You’re in the Deep South and it’s so hot that a thick film of sweat has become the top layer of your skin. You’re in a small, weathered-and-worn black church, the type that’s walls seem to shimmy and shake when the folks inside get a little too excited. A bright piano riff dances through the congregation. The choir sways and sings in unison as the strongest member of the choir reveals herself to be Mavis Staples. At the end of his second verse, the choir’s leader, Benjamin Booker, croons, “everybody brown can get the fuck on the ground,” before he takes us to the bridge: “see we thought that we saw that he had a gun.”
This is the atmosphere that New Orleans by way of Tampa Bay artist Benjamin Booker paints on the title track of his sophomore album, Witness. The gospel-inspired, Staples-assisted song examines what exactly it means to bear witness to something heinous, like the incessant murder or, to be frank, lynchings of black and brown people at the hands of the state. Will you just stand there, take action, or go on with life because this is all routine? Booker doesn’t come armed with solutions in hand and he doesn’t need to. He’s curious and angry as all hell about the wave of racism being reported, televised, think-pieced, and podcasted on a constant dystopian loop.
Booker’s eponymous debut from 2014 was a youthful collection of spirited punk and blues rock that captured the aura of aimless youth and Southern blues. Its riffs were as raw as exposed flesh wounds, successfully evoking luminaries like the Detroit Cobras, Blind Willie Johnson, and the Stooges as well as contemporaries like Alabama Shakes, Courtney Barnett, and Ty Segall. Witness bears only a few jolts of the adrenaline and delicious chaos that oozed all over that album. One such instance is the brisk, high-energy opener, “Right on You,” which is about the inevitability of death creeping up behind. On the highlight “Motivation,” Booker expresses pain and frustration through polished arrangements and clear lyrics.
But the raw, carnal fervor of Booker’s punk numbers is still present—and sometimes it’s more pronounced—on Witness’ acoustic and naked electric blues and soul, when the opposing forces of a lush or refined landscape and Booker’s gravely voice work in concert. “Believe,” the album’s strongest track, uses this new direction keenly. Booker finds himself lamenting an overwhelming feeling of confusion and hopelessness while an amalgam of electric blues, gospel, and soul swell behind him.
While Booker has grown into his comfort zone as a songwriter on Witness, he had to leave home to find it. As he explains in an essay about the creation of Witness, a bout of writer’s block and a thirst to escape that aforementioned dystopian loop of racism in America led him to do just as his hero James Baldwin did in the late 1940s. Baldwin flew to Paris without speaking a lick of French; Booker, meanwhile, arrived in Mexico without speaking a lick of Spanish. Both felt it necessary to escape America, her porcelain hands tightly wrung around their throats. But Booker spent only a month away. After getting into a physical altercation outside of a club, he came to the realize that hostility can’t be escaped; it’s right on you, and it’s best to confront it.
There isn’t a clear answer for how one should react to bearing witness. Some people bear witness and get politically active; some take up respectability politics, refusing to acknowledge what’s true. Some people get broken down, mentally and physically. In his essay on Witness, Booker also cites a passage from “Reflections of a Maverick,” a conversation between Julius Lester and James Baldwin published by The New York Times in 1984. Baldwin, armed with the artist’s duty when acting as a witness, says: “I know what I’ve seen and what I’ve seen makes me know I have to say, I know.” In that sense, Baldwin and Booker are in kind. Booker reacts by looking inward, examining current political, personal, and cultural strife, and conversely making retro music feel modern. But he speaks for no one other than himself, to let it be known no evil goes unseen.
