3/8 via ANTI- and examines British colonialism. “Guilty,” with aid from Lonnie Holley, Raia Was and Mary Lattimore, is the first track from the LP to surface. Like Circuit City, trauma takes center stage:

“Taxpayers of erasure… of relapse… of amnesia.
Paying the crimes off. Did you pay off the trauma?”

Ayew’s tone has no less conviction, but musically “Guilty” has the air of a meditative requiem, 10-plus minutes musical improvisation with elements that drift, swell, and glide.

Links:
Moor Mother — Official website / Instagram / Twitter / Facebook

Links, knowledge, and sounds were handed over courtesy of Stereo Sanctity:

How do you engage the evocative gift that is Moor Mother’s latest album The Great Bailout? Only by following the trail of verbal and sonic poetry delivered. Only by letting Moor Mother and her co-conspiring collaborators be the tour guide.

Coming out on March 8, The Great Bailout is Moor Mother aka Camae Ayewa’s ninth studio album and third with ANTI- Records, with production contributions on various tracks from Lonnie Holley, Mary Lattimore, Vijay Ayer, Angel Bat Dawid, Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty, Aaron Dilloway and more. Called “the poet laureate of the apocalypse,” by Pitchfork, Ayewa’s music contains multitudes of instruments, voices and cacophony that take on themes of Afrofuturism and collective memory with the forebearers of jazz, hip hop and beat poetry in mind.

“Research is a major part of my work, and researching history - particularly African history, philosophy and time - is a major interest,” Moor Mother said of the music’s focus on the effects of British colonialism. “Europe and Africa have a very intimate and brutal relationship throughout time. I’m interested in exploring that relationship of colonialism and liberation, in this case in Great Britain.”

So what is the terrain we are invited to navigate? The backdrop is of two Acts of Parliament: the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act that established a four-year period of ‘apprenticeship’ during which the enslaved in the British Caribbean would transition from being ‘slaves’ to being free. And the 1835 Slavery Abolition Act – a loan that allowed the British Government to borrow £20 million [£17 billion in today’s money] with which to ‘compensate’ 46,000 slave owners who were losing their ‘property’ because of the legal abolition of slavery. A loan that was one of the largest in history. A loan that equaled 40% of the Treasury’s annual income. A loan that was only finally paid off in 2015. A loan that all payers of tax in the UK helped to pay off — which means that all those descendants of the once enslaved, including the so-called Windrush Generation, also helped to pay it off.

Today Moor Mother has shared The Great Bailout opening track, “Guilty.” Featuring Lonnie Holley, Mary Lattimore and Raia Was, it is a tender, atmospheric song that starts our tour through the haunting, rendered by the gentle, almost melancholic instrumentation and calling forth the crimes that were paid off but still live. The exquisite beauty and horror conjured in the song is simultaneously dream and traumatic nightmare. “Guilty” is astounding for the poignancy and tenderness in which it invites us to dwell in our journey of facing Britain’s not just complicity in enslavement and its afterlives, but also its very making as a built environment and social-political formation.

“Displacement and its effects are not discussed enough,” Moor Mother says. “The PTSD of displacement should be a focus, and as we have the opportunity to learn about things happening in the world, we also have the opportunity to learn about ourselves. We’ve been through so many different acts of systematic violence.”

Sincerely,
Letters From A Tapehead