{"id":5250,"date":"2024-01-04T17:27:48","date_gmt":"2024-01-04T22:27:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/read.streamapse.com\/?p=5250"},"modified":"2024-11-29T18:23:28","modified_gmt":"2024-11-29T23:23:28","slug":"kelela-a-boundary-pushing-dance-rb-artist-blurs-the-personal-and-political","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/?p=5250","title":{"rendered":"Kelela \u2014 A Boundary-Pushing Dance\/R&B Artist Blurs The Personal And Political"},"content":{"rendered":"

The nearly six-year period Kelela Mizanekristos took between 2017\u2019s Take Me Apart and 2023\u2019s Raven wasn\u2019t just a break; it was a reckoning. Like a lot of Black Americans, she\u2019d watched the protests following George Floyd\u2019s murder with outrage and cautious curiosity as to whether the winds of social change might actually shift.<\/p>\n

She read, she watched, she researched; she digested the pressures of creative perfectionism and tireless productivity not as correlatives of an artistic mind but of capitalism and white supremacy, whose consecration of the risk-free bottom line suddenly felt like the arbitrary and invasive force it is.<\/p>\n

And suddenly, she realized she wasn\u2019t alone. \u201cInternally, I\u2019ve always wished the world would change around me,\u201d Kelela tells Apple Music. \u201cI felt during the uprising and the [protests of the early 2020s] that there\u2019s been an external shift.<\/p>\n

We all have more permission to say, \u2018I don\u2019t like that.\u2019\u201d Executive-produced by longtime collaborator Asmara (Asma Maroof of Nguzunguzu), 2023\u2019s Raven is both an extension of her earlier work and an expansion of it. The hybrids of progressive dance and \u201990s-style R&B that made Take Me Apart and Cut 4 Me compelling are still there (\u201cContact,\u201d \u201cMissed Call,\u201d both co-produced by LSDXOXO and Bambii), as is her gift for making the ethereal feel embodied and deeply physical (\u201cEnough for Love\u201d).<\/p>\n

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Stream Raven<\/strong><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And for all her respect for the modalities of Black American pop music, you can hear the musical curiosity and experiential outliers\u2014as someone who grew up singing jazz standards and played in a punk band\u2014that led her to stretch the paradigms of it, too.<\/p>\n

But the album\u2019s heart lies in songs like \u201cHolier\u201d and \u201cRaven,\u201d whose narratives of redemption and self-sufficiency jump the track from personal reflections to metaphors for the struggle with patriarchy and racism more broadly. \u201cI\u2019ve been pretty comfortable to talk about the nitty-gritty of relationships,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut this album contains a few songs that are overtly political, that feel more literally like no, you will not.\u201d Oppression comes in many forms, but they all work the same way; Raven imagines a flight out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The nearly six-year period Kelela Mizanekristos took between 2017\u2019s Take Me Apart and 2023\u2019s Raven wasn\u2019t just a break; it was a reckoning. Like a lot of Black Americans, she\u2019d watched the protests following George Floyd\u2019s murder with outrage and cautious curiosity as to whether the winds of social change might actually shift. She read, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5252,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,159],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","category-videos"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5250"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5835,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5250\/revisions\/5835"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}