Moor Mother
Black Flight (feat. Saul Williams)
Don Giovanni/Redeye
Moor Mother, aka Afrofuturist poet Camae Ayewa from Philadelphia, returns with a punchy track from her forthcoming LP, Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes.
Produced by King Britt, Black Flight is set to a frantic beat that sounds like the pounding of feet running away from something sinister, but with the drums have a reverberating quality, like echoing in a corridor where there is little chance for escape.
Moor Mother spits free-flowing verses about the current African-American dystopian reality in the U.S.A.: “Prison chase, freedom race, I’ve been replaced, memory erased; no pace, cold case, blank face, defaced”. With the rhymes punctuated by the chorus that repeats unnervingly: “Black flight – gotta get away”.
Beat poet laureate Saul Williams appears in a late verse, taking a more elliptical approach, bringing in Egyptian mathematics and Sun Ra cosmology in a softly spoken word delivery in his rich voice. Having both female and male/upcoming and veteran poets here on the same track is a dynamite collaboration that embodies the ongoing tradition of radical black poetry.
With the rollicking earlier single After Images, with its stomping beat, fat synth and chilling warning to white America (“cause after they come for me they gonna come for you/ The truth will do you no good here!”), Moor Mother’s new album should put her front and centre of a new generation of angry yet creative musicians and poets that call out the evils of our absurd modern world, and all set to driving rhythms you can raise your fists and bang your head to.
PAUL DOUGHTY
