FEATURE:
Revisiting...
Jamila Woods - LEGACY! LEGACY!
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EACH song on…
PHOTO CREDIT: Bradley Murray
Jamila Woods’ LEGACY! LEGACY! has such an interesting story and inspiration. You can find out about the tracks and what influenced them in this article. Unlike Second Spin, where I go back and pick an album that is underrated or was pushed aside, Revisiting… is specifically me looking at the last three years and albums that were played at the time but are not featured much now. It is a shame that an album as potent, important and astonishing as Jamila Woods’ second album is not in focus as much now as it should be. Following her incredible 2016 debut, Heavn, LEGACY! LEGACY! took her to new heights. To be fair, this was an album that received enormous and universal acclaim (but did not get spun much on radio). It is baffling why that was! The tracks are incredible and provide lessons and revelations. I hope that people pick up on LEGACY! LEGACY! and its sheer brilliance. Before I come to reviews in 20 19 that proves critics were absolutely awestruck by Woods’ masterpiece, this VICE interview featured Woods discussing the album and its themes. I have selected some portions of the interview where we discover more about LEGACY! LEGACY! and its intentions:
“Much has been said about the ways gentrification threatens to erase the neighborhood's rich history, but according to the Chicago singer, her next album, LEGACY! LEGACY!, won't let that happen. "There's a way to celebrate Black artists the way Beyoncé is celebrated, and it starts with how that looks in education," she tells me. Woods has become a fixture in the Chicago R&B scene after collaborating with Chance the Rapper on both 2015's Surf, his collaborative experimental album, and his mixtape Coloring Book the following year. Macklemore even tapped the singer for the outro of "White Privilege II" where she closed the song singing: "Your silence is a luxury." By the time she recorded her debut album, HEAVN, Jamila Woods was known for using her words when the world is often speechless.
For a minute, we reflect on Nipsey Hussle (who was gunned down in Los Angeles's Hyde Park neighborhood two weeks prior to our lunch), and why it seems as though, for most, the legacy of Black artists only begins when their lives end. For the past few years, Woods has been wrestling with how to prevent the legacy of individuals like Nipsey from disappearing. To that end, she decided to pay homage to a different Black creator on each of the album's 13 tracks, summoning the energy of poets, musicians, and writers whose fingerprints can be found all over her stirring resistance songs. The track-list reads like a roll call, with names like "ZORA," "EARTHA," and "MILES" marking themselves present. It's an example of the magic that happens when the careers of Black people are given the grace of eternal life.
Woods's work often reads like a manifesto on Black life, and her background in poetry, which she started writing and reading while growing up in Chicago's Beverly neighborhood, is partly to thank for that. "I always wished I knew a second language, and this is it," she tells me. "I found it in poetry."
Though she's been busy readying her upcoming album for release, she still works part-time at Young Chicago Authors, an arts education program that nurtures local talent and counts Noname, Chance the Rapper, and Woods herself as notable alumni. She says LEGACY!'s theme originated out of a writing prompt she assigned to her poetry class: Each student was expected to write their own version of a well-known poem. Then she challenged herself to do the same.
"I wrote a cover of Nikki Giovanni's 'Ego Trippin,'" and then Kevin Coval, who's a poet I work with at YCA, asked me to do a cover of his poem about Muddy Waters," she tells me in between bites of cornbread. "That's how I wrote the Muddy song."
According to Woods, writing songs based on the work of your muses isn’t the difficult part—it's narrowing down the list. Woods had to let go of some of her heroes in order to create the 49-minute album. Literary giants like Toni Morrison and Lucille Clifton are absent, even though Woods attributes the directness of her songwriting to the way those writers use language.
She says the title of the album came to her at a dinner last year, where she encountered a collage inspired by a 2007 poem from Chicago museum co-founder Dr. Maragret Burroughs, and which included the words "LEGACY! LEGACY!"
