Moor Mother aka Camae Ayewa announced her new album ‘The Great Bailout’ last month, a body of work that explores the atrocities of British slavery, including how it was paid for and then obscured.
Coming out on March 8, ‘The Great Bailout’ is Ayewa’s ninth studio album and third with ANTI- Records, with production contributions on various tracks from Mary Lattimore, Lonnie Holley, Vijay Ayer, Angel Bat Dawid, Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty, Aaron Dilloway and more. Called “the poet laureate of the apocalypse” by Pitchfork, Ayewa’s music contains multitudes of instruments, voices and cacophony that take on themes of Afrofuturism and collective memory with the forebearers of jazz, hip hop and beat poetry in mind.
Today she shares the album’s second track ‘All the Money’, which shifts the album’s tone into a more sinister register of voice and instrument. Examining the money made from the enslavement of Africans in Great Britan, the song was co-produced by Vijay Ayer and features Alya Al Sultani; both artists sent Ayewa samples and she threaded them throughout the track. Lyrically, the feeling of water remains a throughline as ‘the storm keeps raging’, but now as a drowning, conjuring the many captured black lives swallowed in the waters of the transatlantic crossing and the continuing drowning out of this British history.
Also out today is the new video for ‘All the Money,’ directed by filmmaker and multimedia artist Cauleen Smith. Inspired by Afrofuturism, black feminism and African American identity in general, she is currently a professor at UCLA. The video she created for the track features chilling, crime scene-esque images of British royalty, landmarks and politicians; watch it below.
This movement, or rather entanglement, between gentleness and horror, rage and grief, is the warp of the long poem that is the album. Most telling is the 1835 Slavery Abolition Act – a loan that allowed the British Government to borrow £20 million – £17 billion in today’s money – with which to ‘compensate’ 46,000 slave owners who were losing their ‘property’ because of the legal abolition of slavery.
A loan that was one of the largest in history. A loan that was only finally paid off in 2015. A loan that all payers of tax in the UK helped to pay off — which means that all those descendants of the once enslaved, including the so-called Windrush Generation, also helped to pay off.
Think: British Government hubris and historical inaccuracy. “Here’s today’s surprising #FridayFact. Millions of you helped end the Slave Trade through your taxes,” announced The Treasury in a Tweet on February 9th, 2018. It wasn’t for the ending of the trade; it was for the ending of ownership of black life that taxpayers helped pay for.
Think: Not one of the enslaved received a penny in the form of compensation.
Think: two British Prime Ministers – William Ewart Gladstone, Prime Minister on four occasions between 1868 – 1894, and David Cameron 2010 – 2016, both of whose ancestors received ‘compensation’.
This is one way onto the tour to which you are invited by ‘The Great Bailout’. Or you can just breathe and enter, to reckon with a horror story hiding in plain sight and be lifted by the poignant beauty that is black poetry and music making as freedom in the otherwise and ‘everywhens’ mediated through a journey into Britain.
“Displacement and its effects are not discussed enough,” Ayewa says. “The PTSD of displacement should be a focus, and as we have the opportunity to learn about things happening in the world, we also have the opportunity to learn about ourselves. We’ve been through so many different acts of systematic violence.”
Pre-Order ‘The Great Bailout’
1. GUILTY FT LONNIE HOLLEY & RAIA WAS
2. ALL THE MONEY FT ALYA AL SULTANI
3. GOD SAVE THE QUEEN FT JUSTMADNICE
4. COMPENSATED EMANCIPATION FT KYLE KIDD
5. DEATH BY LONGITUDE
6. MY SOULS BEEN ANCHORED
7. LIVERPOOL WINS FT KYLE KIDD
8. SOUTH SEA FT SISTAZ OF THE NITTY GRITTY
9. SPEM IN ALIUM
