The science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany wrote that the raison d'être of the genre was not about creating an imagined future, but to consider a world in which art can provide “a significant distortion of the present.” To travel through time, to be plopped out on the other end of a wormhole was to excavate the present moment and remix the past.
For the Afrofuturist music critic Kodwo Eshun, this thinking was essential. The art of the Afrodiaspora, from Du Bois’ double consciousness to Sun Ra’s extraterrestrial imagination, was united by a desire to create contexts “that encourage a process of disalienation,” by reconsidering what was possible in the present. Camae Ayewa (a.k.a. Moor Mother) follows in the footsteps of these radical time travelers. Her latest LP *Fetish Bones, *is a discombobulating journey from the 19th century to the end of the world—through government-sponsored racism, redlining, and the carceral state, revisiting every single wrongful slaying from Emmett Till to Sandra Bland. It’s music that implicates, reveals culpabilities, and creates a space to learn from its inherent difficulty.
Ayewa is a Philadelphia-based artist and community activist who has been a fixture in the city for over a decade. Moor Mother began in 2012 as a solo project, and under the moniker she’s released dozens of EPs on Bandcamp, recasting the protest song as a moving electronic collage. According to her own description of the music, it falls within “blk girl blues” and “project housing bop” to “slaveship punk.” These self-made categories allow Ayewa’s music to be fluid in terms of expression, yet consistently grounded in a sense of history. It is very much influenced by the idiosyncrasies and formal experimentation of Sun Ra, but also aligned with the chaotic joy of Shabazz Palaces. Her music is without a doubt confrontational, it often asks you to not only suspend your disbelief, but open yourself up to punishment as well. *Fetish Bones *is her masterclass on creating a sensory experience that interrogates your complicity, pushing you through a door that sends you hurtling through time.
The opener “Creation Myth,” is an astonishing stand-alone musical experience. The way Ayewa arranges sounds reflects a non-hierarchical kind of thinking. Dissonant textures are forced to work in tandem, creating a strange but discomforting beauty. The opening seconds find an electronic warble resembling a tractor beam sharing space with serene flutes, a whispered poem, and a percussive pitter-patter.
If you pay attention to the whispered voice beneath the noise, the content of the nearly inaudible words becomes chilling: “Four out of five every day a slaying/Two black girls hanging/Three black men choking/Gun to your face when you praying/Or get lynch in ya cell for changing lanes.” When Ayewa enters the scene, digital noise starts to coalesce at the song’s center, and she begins reciting for the next four minutes a harrowing poem that tries to get a handle on the black experience at a nearly molecular level: “Your DNA, the processes of your chromosomes, systematically forming to prevent one's own annihilation.” The narrator of Ayewa’s poem reconstructs the feeling of racing through history by revisiting moments of historical trauma: “The idea is to travel throughout the race riots from 1866 to the present time...I’ve been bleeding since 1866/Dragged my bloody self to 1919/And bled thru the summer being slaughtered by whites.” The writing here is allusive and surrealist but powerfully direct in its effect. It’s a piece that could be endlessly analyzed: The mixture of words and sounds evoke the visceral intimacy of shared trauma, and it turns a history of abstract suffering into a close-proximity experience.
This is not to say the other 12 tracks are slouches. The album is made up of a series of noise poems, mostly just over two minutes long, wherein Ayewa crafts remarkably dense stories. Take “Deadbeat Protest,” which resembles a Death Grips song in its frenetic pace and howling flow. “Trying to save my black life by fetishizing my dead life” Ayewa gasps, making clear the pitfalls of self-centered allyship. In other moments, like in “KBGK,” she looks at how not only the government but capitalism has not only failed the black community but commodified them: “No use for crying/They catalog buying/And everything for sale/Even ya swag in ya public housing.”
To live in this album is to be escorted from the past, to present, to future in thirty-second chunks. It happens in part by Ayewa’s woozy selection of both futuristic and anachronistic sounds: needling synths interact with saxophones and grainy sermons in dizzying fashion. This is most evident in “Chain Gang Quantum Blues,” a dazzling and temporally unmoored collage made from the recordings of a chain gang singing through static dissonance. In moments like these, where found sound is heavily processed and queered, the album showcases a frank and unsparing documentarian touch. Ayewa’s great skill is to make the evidence of the past even more uncomfortable, somehow even more present.
The last words you hear on the album in “Time Float” are: “Use my dead body as a raft to survive the flooding that’s coming.” In a sentence, she compacts an entire economy of images and events and fears into a single imagined event. Yet in Ayewa’s delivery, it is not brutally sad or even wistful, it is a reminder of the hardships of love under the regime of historical trauma. In those last words there is a sense of sacrifice and duty to the community, that at the end, even under duress, someone is there. It embodies the experience of the album: You will never be able to unhear *Fetish Bones *because it will have made you a witness.