"This is the prime moment for you to think / And get to work / And identify what you will leave as your legacy / For you to be remembered by."
Woods doesn’t limit her interpretation of the past to cultural icons. In fact, she spends much of LEGACY! exploring her own family lineage through the lens of her literary and musical heroes' ideas. "My mom is really into genealogy and piecing together our family tree," she says. "She's told us her great-great is a woman named Sarah who was a slave in South Carolina. We also took a DNA test that traced our family back to Cameroon." The harsh reality for most Black Americans is the erasure of their family tree because of the slave trade—or the complicated history the results do provide.
On LEGACY!, the singer references her "great-greats" a handful of times, using their stories as a reminder to stay strong and resilient in the present day. Woods centers her mother and grandmother on "GIOVANNI"'s hook, providing glimpses of the ways the Black women in her world armed her with tools to shield herself. "I’m protected / Joycetta prayed on me / Momma burned sage for me / None of that can take the energy away from me," she sings.
Growing up, Woods says she didn’t always think the reiki techniques her mother taught her were cool. But as she got older, her mom's rituals became a sanctuary when she felt out of place in predominantly white settings. "I talk about it on 'ZORA' too,” Woods says. "My mom would always say, 'Imagine white light around yourself.' It's like a bubble of protection."
Elsewhere, Woods debunks the trope of the "angry Black woman," berated for displaying any emotion besides a smile—while acknowledging that when you're navigating the world as a double minority, the anger you experience can often feel inherited. "It's like you want to be me / You trying to provoke me / This shit hereditary / The pressure rising in me," she sings on "BASQUIAT."
"Anger and stress has literally created high blood pressure in people throughout time," she says. She's talking about the correlation between discrimination and health conditions like diabetes and hypertension in the Black community—a phenomenon public health researcher and professor Arline Geronimus has described as "weathering."
Her rage is most obvious on "BASQUIAT" and "BALDWIN," their spurts of paranoid percussion and the skepticism in her voice marking a stark departure from the dreamy optimism of HEAVN. "BASQUIAT" is a deliberate provocation, with a hook that mimics a 1985 interview with the painter, captured in last year's Basquiat: Rags to Riches documentary. "Are you mad? / Yes I’m mad / What makes you mad? I don’t fucking know," she sings.
"[The interviewer] is like, 'What makes you angry?' and [Basquiat] pauses for a minute and says, 'I don’t remember,' Woods says. "It felt like in that moment, he was denying that annoying white dude's access to his interior emotional space, almost as if he didn’t want to be that vulnerable with him."
Woods's relationship with anger is one she still seems to be working through. "A lot of times people will say, 'Your music is political, but it's not angry'—like that's a compliment. It rubs me the wrong way that not being angry is a compliment to a Black woman. I have an aversion toward anger, but I feel it. I don’t think it looks or sounds the way people expect it to”.
One only needs to read a few reviews of LEGACY! LEGACY! to understand the impact it made back in 2019! I think that people need to explore it. So many of its magnificent tracks have not been played a lot or have passed people by. NME wrote a five-star review of one of 2019’s very best. This is what they offered:
“The title and the track names are a celebration of the Chicago musician’s heroes; an ode to historical black artists that came before her. Jean-Michael Basquiat and novelist Octavia E Butler appear alongside critic and writer James Baldwin as well as Zora Neal Hurston, Sun Ra and Eartha Kitt. The free-spiritedness of the album is grounded by Woods’ lyrics, as she recites on ‘ZORA’: “Must be disconcerting how I discombob your mood / I’ve always been the only, every classroom, every home / Kiss of chocolate on the moon, collard greens and silver spoon / Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes you can’t stick unto me / My weaponry is my energy / I tenderly fill my enemies with white light.”
