This isn’t just an album, it’s a history lesson, except the effects of the history at hand – the legacy of Britain’s deep involvement with the slave trade – still very much reverberates. The Great Bailout, the ninth studio album from Moor Mother, is targeted at Britain. After the abolition of slavery, the UK Parliament enacted legislation that compensated former slave-owners. The loan that the government took out to fund this was extinguished only in 2015. The emancipated received not a penny. There are many styles of music on The Great Bailout: soul, freeform jazz, a wordless gospel, a ripping, buzzing electronica: they are all united by anger, by sorrow, and, via the poetry of Moor Mother herself, a call for justice.
Hailing from Philadelphia, Camae Ayewa – the poet, musician and activist behind Moor Mother – is an artist used to working collectively. A lead figure in the jazz poetry group Irreversible Entanglements, Ayewa’s work bisects many other groups in the Afrofuturism sphere. Many of those feature on this album – multimedia artist Lonnie Holley; violinist C Spencer Yeh; noise muso Aaron Dilloway; Kyle Kidd with their beautiful, gospel voice on ‘Compensated Emancipation’ – work in similarly collective ways. Their talents bring many voices to the album. But the album is Ayewa’s, and her strong modulations call out the present-day legacy of slavery. The album is haunted: Ayewa’s inventory of property looted from Africa starts off ‘All the Money’, and haunting spirits rise to witness inequities of the present day: deportation, the loss of citizenship, institutional cruelty and more. An astonishing album.
