On “Mukazi,” the closing song from her latest album, Backxwash attempts the conventional aesthetics of a triumphant hip-hop track. “It’s like my life means something, less stress these days,” Ashanti Mutinta yells over the kind of Kanye-ish victory lap beat that millennial rap fans grew up on, with a soul sample that sounds like heaven opening its gates. But don’t bother checking your headphones, because the track’s eerie deterioration is part of Mutinta’s production. Interrupting an outpouring of beneficence to loved ones, Mutinta suddenly decides “tell my homies I love ’em, even though I don’t trust ’em.” Then a redacted name gets flipped off and Mutinta lets out one last shout and just dips, letting the sample play unadulterated.
Is this parody? Not quite. This is, after all, the concluding note of a trilogy that includes 2020’s God Has Nothing to Do With This Leave Him Out of It and last year’s I LIE HERE BURIED WITH MY RINGS AND MY DRESSES. Rather, Mutinta seems unable to bear the farce: It’s as though she deeply wants to make a song like this, but far from being unable to keep a straight face, she can’t do it without breaking down. When she gets on the track, it crumples and distorts. At the end of the trilogy’s journey, hoping to achieve something like transcendence, she can only manage a hollow performance of it. Throughout HIS HAPPINESS SHALL COME FIRST EVEN THOUGH WE ARE SUFFERING, Mutinta seems to strain for faith without relief. The album begins with the ring of an unanswered telephone, followed by a pastor’s voicemail message. In his absence, unhappy voices start to fester and protest.
Mutinta spends most of HIS HAPPINESS SHALL COME FIRST EVEN THOUGH WE ARE SUFFERING in cacophonies of tense noise and gothic samples, over which she and her companions yell in voices of frustration. “Vibanda” opens on a towering, end-of-days sample of the famous Lacrimosa portion of Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor—you know, the part of the Requiem Mass that begs mercy for sinners being cast into hellfire, never to feel the sanctity of God’s love. Mutinta’s voice is cloaked in a filter straight from The Exorcist as she raps the refrain, “I’m a dog, I’m a pest, I need help, I’m possessed!”
In hip-hop sample selection, it’s traditional to reach for obscurities, but though Mutinta takes a relatively experimental approach to rap, she laces her work with familiar references: Mozart, Malcolm X in “Muzungu,” the drums from “When the Levee Breaks” on God Has Nothing to Do With This Leave Him Out of It. These are sanctified figures, the kind we’re used to turning to for guidance, the ones that ought to contrast the absent pastors and malevolent priests. Here, they seem to be chosen for the exact opposite reason: They can’t offer the relief Mutinta needs, only punctuate her spiral into despair and self-loathing. By the penultimate track, “Kumoto,” between refrains of “my evil deeds, my evil deeds,” Mutinta recalls saying something cruel to a sick classmate in their final conversation before the classmate’s funeral. The admission of sin should be cleansing, a show of repentance followed by absolution. But even after she’s done addressing specifics, Mutinta can only sputter “my evil fucking deeds,” as a piano riff beckons down, down, down.
That’s when the final track, “Mukazi,” arrives. It promises the grail, the holy truth behind the fanatical farce, and the reward for this brutal journey into the hellish depths of Mutinta’s psyche. She addresses herself with a list of things she wants to say, like, “I wanna tell you that even though it was hard/You really know who you are, no need to don a facade.” It’s left ambiguous whether she can truly bring herself to say these affirmations, whether this is the triumph she has earned. It could be.