Fusing together alt-pop, progressive R&B, ‘60s Northern Soul, the album showcases an eclectic range of style. Over 13 joyful tracks that radiate happiness and double as protest music that’s cerebral and pensive, Woods’ words possess the most weight, soaring above the instruments, lithe and often jazzy. Her lyrics are evocative, cutting through the rhetoric with double entendres and metaphors that showcase her poetic skills. On ‘SONIA’, she sings, “My great, great granny was born a slave / She found liberation before the grave / Who You tellin’ how to behave? / Oooh, I’m trying to forgive but I can’t forget.”
Features are scarce on the album. Chicago contemporary SABA shines on ‘BASQUIAT’: his bars a reminder that he is one of the more exciting talents in hip-hop right now. New York rapper Nitty Scott steals the spotlight, though, with her visceral, feminist bars on ‘SONIA’ that ooze confidence: “My abuela ain’t survive several trips around the sun / So I could give it to somebody’s undeserving son / This pussy don’t pop for you, booty don’t bop for you / Never owe none, belong to no one.”
Like history repeating itself, the album closes with ‘BETTY (for Boogie)’, a re-worked house edit of the first track leaving us with an irresistible urge to dance. Quite frankly, ‘LEGACY! LEGACY!’ is one of the albums of the year. It’s a confident and self-assured project that affirms Woods’ own place alongside the historical greats she praises”.
To finish off, AllMusic were among the many who extolled the strength and incredible of an album that will stay with you. I cannot over-emphasise how good LEGACY! LEGACY! is!
“Jamila Woods conceptualized her second solo album after an exercise she presented to her poetry class at Young Chicago Authors. The students were assigned to choose a poem and "cover" it, as Woods terms it, by putting their individual spin on it. Woods took part with Nikki Giovanni's "Ego Tripping (there may be a reason why)," and was then asked by YCA artistic director Kevin Coval to do the same with a piece he wrote about Muddy Waters. This evolved into LEGACY! LEGACY! The liner notes list "Ego Tripping" and a Waters interview with other texts, clips, documentaries, and a painting, all of which are either by or about the prominent artists and activists -- predominantly black and all of color -- Woods honors here. Each song is titled after its catalyzing figure and is brilliantly threaded with references, but Woods also connects their experiences to her own and those of her immediate bloodline. Racism and its side effects, from theft of culture and land to willful distortions and ignorance of black achievement, weigh heaviest on Woods' mind, yet her voice maintains a sweetness, unfurling like ribbon over the rhythms. Vulgar rebukes such as "Shuddup muthaf*cka, I don't take requests" are expressed with enough grace and melodicism to be as quotable and whistle-able as "I tenderly fill my enemies with white light" or "Take a picture if you want me quiet."
Just like HEAVN, Woods' debut, LEGACY! LEGACY! is a modern R&B album recorded in Chicago, mostly with Chicagoans. There's more from Saba and Nico Segal, HEAVN collaborators who respectively add a tailwind-generating guest verse and beaming horns. Three-quarters of the songs, plus a garage-flavored remix of "BETTY," are dynamic Slot-A productions, covering sci-fi electro-soul of numerous shades and chunky hip-hop with elements of post-bop jazz, sometimes with an electric quartet. There's evidence his work was custom built, like when the keyboards burble and blare out of "Miles," evoking the namesake trumpeter's early-'70s dates, and the moment a sampled Geoff Barrow/Adrian Utley one-off elbows its way into "MUDDY," resembling the grit of Electric Mud (an LP recorded in Chicago with Chicagoans). This galvanizing declaration of pride, support, and discontent will no doubt inspire covers itself. Every public library should have at least one copy”.
In other parts of this feature, I will look at great albums from last year, earlier this year, 2019 and late in 2018. It is because, at the time, certain albums get great reviews and are celebrated. Soon enough, they are either put aside or not as studied and kept aflame as they should. So far, I have featured Nadine Shah, Thundercat, and now Jamila Woods. Her world-class second album is as relevant now as it was upon its release on 10th May 2019. If you only do one thing today, then make sure it is to…
HEAR this album!