Moor Mother Opens the Archive of Murder and Riches on The Great Bailout

The worlds that Camae Ayewa constructs—as Moor Mother and as part of Black Quantum Futurism, Irreversible Entanglements and 700 Bliss—are often speculative, theorizing futures beyond the oppressive present condition and without colonially imposed temporalities. It’s with this futuristic approach that Ayewa also researches, recounts and reinterprets the past, poking holes in the narratives the state tells itself and all of us in order to live unquestioned. On The Great Bailout, Ayewa turns her critical eye towards Great Britain, whose colonial empire stretched throughout much of the North American continent and throughout the Caribbean, with many of its outposts being plantation colonies that, over centuries of trial, legislation and cruelty, designed chattel slavery as it’s understood today. The Great Bailout returns to the 1835 Parliamentary Act that granted 46,000 former slavers monetary reparations, which the government funded through a loan repaid through taxes collected through 2015.

There are a variety of approaches for understanding the 1835 rule, but the fundamentals are consistent: The loan promised 180 years of wealth extraction from British subjects, including the once-enslaved, as a windfall measure for Britain’s wealthiest, cruelest actors. The government sought to cushion the financial blow of liberation, not to give the newly liberated compensation for what they endured, but to perpetuate the superior status of planters. This pattern shows up in other countries who oversaw their own colonial empires built on slavery, but Ayewa focuses her attention on Britain as a part of a global project to build networks between shared Black diasporic histories. And, as usual, on The Great Bailout, Ayewa is the lead on an album rich with collaborators: Angel Bat Dawid, Lonnie Holley, Raia Was, Kyle Kidd and so many more lend their incredible talents to supplement Ayewa’s breathtaking poetry and production. Moor Mother surrounds herself with artists of uncommon visions and orientations toward justice and, together, they urgently reinterpret the historical record to reveal unjust actions and their evil philosophical underpinnings while creating art that similarly challenges existing structures. In turn, The Great Bailout is an all-around success.

Album opener and lead single “GUILTY” sets the scene with one of Moor Mother’s most haunting collaborative pieces. As she repeats “Did you pay off the trauma?,” spending due time with each word in the phrase “taxpayers of erasure, of relapse, of amnesia, paying the crimes off—GUILTY,” languishing strings cloud her words and Mary Lattimore’s precision harping gives each syllable some extra sting. Like dual specters, Lonnie Holley and Raia Was throw their voices like comets across a foggy sky. “Did you pay off the trauma?” is an incitement: The British paid off the slavers, but what does that compensation actually mean? What of the generations of trauma from the cruelty of denigration as property, as capital to be used on plantations that sold cash crops that would one day become mass-market poison: the cigarette. Why, in 2015, does the Treasury celebrate the payoff of the loan used to benefit these slavers when the funds it used came from the people forced into servitude?

Ayewa’s collaborators add incredible dimension to The Great Bailout as Ayewa spreads the archive open for all to see. “ALL THE MONEY” brings Alya Al-Sultani and Vijay Iyer into the fold on a visceral, sinister exploration of the terrors of trade from London to British port towns, where lives were traded as goods and where the British regime decides who they should allow to enter the UK as a refugee after fanning the flames of conflict in the global south. Repeating “so much money, all the money, so many contracts” while visiting places of worship and historic landmarks reinforces how pillaging built the crown as it presents itself.

Kyle Kidd, the New York-via-Cleveland vocalist who came up in the collective Mourning [A] BLKstar, features prominently on “COMPENSATED EMANCIPATION” and “LIVERPOOL WINS,” running vocal achievements that are a striking foil to Ayewa’s level-headed spoken word and the overall grave production. Kidd and Ayewa make an incredible pair. Angel Bat Dawid’s evocative clarinet brushstrokes and futuristic composition from Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty bring the nine-minute “SOUTH SEA” to life like an operatic movement. In many ways, The Great Bailout works like a meditative opera, working to dissipate smoke in mirrors to ensure that the tough questions are asked and answered with drama and song alike. Moor Mother is not one to restrict her work to one art form, so in recorded form, she and her collaborators heighten every moment to ensure that performed gravitas makes it across.

Because Moor Mother’s music is so far beyond the strict definition of music, everything she does feels exciting. The Great Bailout cuts through the noise of big pop and rock with something that urgently takes history to task and reimagines what the album can accomplish. But even amongst her own body of work, The Great Bailout is a standout—one where it feels as if she and her collaborators have room to roam. There’s a central tension in British history that everyone gestures toward with the tools they use best. The album is infinitely greater than the sum of its parts, and that sum is already a feat. The Great Bailout reckons with cruelties past and present, highlighting how those supposedly of the past are nowhere near gone because their philosophical underpinnings thrive in the present, permitting a cycle of extraction and death distributed by race, wealth and nationality. It is precisely this linkage between systematized death and riches that makes the album such a mortifying listen and perhaps the most essential of 2024.

Devon Chodzin is a critic and urban planner with bylines at Aquarium Drunkard, Bandcamp Daily, Slumber Mag and more. He is currently a student in Philadelphia. He lives on Twitter @bigugly.