One Basquiat x H&M collection at a time, the capitalist state warps radical art to its own ends. Consider the CIA front that, in 1961, sent Nina Simone overseas for a concert in newly independent Nigeria. The high priestess of soul, famously fond of referring to her country as the “United Snakes of America,” had temporarily become a patsy in the war on communism. On “Black Opps,” the opening track of his new album, LOWER, Benjamin Booker pays sneering homage to the U.S. government’s history of covertly undermining African American liberation. The message: This game wasn’t winnable then, and it certainly isn’t winnable now. Booker has seemingly spent the seven years since his last record swallowing down all the hopelessness and dread he could hold. Now he’s spitting it back up like bile.
Even as it grappled with systemic racism and police brutality, 2017’s Witness was warm and hospitable; steeped in blues, soul, and R&B; all well-trod wood and candlelight; rich with the humid air of Booker’s adopted home of New Orleans. On LOWER, night has fallen, and there’s a cold wind blowing. “Give a little love,” Booker croons—shivers, really. “They’ve bugged the house again/Give a little love, they’re on the lawn.” To make this record, he sought out producer Kenny Segal, known for his work with rap acts like Armand Hammer and billy woods, and together they systematically drained Booker’s work of color, light, and heat—in a good way. “Black Opps” renders a hi-fi blast zone littered with 808 rubble. An irradiated guitar riff, both funereal and militant, accompanies Booker as he surveys the wreckage, delivering his black mass: “Hallelujah, dying fighting for a life I ain’t had yet.”
Segal comes from underground hip-hop and Booker from retro-leaning rock’n’roll, but LOWER doesn’t sound like any of those genres’ past collisions. Instead, it takes the basic textures of rap rock—boom-bap beats, Deftones’ icy ambiance, the corroded shredding of “She Watch Channel Zero?!”—and fashions them into a new strain of beat-centric grunge. Lead single “Lwa in the Trailer Park” submerges Booker’s voice in a pool of shoegaze that ripples around the steady pulse of a kick drum. Later in the album, “Same Kind of Lonely” features a provocative juxtaposition of samples: real audio from a school shooting, followed by the laugh of Booker’s baby daughter. Call it poor taste, but courtesy isn’t worth much when you’re living with the fear that one day, your child might not come home.
Sometimes, LOWER’s sheer scope—which encompasses homelessness (“Pompeii Statues”), alcoholism (“Hope for the Night Time”), and the surveillance state (“Black Opps”)—threatens to collapse on itself. “I see the way they talk about people on this side of town,” Booker sings on “Lwa,” a stormy meditation on inadequacy and aspiration that’s poignant in large part because he has lived it, growing up in a Tampa Bay trailer park where neighbors once burned a cross in his family’s front yard. “The wrong side of the tracks” may be an antiquated framing, but the legacy of redlining means it will remain an evocative one. To separate Booker’s lyrics from Segal’s soundscapes is also to deny their combined impact. Gleefully inviting a new wave of satanic panic, “Speaking with the Dead” gives Booker a demonic, pitched-down doppelgänger before morphing into an ambient found-sound piece that would be at home on Yves Tumor’s experimental pop opus Safe in the Hands of Love. Burrowing deep into the mix or disappearing altogether, Booker becomes more unknowable, unreachable, and more compelling for it.
“Speaking with the Dead” is one of two songs that form the album’s harrowing core. The other is called “Rebecca Latimer Felton Takes a BBC.” It’s a knowing piece of rage bait, recasting the first woman and last slaveowner to serve in the United States Senate as a racial fetishist and Booker as one of the men working the fields on her plantation. “Was it hard to not think of me, working there and glistening in the sun?” he taunts, glitching like a ransom caller with a poor connection. “You watched me from the porch and touched yourself, didn’t you?” The image of a white woman seduced by a Black man is already charged, and what’s more—she wants it. “Did your husband beat you too?” A whip cracks in the background. Felton, as Booker sketches her, is just one corrupted link in a chain of exploitation. If that’s not jarring enough, there’s a genuine jump scare: a sudden crash of violin and cello that could make the most stoic soul sit bolt upright in bed.
Still, Booker offers pockets of solace amid the outrage—the jangle-pop guitar on “New World,” molten washes of feedback on would’ve-been Otis Redding jukebox hit “Show and Tell.” The noise and distortion he and Segal summon can disturb, but it can also comfort. “Slow Dance in a Gay Bar” is LOWER’s gentle act one stunner, built around a gorgeous sample loop that mimics the skip of a dusty vinyl record. “I am beginning to see the beauty all around me,” Booker sings, though the overall effect is not so much a return to the light as a growing familiarity with darkness. Many 12-step recovery programs teach that the process of healing cannot begin until one “hits bottom,” a process Booker describes in wry detail on closer “Hope for the Night Time.” Here, the album’s title finally snaps into focus; it’s not a threat but a command. When they go low, keep digging.
