- An electrifying condemnation of British colonialism delivered with searing production and incisive poetry.
- "I wanna fuck up some orchestra stuff [laughs], I really wanna fuck up classical music," the Philadelphia-based poet, activist, sound experimentalist and Afrofuturist Camae Ayewa, AKA Moor Mother, said in 2017. The declaration led to the London Contemporary Orchestra reaching out for a collaboration in 2019 called The Great Bailout: a stark, blood-soaked interrogation of the Commonwealth and Great Britain's history in the slave trade performed with a four-piece orchestra and now expanded into Ayewa's ninth studio album of the same name. With free verse deliveries over orchestral instrumentation, The Great Bailout is a grand and harrowing spectacle that probes the most uncomfortable of truths while leaving no stone unturned. Where her last album, 2022's Jazz Codes, was a love letter to art, community and jazz, this LP is far more foreboding and desolate. As excerpts of poetry sound like heart-stricken dialogue and foggy soundscapes take the shape of a score, it often steps out of the confines of music and begins to approach theatre.
Above all, Ayewa is a social archeologist. Whether it's excavating Black musical histories or tracing the legacies of colonialism, recovering erased and threatened narratives is her trade. Ayewa treats the idea of linear time as an oppressive structure in that it moves from historical event to historical event without truly considering their interconnectedness. On "The Great Bailout" she pulls out receipts and then stitches them together to form what she dubs a "non-linear word map" of atrocities and injustices. "1780 St. Paul's Cathedral / 1857 V&A Museum / 4.6 million objects that span a period of 5,000 years," she recounts with a bluesy, guttural delivery on "ALL THE MONEY." "Research is a major part of my work," Ayewa said in the press release for the album, and there are countless references to specific dates, monuments and locations, though she never specifically identifies the victims of all of this construction and resulting destruction—essentially mirroring how they were left behind by history. "Europe is God / And everything else is the devil," she snarls on "DEATH BY LONGITUDE."
Like persistent industrial smog, the production here is dense and disorienting. "DEATH BY LONGITUDE" is a formless knocking of syrupy drums and electronic noise. On "LIVERPOOL WINS," a sawtooth bass pulsates while operatic croons begin to sound like wolf howls in the distance. The way Ayewa goes from a booming drawl to an urgent scream between lines is both epic and anxiety-inducing. Ambling, wordless vocals from the likes of Kyle Kidd lurk in perpetuity throughout the album, brimming with both soul and misery. Alongside Ayewa's recounting of exploitation and tragedy, they sound like the songs of trapped spirits that were never compensated for their suffering.
Ayewa glazes the beat poetry on "The Great Bailout" with satire and looming rhetorical questions—a unique (and not-so-subtle way) of letting us know who the villains of this story are. "GOD SAVE THE QUEEN" fuses hip-hop and jazz under a satirical plea for the safety of the Queen and all of her stolen riches. The irony is evident: "God save the Queen / Because who else's life has value?" Discordant chords, trap percussion and spiralling sax culminate into a nightmarish version of the anthem. Like the ghosts of exploited labour haunting elderly profiteers in their sleep, haunting whispers fill the air on tracks like "LIVERPOOL WINS" and "GUILTY," posing questions we all know the answers to: "Where do they get all the money?" "Who helped build the country and then got deported?" Meanwhile, Alya Al Sultani sings like a siren trained in opera over progressively intensifying percussion and nightmarish keys. The result is a palpable tension that takes reflections from the present and past and bleeds them all into inseparability.
In an interview with Pitchfork, Ayewa responded to a question about defining adequate protest music by bringing up the late legendary composer Sun Ra: "He tried to send us off on the path of what we can do with music, but we tend to focus more on his outfits than what he was trying to do."
The similarities are clear—both artists approach their art as liberation technology. Sun Ra's Astro-Black mythology dreamt of futures that liberate us from the perils of earth, while Ayewa's focus on quantum futurism focuses on "recovery, collection and preservation of communal memories, histories and stories" in order to free us from a prewritten ending and psychological suffering. In its force feeding of bitter, hard-to-swallow pills, The Great Bailout directly acknowledges the evils of the slave trade with imagery ("For so long we begged please / We wiped away our blood sweat and tears") that could apply to both an 18th-century plantation and a modern day Congolese cobalt mine.
Ayewa leaves room for alternate outcomes predicated on the notion that we can't light the path for a brighter future without true knowledge of the past. No matter the genre, electronic or classical, it all sounds gorgeously unsettling, the perfect backdrop for such callous themes and ominous post-blues beat poetry. A lot of artists speak about the desire for their music to instil change. With The Great Bailout, Ayewa proves yet again that no one else around can do it as tactfully as intentionally as she's been doing for the better part of a decade.
Tracklist01. GUILTY feat. Lonnie Holley & Raia Was
02. ALL THE MONEY feat. Alya Al-Sultani
03. GOD SAVE THE QUEEN feat. justmadnice
04. COMPENSATED EMANCIPATION feat. Kyle Kidd
05. DEATH BY LONGITUDE
06. MY SOULS BEEN ANCHORED
07. LIVERPOOL WINS feat. Kyle Kidd
08. SOUTH SEA feat. Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty
09. SPEM IN ALIUM