America, it’s been said, has entered a new era of racism, one with no racists. We live in a time, in a nation, where discrimination and segregation require no outward hostility — the status quo takes care of that for us.
American culture allows a white woman like Miley Cyrus to unapologetically don a gold grill and twerk her way through years of her career, then, with no signal, make a U-turn back to doe-eyed, radio-friendly pop while denouncing the excesses of hip-hop — because she’s “so not that.” (For the record, she scored her 10th top-10 entry on the Billboard Hot 100 with that U-turn.)
For what it’s worth, Cyrus isn’t alone. Even the most thoughtful artist can endlessly question what their success is built on, or perhaps more accurately, on whose backs it’s built. Like Cyrus (and yet wholly unlike her), Merrill Garbus, one-half of the art-pop project Tune-Yards, is also guilty of cultural appropriation.
Through Tune-Yards, Garbus has bewitched audiences with her powerful, acrobatic voice, often layered against synthesizer-drench polyrhythms and counter-rhythms. It’s a lush world she creates, a whimsical aural playground built of ukuleles, horns and pleasingly odd loops. The videos are equally quirky, with animated choreography, glitchy editing and vibrant splashes of color. Responding to Tune-Yard’s 2011 hit “Bizness,” one YouTube commenter wrote, “I feel like I just took a semester of art school.”
Trouble is, those layered sounds, that call-and-response technique she employs, those gyrating rhythms, they’re all deeply connected to African music.
None of this escapes Garbus. She loves African music, even spent two years studying drumming with Haitian-born musician and teacher Daniel Brevin, and spent weeks in Haiti immersing herself in music.
Garbus has always used Tune-Yards albums to examine what she calls “our inescapable participation in politics.” In 2011’s much lauded album w h o k i l l, Garbus confronts issues of race, body image, sex, power, inequality and privilege in completely unveiled ways. She wonders why she doesn’t have more black friends in the song “Killa,” and grapples with her own privilege in “My Country.”
But it wasn’t enough, not nearly, and Garbus knew it.
She and bandmate Nate Brenner set about recording Tune-Yards’ newest album, I can feel you creep into my private life (ICFYCIMPL), in January 2016. The album, released in January 2018, is the most personal work Garbus has ever offered; a raw, deeply critical look at her own role in systemic racism.
It’s also dance-floor ready — and the whole thing makes Garbus proud and uncomfortable as all hell.
“Whiteness in general is about getting uncomfortable, because whiteness and white supremacy is all about whites being so comfortable,” she says during a phone call.
“So yup, I’m uncomfortable for sure.”
During the making of ICFYCIMPL, Garbus did the work. She went to activist events specifically geared toward white people. She read books about white fragility and the characteristics of white supremacy culture, and she completed a six-month-long workshop on whiteness at the East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, California, where she and Brenner live.
“It was rooted in Buddhist principles, so we had teachings about mindfulness practice, about the dharma and particularly how it relates to social justice,” she says. “That’s something that Buddhist communities in the States would be wise to look at, because if we’re talking about the dharma being accessible to everybody, most Buddhist communities in the States are white, so just looking at that and questioning it.
“We did a lot of readings from white people talking about their exportations of whiteness, readings from writers of color talking about their experience in Buddhist communities and a lot of mindfulness work, how these things feel. They usually bring up big emotions like shame and guilt. But we focus on how to use mindfulness practice as a way through those feelings so we don’t get stuck in those kinds of paralyzing emotions.”
That mindfulness practice comes in handy when Garbus is on stage performing tracks from the new album because, well, it can feel awkward playing songs about being white (not every song, of course) to a predominantly white audience. It was unnerving, to say the least, the first time Garbus sung “Colonizer” to a live crowd:
“I use my white woman’s voice to tell stories of travels with African men/ I comb my white woman’s hair with a comb made especially, generally for me/ I use my white woman’s voice to tell stories, stories/ Colonize it/ Colonize it.”
Delivery of such material presents a tricky balancing act.
“Me and Nate were talking about it last night; where is the moment in the set where it starts to teeter over into whining instead of self-reflection that continues to propel into action and change,” Garbus says. “What we’re working for, ideally, is liberation for all. As squeamish as I feel including myself in that, because I’m coming from a place of severe critique and white guilt in my past, I think this album traces what the next era is for me — transforming that energy into creative work, knowing that my energy can be used toward positivity and liberation for all instead of inward into self-punishing behavior.”
ICFYCIMPL uses club-ready beats as a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. Yes, there are tracks like “Colonizer” with a message so clear even the most passive listener can’t miss it, but other tracks like “Heart attack” have lyrics that listeners can easily transpose their own meaning onto — and a beat that just won’t stop.
Missing the point completely, one critic said the album “underwhelms and over-explains.” In a day and age where Donald Trump can say there’s blame on “both sides” when a white supremacist runs down a crowd of protesters and kills a woman, we really can’t over-explain white privilege. To say that we can is part of
the problem.
Garbus knows the new album won’t suit everyone, and she knows she doesn’t answer any questions with it. But that’s the point, isn’t it?
“It feels very clear to me that white people are overdue to do some work on themselves and on society, and certainly activists of color have been calling upon white people to do that for decades,” she says. “And still I have a lot of questions: I don’t know how this fits in with trying to be a band, you know, trying to sell tickets and trying to make a living that way. I know that it is what it is. If we lose people along the way I would rather go down talking about what’s coming up for me because I think that’s what my job as an artist is. But also I would rather go down as someone speaking about whiteness and white supremacy as a white person and a white musician than someone who, you know, just rolls with the white supremacist flow.”
On the Bill: Tune-Yards. — with My Brightest Diamond. 8:30 p.m. Thursday, April 26, Boulder Theater, 2032 14th St., Boulder. Tickets are
$25-$30.
