My favorite song Kele Okereke has ever written—hell, one of my favorite songs ever written, period—is Bloc Party’s “I Still Remember.” The swooning electric guitars rendered the private, quiet pain of gay adolescent yearning on the scale of a fists-in-the-air epic, tracing every incandescent high and bitter low. The song was a bold move in 2007, when the indie rock scene was even more homogeneous than it is now, and it endures over a decade later, having been embraced by new generations of young queer people.
As with so many other songs in Okereke’s catalogue, “I Still Remember” proves his gift for subtle, powerful songwriting about subjects as personal as they are political. But the clunky conceptual scaffolding of 2042 often obscures this gift from view. Like slowthai’s Nothing Great About Britain, 2042 announces itself as a blazing indictment of institutional racism in the United Kingdom. slowthai’s record succeeded largely on the strength of his storytelling, which gave listeners intimate, ground-level glimpses of life under white supremacy. Okereke reaches instead, too often, for stock characters and statistics, painting a vivid picture of racist oppression while neglecting to flesh out the people who live under that oppression.
On “St Kaepernick Wept,” for instance, Okereke relates the story of a man shot to death by police while his children watched, and then concludes with the blunt clunker of a lyric, “He was just another hand-out for welfare/Headed to the prison-industrial complex.” It’s a strange compulsion that recurs throughout the record, Okereke gesturing broadly at sociological concepts while flinching away from smaller human stories. His stated goal, granted, is nothing less than sweeping, structural change—“Let England burn,” he sings, “so we can start again”—but the broad strokes of his lyrical approach often divest his subjects of distinctions.
The stronger moments of 2042 are undercut, too, by jarring sequencing. In the record’s first half, listeners are rushed from earnest hagiography (“St Kaepernick”) to satire (“Guava Rubicon”) to “My Business,” a rap song with all the edge of the antagonist’s big moment in a Disney Channel musical. Past the halfway point, the record is a smoother listen—more sonically cohesive, more given to the kinds of sweet, subtle love songs that Okereke perfected on his last solo outing, Fatherland. “Natural Hair” is particularly lovely, a lilting flirtation between two black boys, as is “Back Burner,” which traces a love story that feels lived-in, tested by conflict and strengthened by years of togetherness: “No, I don’t fuck with The Smiths, but to The Cure I can get down.”
There’s a speed-bump in this back half, though, which is particularly emblematic of the problems that plague this album. After the sleek, sexy slow burn of “Catching Feelings,” Okereke inserts “A Day of National Shame (Interlude),” an excerpt of British Member of Parliament David Lammy’s blistering indictment of the wrongful deportation of legal Caribbean immigrants. He backs Lammy’s speech with an echoing guitar track, calm and spacey and deeply tonally inappropriate. He follows it with “Ocean View,” a featherlight waltz without any real connection to the ideas Lammy advanced. It’s hard to say whether 2042 would be a more compelling record with more appropriate sequencing, or if this sprawling sixteen-track album would have made, perhaps, for a better set of separate EPs. What’s all too clear, unfortunately, is that 2042 stumbles precisely where Okereke has proven himself so capable of soaring.
