No Album Left Behind: Jamila Woods’ LEGACY! LEGACY!

One of the record’s hardest-won truths is Woods’ own capacity to be heard and loved: “I used to be afraid of myself / Hung my smile on a shelf,” she shares on “EARTHA.” “BETTY” is a love letter as much to funk pioneer Betty Davis as it is to Woods, and to every black woman told she is too much or not enough. An homage to the woman onetime husband Miles called “too young and wild,” “BETTY” sets the stage with its messages of unconditional self-love and independence. After years of hiding from her own power, Woods is “falling for” herself: “I am different,” she sings, tenderly and defiantly, the words shimmering in a wash of reverb. Her reference is to Davis’ 1974 record, and the 2017 documentary named for it, They Say I’m Different.

Woods has battled to find her own beauty and bravery illuminated in the triumphs of these greatests of greats. It’s a marker of her hard-fought down-to-the-bone confidence that she refuses to fight for your attention or your agreement. HEAVN was unrelentingly cozy and vibrant, even when it took up the worst offenses against black bodies and souls; at first listen, LEGACY! LEGACY!’s dispersed production and coolly-composed vocal delivery might feel a bit flat and washed-out in comparison. Listen a bit closer and it’s clear it’s just a different kind of power: There’s a strength and self-assuredness in Woods’ new resignation. “GIOVANNI,” for one, finds her sounding absolutely unassailable. “Permission denied to rearrange me,” she declares, protected from white racism and “Hotep” misogyny by her grandmother’s prayers, her mother’s love and Nikki Giovanni’s radical poetry. Each poised syllable lays down another brick for her spiritual and psychological fortress, building to a rousing guitar solo.

Just over half the tracks on LEGACY! LEGACY! center the lives and work of female artists, refusing to assent to all the ways women of color are made to feel small. “I’m all out of fucks to give,” Woods proclaims to her unimaginative critics over sparkling, swirling synths on the measured but playful “ZORA,” channeling the ever-original Hurston. On the languid, bouncy “EARTHA,” a tribute to effervescent icon Kitt, a woman who had no interest in compromising with men, Woods’ selfish partner is met with a matter-of-fact “I’m tired of your shit.” “BETTY” lambasts fragile so-called independent men in a nod to Miles’ abuse; “FRIDA,” the one song titled after a nonblack artist, takes inspiration from the bridge that separated Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s houses to assert the importance of making space for oneself in a relationship. Harnessing fairy-tale framing and deceptively lighthearted, sing-song melodies, the exploration of an abusive relationship on “SONIA” harks back to the material on HEAVN, with Nitty Scott’s verse adding an acerbic bite: “My abuela ain’t survive several trips around the sun,” she spits, “so I could give it to somebody’s undeserving son.” Woods repeats the stunningly simple verdict of a character describing her enslavement in a Sonia Sanchez poem—“It was bad”—as she lists all the indignities an abusive male partner put her through. Her point isn’t to compare slavery to a toxic relationship, but to testify to her ancestors’ resilience and thus her own. “My great-great-granny was born a slave,” Woods tells us: a “great great” in her own right who “found liberation before the grave.” Her personal, historical and creative legacies intertwine as she finds hope in the women of her family alongside Betty, Eartha and Sonia.

LEGACY! LEGACY! is about finding strength in your history, but it doesn’t shy away from its ambiguities. After opening her album with “BETTY,” Woods later gives us the suspenseful staccato of “MILES,” a song devoted to Betty’s serially abusive husband. Woods recounts her own abuse on “SONIA”—”I remember saying no to things that happened anyway,” she sings with disarming sweetness—and it’s not lost on her that Miles Davis beat his wives to keep them in line. “That type of energy, his masculine power which he sometimes wielded in fucked-up ways, what does it mean for a Black woman to embody that?” she asks in an interview. While there’s no definitive answer, it’s clear that Miles’ swaggering bravado takes on a different valence coming from her mouth, one that fights for a more equal future. Woods takes inspiration from the trumpeter’s refusal to face and entertain white audiences, as well as his penchant for speaking so quietly in business meetings that executives had to strain to hear—but when she intones, “Shut up, motherfucker / I don’t take requests,” it’s easy to imagine her disdain applies to entitled white audiences or industry higher-ups just as much as it does to any man seeking to control her. She’s “bad like [her] mother,” flanked by a poignant choir of her own voice that recalls every woman artist wanting to be seen on her own terms: “I do what I do / not for you.”

Not only is LEGACY! LEGACY! one of the best albums of the year with its incandescent power and hooks that never stop giving, it achieves the remarkable feat of crafting a cohesive whole out of a dozen disparate stories. “Our black has no imitation,” Woods states on the funky, futuristic “OCTAVIA,” which honors Butler’s sci-fi oeuvre. It’s one of the album’s thesis statements, repeated on the track for Muddy Waters, who could only laugh at the prospect of white kids emulating his greatness. As Woods’ record celebrates, part of what makes blackness so inimitable is that there is no narrow definition, especially when it comes to how black artists choose to exercise their power. The sprawling, jazzy Saba feature “BASQUIAT” is inspired by the artist refusing to explain his anger to a white journalist (“Are you mad? / Yes I’m mad / What make you mad? / I don’t fuckin’ know, you should tell me so, you done done it”); “SUN RA,” a spacey psych-infused ode to the Afrofuturist, meanwhile, admires his unironic allegiance to Saturn. “BETTY (for Boogie),” the album’s closing track, makes one of its few missteps in trying to bring everything full circle: The remix is dedicated to Woods’ hometown house scene, but its placement dampens the effect of its predecessor, “BALDWIN.” The record’s biggest and most buoyant track, it shines with horns from Nico Segal and references to James’ incendiary prose and paradoxical invocations for love in The Fire Next Time.

Fierce, layered and never obvious, LEGACY! LEGACY! reflects its central question back at the listener, no matter your race or nation: What will your legacy be? “You will never know everything / I will never know everything,” Woods admits playfully on “ZORA.” But what we can do is look to the past—and do our best to build a better future.