They say the universe has a way of gifting you exactly what you've been fiending for. So does the algorithm. Because I swear social media has been feeding me an endless loop of astrological predictions and tips for ancestral veneration. It feels like being called-out online has been replaced by being called on. Once relegated solely to the evangelicals, the calling used to be something that only came from on high. Now, I'll be damned if it ain't coming from my wifi.
'Round midnight last Friday, while the partial lunar eclipse in Pisces had my whole timeline in a tizzy, a couple of albums from two of our brightest supernovas dropped. The timing feels fated. Like the cyclical rebirth of a primordial Black cosmology that never truly dies but remains unseen (or, hidden from the mainstream) until the time comes to signal a sea change.
Even the title of the first offering — Erykah Badu and the Alchemist's long-promised collaborative LP — was kept secret until hours before its release. If you couldn't tell from the single "Witch Doctor," Badu is back in her bag. Before The World Blows opens with a 7-minute incantation called "Echos" on which she personifies every bit of her conjure-woman ethos. By the final verse, she sounds downright ancient. Not so much singing the words but chanting them. Calling them into being. Sometimes they spew forth like a guttural eruption. Or spells being drawn out of her by some animated force. It's church. It's channeling. It's childbirth.
If you leave this song on repeat for hours at a time, like I have, you might tap into an altered state of being. Or you might pop your thirteenth gummy trying to chase down your transcendence.
The second offering, by way of Saul Williams, ushers in something even quieter but more disruptive. Leap Life, the seventh studio album from the spoken word artist/actor/musician sounds like the soundtrack to a seance. (He's actually hosting several "listening seances" across the country for the new album this month.) Brooding and meditative at times, it leaps into climactic rhythms that seem to prep the way for necessary and total destruction. My favorite lyric on the album comes halfway into "13 Moons" when he drops this gem: "The child asked, 'But why so much blood' / The elder answered, 'This is our cycle.'"
Saul told me that the album is built to trigger "internal work." No stranger to spiritual possession himself, he feels more intent on sharing a how-to manual for those eager to give themselves over to the eternal. It's a type of empowerment that runs counter to everything we associate with power in this lifetime.
Both Erykah and Saul came through saging the planet, like double wicks of frankincense and myrrh. Leap Life and Before The World Blows feel like they're in direct conversation. With each other and also with us. On these new offerings, both of them are out to spark something revolutionary, but it starts with deep internal work first.
Everybody keeps waiting for Black music's response to the political and economic turmoil of these times because we've always been the canaries in this coalmine. We've been the first responders, too. Now that we've tapped out on topping the charts, one of the benefits might be that Black music can go back to building up culture(s) over commerce. Maybe a hip-hop generation hellbent on seeking knowledge of self in its coming-of-age heyday is returning in middle-age to its spiritual center. Less new age, more old soul; it's a psychic reminder. We were griots once. We had medicine folk. Hoodoo practitioners and magical herbalists. Shaman and divinators. We were witches, too. "And you eat it up (yeah) / 'Cause you need it (yeah)," as Badu intones on "Witch Doctor." "That's witchcraft, that's witchcraft (ayy)."
CLOSING SHOTS:
- Diligence II
Speaking of the ancestors, Busta Rhymes' collaborative album with Dilla also dropped last week. It took me years — and Dan Charnas' masterpiece Dilla Time — to truly catch up to the producer's genius. Even two decades after his death, he's still miles ahead. - Al Green, Mary Woodson and The Night of The Grits
Aliya S. King, the renowned hip-hop journalist, has taken to telling the stories behind some of her most legendary stories. And her latest, behind-the-scenes YouTube episode about her investigative reporting 20 years ago on Mary S. Woodson — the woman who mysteriously died right after scalding Al Green with a pot of hot grits — is the reason why she, too, is legend. - 2Pac's murder trial
Now that a jury has convicted Duane 'Keffe D' Davis of first-degree murder — acknowledging what the streets of Compton likely knew to be true decades before any of us — may Tupac Shakur Amaru rest everlasting up in Thugz Mansion.
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