From Woody Guthrie to R’n’B: Cleo Reed from New York
Foto: Facebook/Cleo Reed
Before it starts with the music, a short Schlenker to the social struggles to continue to make the social struggle. There is probably little that the left in the western countries split and paralyzes as much as the contrast between identity and class policy, which is constructed as insurmountable. A contemporary form of parts and rulers. The rulers, still – in all classes of classes and developments, but which never adopt the form of autodestive struggles – a rather homogeneous group. The dominated rubbing on, and at some point everyone melt away at 50 degrees, and of course the poorest first.
On the album »Cuntry« of the African American singer* Cleo Reed from New York there are pieces that have taken together something like a contemporary form of the political song. Also because class consciousness, industrial action, feminism and queerness run next to each other in the texts and cross over again and again as if they were part of one and the same struggle. What they are.
So far, “Cuntry” has only appeared as a download and stream, as a self-release, without a label. But also fits, “self-release”. The music is liberating in all kinds of views. Reed ties in with the radical-political current of the American folk tradition, i.e. at Woody Guthrie. And from there goes with twelve songs through the history of black music in the USA, at least the parts that have articulated themselves in song form. Hip-hop, r’n’b, blues, soul- on the first half of the album, primarily held together of acoustic and other guitars that form the scaffold, always tender, but never fragile.
In the second half, the album then becomes more beat-heavy. In the lyrics there is work, class struggle and the fight against male rule and heteronormativity, everything seen by the eyes and sung with the voice of a black queer artist. In the opener “Salt n ‘Lime”, the suffering of the alienated work and exploitation in precarious jobs is conjured up: “Life on the clock’s like eating with your eyes”. Then party to get rid of the dirt (“Tonight Every Drink’s on Me”), in order to then end up with a kind of self-impowerment-folk mantra: “I’m always good / for putting my black queer ass first”.
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The piece takes almost nine minutes and contains a lot of what makes the music of Reed radically stubborn and surprising. The plucked acoustic piece changes without breaks, in a single river, into a class-fighting soul-r’n’b-hip-hop hybrid. As I said, Reed amalgamates a lot in her music, but since nothing is installed here, rather everything- genres, voices, instruments- flows into one another, the music has nothing crosso-heavy. But looks like a homogeneous picture, in which everything deviating can find its place.
The flow on the sound level, which always radiates a tender and therefore solidarity tint (which is then explicitly established together with the rapper Billy Woods, and in “No Borders”). The sound aesthetics find its equivalent in the body and other politics that articulate on »Cuntry«. The circles of solidarity and celebrating stubbornness. In the combination of both, not only claimed, but noticeable in music, the key to political beauty is this album.
Cleo Reed: “Cuntry” (self-released-to be found, for example on Bandcamp.com)
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