In a song.
In a song.
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The Music Issue
Brittany Howard Gets Her Revenge
ByZandria F. RobinsonMarch 11, 2020
In a song.
Brittany Howard Gets Her Revenge
In a song. By Zandria F. Robinson
Brittany Howard, progeny of Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Prince and owner of all genres, took herself to the proverbial woodshed (in this case a greenhouse in Topanga, Calif.) and made a black-queer-Southern-feminist debut solo album that rings up Meshell Ndegeocello’s “Bitter” from the future. Named after her big sister, who, before she died of a rare eye cancer at 13, gave Howard the best tools a big sister might — poetry and sound — “Jaime” feels like that elusive and mystical other side of grief, where tears, no longer happy or sad but something much greater and far more satisfying, surprise and amuse.
Heretofore known as the luminous frontwoman ofthe blues-rock band Alabama Shakes, Howard has been lionized by Southerners and non-Southerners alike as the region’s radically reconstructed blues woman, its weird, funky rock savior and an emblem of a South that might finally see promiscuity and difference — racial, sexual, sonic — as a liberal good. Howard herself has palpably resisted this role and its box, in part by genre-hopping from garage rock to Americana in the groups Thunderbitch and Bermuda Triangle. On“Jaime,”this resistance appears effortless, intimate, self-evident and interior.
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Here, Howard models luscious generosity toward herself as a woman, lover, Southerner, daughter and sister, modes of being that spread to every crevice of the album. She deftly guides her voice — a divine, soaring, hand-to-hand, declarative, love-soaked instrument only made more expansive in service of herself and her sound alone — through the varying registers of the blues.
In all of the album’s tenderness, from full-throated commentary on the state of the world and how to right it to quiet remembrances of queer desire, to loves ecstatic — some lasting, others ended before they begin to rot — the ninth track, “Goat Head,” is a pivot, an interruption. First off, it’s an entire bop, a Southern trap, snap-crunk-reminiscent song that induces both movement and dread. I find I canBlocBoy JB Shootto this. There is a frantic, buck-jumping cymbal and a teacup masquerading as a triangle that refuse to live in one cadence. Robert Glasper is banging the keys, creating both dissonant melody and bass rhythm punctuated with a three-note Allen Iverson stutter step. I might also snap my fangaz and do my step to this. I am concerned about the dissonance, the insistence of the repetition, the somewhat unpredictable snap, this jumpy high-hat and teasing bell. Something is off, but the beat drops again, and so do I. Shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot.
“Goat Head” recounts an incident Howard learns of long after it happened: In retaliation for her very presence, her birth to an interracial couple, her father’s tires are slashed, the severed head of a goat placed in the back seat of his car and blood spread around the vehicle. This anti-black hate crime is the grotesque kind for which the South is infamous, made more egregious by the silence that surrounds it, the culprits unrevealed and unpunished. The song is both a memoir of this moment and the preface to a retribution ritual.
The beat runs for over a minute before Howard’s voice arrives, and when it does, it provides neither immediate clarity nor relief. The opening of the song, a poem, squats down to America’s level to explain race to the South, and the nation, as if they were children:
There is an innocuousness here in the words that Howard’s voice, syrupy Southern with a side of ominousness, belies. The beat drops after the fourth line, and the poem continues, her staccato articulation of syllables reflecting the restraint and patience it takes to explain something to willful adults who feign childlike ignorance:
Howard exits the poem abruptly, and starts her lecture — the real reason we’re here: “See, I know my colors, see. But what I wanna know is … who slashed my dad’s tires and put a goat head in the back?” In a nation known for its appetite for sadistic punishments, there is an abiding belief that the punished will soon have their reckoning. And here it is. Mask off.
The song’s final 30 seconds, which consist of nine diminuendo Parliament-Funkadelic-style chants of “Goat head in the back,” are its most devastating. The observable fact and memory “Goat head in the back” morphs into the command “Go ’head in the back,” where the perpetrators are bade to proceed so that justice might be had at long last. Moving from octaves into fifths as the percussion drops and drifts, the song’s ending haunts with a lusty promise: to speak the unspoken. Howard, with her rainbow-wrapped machete, points at America’s back seat crammed with racist projections, and asks firmly, Who spilled this blood? Pulled into the ritual with dance and jam and poetry, Howard compels us to accept or witness, depending on who we are, the bloody consequences.
Zandria F. Robinsonis a writer, professor and cultural critic based in Washington. This is her first article for the magazine.Arielle Bobb-Willisis a photographer from New York who was recently featured in Aperture’s “The New Black Vanguard.” This is her first assignment for the magazine.
Stylist: Nonja McKenzie. Hair and makeup: Monae Everett.
Additional design and development by Jacky Myint.
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