The most pernicious lies about Canadian culture—that it is fledgling, subpar, or one-note—are self-generated. A month ago, I read a 1964 short story where the late novelist Mavis Gallant describes a photo of an expat family taken on a “Canadian-looking lawn.” It takes skill to make something as dull a patch of grass seem even more dull, though it is a pretty effective quip. Growing up in the Toronto suburbs in the ’90s, that same derisive shorthand was used to poke fun at homegrown radio and television content that conformed, lacked imagination: “It sounds Canadian,” “It looks Canadian,” we’d say.
The recent, unprecedented interest in Canada’s youth culture stems mainly from rappers, pop stars, and YouTubers—many black and brown, or children of immigrants—who leapfrogged these civic tropes to find global success. But in the rush to canonize this digital generation and their savvy, we’ve subtly encouraged the ahistorical idea that culture is somehow new here. For decades artists have flouted the overwhelming whiteness of Canadian sensibilities, considered their ancestries, made the pilgrimage “home,” returned, and eked out space. Exile is part of the Canadian story—almost all of us are settlers on this land—and this forgetting helps no one.
Singer and songwriter Zaki Ibrahim is part of this history. The Secret Life of Planets is Ibrahim’s second full-length release in a 12-year career, half of which was spent fervently gigging around Toronto’s R&B, rap, and house music scenes, before decamping for her fatherland in South Africa. In Cape Town, she found new inspiration in the loping cadence of kwaito, recorded parts of her 2012, Polaris Prize-nominated LP Every Opposite, and lent her flushed, practiced vocals to collaborations with local musicians as well as Hyperdub producers like LV and Scratcha DVA.
Along the way to arriving at Planets, Ibrahim has gathered new methods, sounds, and communities, recombining old ideas to make something all her own. This analog/digital, past/future, sensory/tactical approach to music-making is her hallmark. On The Secret Life of Planets (a title that riffs on a kitschy 1979 Stevie Wonder album), she flexes this musical vision—helped by Toronto producers/instrumentalists Alister Johnson and Casey MQ—with singular focus and nuanced whimsy. Try, but it’s very difficult to pick a favorite patch of sound from the Planets’ 13 tracks, her best album to date.
Despite its title, Planets is less liturgical science fiction and more soulful and sublime, focusing on cosmos of human experience. Ibrahim’s space odyssey somehow feels like both the dewy coast of British Columbia, where she was born, and South Africa’s sun-blanched expanse. Musically, she’s connecting a lineage of black styles across eras and oceans. Emotionally, she’s narrating a moment when time collapsed: her father’s death, followed four months later by the birth of her baby boy. Could life be more literal? Planets captures the giddy wonder that can come with immense despair. That moment when you raise your wet cheeks to the sun, our closest star and anchor, and find some peace in the immensity.
“Intro” feels the most familiar to the astral theme; it’s the dulcet, soft-lensed opening credits of a planetarium laser show, orbited by voices that are gurgling, somber, and far-off like a transmission. For most of Planets, Ibrahim and her producers dig into a range of earthbound electronic sounds: “Get There” is the lucid, bass-heavy two-step of the rave, “Love Made Naked” skips backward to boogie, and “Do the Thing Right” vibrates like a sweaty function, as vocal chants, percussion and horn sounds collide over the tipsy wub of Afrohouse. In the past, Ibrahim’s affinity for four-on-the-floor house and improvisational vocal rhythms have provided beautifully literal tributes to her South African return. But on Planets, she’s syncretized these interests into something of her own that sounds placeless, inquisitive, undeterred.
There are some thrilling pop moments too. “Cut Loose” follows a sultry loop and releases into rapturous, funky, wall-of-sound harmonies. On “Diamond Time,” which feels equally indebted to Chaka Khan and the warm bounce and clean lines of ’90s British soul, Johnson and MQ freak a range of wild synth sounds and muted handclaps, but it’s the big hook that takes it away. “I known love through the ages,” Ibrahim and her chorus exhale in unison, before soaring over the beat, “Big enough to blow your mind.” And on the incandescent lullaby “Galileo,” there’s a spotlight on Ibrahim’s most compelling gift: her moonlit voice, contoured by emotion.
Ibrahim’s eclipsing talent has been tenaciously honed outside of the pressures of a homogenizing industry that would benefit from making her its star. Planets isn’t just a product of black American or South African music styles; it’s multiple identities make it distinctly Canadian. It’s the work of an optimist whose voice wasn’t silenced by the confines of an unimaginative industry; it’s expansive in effort, and by sheer existence.
