(Reprinted from the March 2024 issue of Downbeat magazine)
Moor Mother says a lot with just a few words: In a mere nine tracks she manages to encapsulate the centuries-long reckoning between the British monarchy and the millions of people it enslaved. On The Great Bailout, Moor Mother’s ninth studio album, this reckoning is more than a poetic revelation, though it is that, too. It’s a veritable tally of the costs—physical, psychological, perpetual—exacted by the Atlantic slave trade. As an activist-artist, Moor Mother delivers this accounting through atmosphere-conjuring electronica, gripping vocals, and damning phrases.
Composer Camae Ayewa is the musical mind behind the Moor Mother pseudonym. She’s also the diligent chronicler who researched the forebears whose stories she would tell. She opens with “Guilty,” a lone melodic voice introducing the day-to-day ordinariness of slavery’s injustices and the trauma it introduced to its victims. She moves on to “All The Money,” her ever-deepening voice furthering the telling with a series of numbers—key dates, the total of lives disrupted/lost, the money paid in the bartering of human flesh. She continues to track the cost of slavery in “Compensated Emancipation,” underscoring the ultimate irony—that only the enslavers ever received recompense for its abolition. Hence the album title.
The album’s second half contains some of Moor Mother’s more pointed messages. On “Liverpool Wins” she shows how Christianity whitewashed the sins of slavery (“Save our future / rotting in your mouths”) and on “South Sea,” with its wordless blues chanting, she inveighs against the one-sidedness of the historical discussion about slavery, asking with great insistence: “When and where do the ancestors speak for themselves?” She doesn’t answer explicitly. But the question itself speaks volumes.—Suzanne Lorge
The Great Bailout: (Side A) Guilty; All The Money; God Save The Queen; Compensated Emancipation. (Side B) Death By Longitude; My Soul’s Been Anchored; Liverpool Wins; South Sea; Spem In Alium. (42:34).
Personnel: Moor Mother, vocals, electronics, arrangements, compositions; Raia Was, (1); Lonnie Holley, (1); Alya Al-Sultani, (2); Justmadnice, (3); Kyle Kidd (4,6); Ambrose Akinjusire, trumpet (3); Angel Bat Dawid, clarinet (8).