A couple of years ago I asked my oldest nephew what music he was listening to. He mentioned the name Blood Orange. I didn't follow it up. Kids, what do they know.? The previous time I got recommendations from he and his siblings they were pushing Mumford & Sons on me.
All this time later I've finally got round to Blood Orange, largely because he, (the name, is a moniker for Dev Hynes), put out a new album recently, Negro Swan, which has made some waves. And no wonder listening to it. It's a fine record. Soulful, considered and clearly an extended comment on the world we live in and particularly America, as turbulent now as it's been since the late Sixties.
In many ways this feels like a companion piece to the Janelle Morae record Dirty Computer that I wrote about in such glowing terms yesterday. This is not such a strident album but it is a State of the World address in a different way. Like Morae it totes no guns and seems at times like an almost academic investigation into black experience, spirituality and soul.
In the man's own words: ' My newest album is an exploration into my own and many types of black depression, an honest look at the dark corners of black existence, and the ongoing anxieties of queer / people of color. A reach back into childhood and modern traumas, and the things we do to get through it all. The underlying thread through each piece on the album is the idea of HOPE, and the lights we can turn on or within ourselves with a hopefully positive outcome of helping others out of their darkness.'
All power to the Blood Orange elbow and maybe I should listen to my nephew more. Negro Swan is a graceful and beautiful creature. As with Dirty Computer it focuses on the marginalised at a moment of great and explicit political threat but in contrast chooses to internalise, and in doing so traces out a significant and impressive landscape of consciousness.
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