Across eight albums, Moor Mother—aka Camae Ayewa—has bore witness to history’s sins, threading connections between past, present, and future in a sensory overload fusing industrial noise, “witch rap,” and free jazz. “Going to see Emmett Till out his casket/Beaten to death with a hatchet/For whistlin’ at white girls,” she rapped on 2016’s Fetish Bones. On 2020’s Circuit City, she traced the racial disparities fueling the housing crisis. And on 2022’s Jazz Codes, she documented the erasure of Black genres in an attempt to rescue them from institutional amnesia.
On The Great Bailout, Moor Mother interrogates the knotty relationship between Europe and Africa, confronting the enduring legacy of colonialism. Journeying back to the 19th century, she shines a spotlight on Britain’s Slavery Abolition Act of 1833—a perverse form of reparations that compensated former slave owners, to the tune of £20 million. The enslaved people in the British Caribbean received nothing; rather, they were subjected to a four-year transition period, during which they were forced to work without pay. The Guardian called it “the largest bailout in British history until the bailout of the banks in 2009”. Funded by British taxpayers across generations, the debt was only repaid in 2015.
By grounding The Great Bailout in the bedrock of British colonialism, Ayewa unearths an overlooked narrative of slavery, one often eclipsed by tales of American enslavement. Simultaneously, she connects the dispersed voices of the African diaspora by mapping out the far-reaching echoes of European imperialism, and joining forces with peers like British Iraqi soprano Alya Al-Sultani. Lines like “Who’s without citizenship?” and “Who’s still burning?” offer reminders of history’s grip on today’s crises, whether in Palestine, Sudan, or along the the Mexican-American border.
Unfathomable sorrow and controlled fury give the album its shape. On the opening “GUILTY,” Lonnie Holley sings over Raia Was’ siren calls, “We watched the slave ships being unloaded,” as harpist Mary Lattimore plucks out gossamer melodies; Moor Mother’s voice rises in the mix, whispering “Guilty, guilty,” before turning to an accusation: “Paying the crimes off/Did you pay off the trauma?” Built from sputtering drum machines, jazz horns, and queasy electronic tones, The Great Bailout is a disorienting hall of mirrors with no exit in sight. Every uneven loop and distorted blast amplifies the feeling of being trapped in a Dutch angle. Much like Moor Mother’s Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes, The Great Bailout revels in discomfort. “ALL THE MONEY” suggests an illbient take on a Jordan Peele thriller, and the glitch-corrupted “LIVERPOOL WINS,” co-produced with Wolf Eyes’ Aaron Dilloway, feels like waking into a nightmare.
The journey through “COMPENSATED EMANCIPATION,” co-produced with noise musician C. Spencer Yeh, is particularly jarring. Gravelly drones conjure dystopian atmospheres shot through with Kyle Kidd’s gospel cries. “At any moment, they’ll be coming around,” Moor Mother hisses, oscillating between rage and panic, before a choking silence gives way to the opening chimes of “DEATH BY LONGITUDE.” The penultimate track, “SOUTH SEA,” serves as a purging ritual. Amid the mournful, wordless singing of Angel Bat Dawid and Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty, Moor Mother intones a meditation on history and suffering. She evokes the image of slave ships, of institutionalized death, of cruelty beyond measure. “We in the present are constantly injecting ourselves into the past,” she says, her voice firm and unforgiving. “The gaze of history shapes it. Crystallizes it. Collapses it upon the linear timeline. How do we keep ourselves tethered to the narrative? When and where do the ancestors speak for themselves?” The Great Bailout does not pose answers to those questions, but by asking them, it keeps history alive, and reclaims liberation from the slaveholders and their descendants, whose legacy ties itself up in knots to evade accountability.
