Blood Orange - Negro Swan

August 24, 2018 - Domino

After a mysterious-to-me low period, Devonté Hynes a.k.a. Blood Orange is back with his new LP Negro Swan. The title conjures two connotations: one of a powerful elegant being associated closely with beauty (especially balletic) and the other a revision of the black sheep. Pulling in a large array of collaborations, Hynes normalizes himself through an album about being out of place. Thus the negro swan is a symbol of queerness coming to power.

With a first song titled ‘Orlando,’ whether or not an intentional reference to the shooting, it’s difficult to not make the association of violence, though purportedly more about a coming of age experience. A little bit dream pop and a little staccato funk give the song a nostalgic backdrop. Hynes’s refrain, “First kiss was the floor,” distills the queer sexual experience which has tended and tends still to conflate violence against a body for its sexuality and gender representation. “Sucker-punched out…First kiss was the floor.” The track outros by Janet Mock. Her presence on the album is charged, having been the first trans woman of color to direct and write for television on FX: Pose. Over a quiet instrumental round out, Mock ruminates over “doing too much,” which she posits is an insult put on people whose visibility in traditionally non-welcoming situations over-saturates an environment. Essentially, a person working for the right to be in charge of their own story, working against erasure history, is “doing too much.” And here Janet Mock says, “My eternal goal is to do too much.” Hynes loves this. He says, “Haha, I love it.” A highly commiserate track. The catchy pop riffs which Hynes once drew in and welcomed his audience with have been traded in for emotional vulnerability. Predominantly, this is an album without hooks and in general without catchiness. Though his knack for pop invariably leads to some hypnotic and memorable choruses, the bulk of the album is orchestrated without much structure.

What follows is a spooky jazz intro with hollowed out horn flurries. It’s ‘Saint,’ a song to which an opening jazz phrase is only a statement of atmosphere. Political activism rises out of the context within the first chorus. At this point the music falls back on 808-sounding hip hop beats and the steady sparse chord to minimize the sense of filled space, the initial horn movement dipping back in. Spliced together, this instrumental arrangement creates layers of history, from the early protests in jazz and blues to raw hip-hop tracks in which an entire people are argued for. The track harmonizes on the lyric “Your brown skin’s a flag for us all,” and makes a move towards new R&B.

Simmering back down, ‘Saint’ effortlessly moves into ‘Take Your Time.’ By now, the poignancy of ‘Orlando’ is setting in. A slower but perhaps more powerful burn for its indirectness. It’s all in that refrain, “First kiss was the floor.” Lyrically oblique and glazed with flute, the song revisits Janet Mock’s doing-to-much ethos, but turns its gaze toward those who are "doing too much” with confusion. A little bit of a haunt, this one. The voice of a concerned spectator (whether mother, lover, friend, acquaintance, ally, whatever) says do your life differently.

Then Puff Daddy and Tei Shin come into the studio to be featured on ‘Hope.' I keep forgetting that Puff Daddy is in this track. That’s not a dig. I just thought he was something else, so I think there is a continuity error when I puff daddy in the modern era. Anyway he gives a moving speech at the end, and it’s hard to know if it’s from his heart or Hynes’, since with Janet Mock the songs engage a sort of interview format. The song begins with a soulful bright piano intro. Tei Shin comes in with a powerful vocal lead outlining the distance between men and women’s expectations of love, eventually leading P. Diddy to soliloquy regarding his desire to let his guard down. When summarized it is an unappealing progression. Not only does the actual movement insinuate a necessary change in masculinity, it also seems to prioritize it towards making sense of monogamous relationships—the result being that men have an idea of the love they want but not the emotional equipment to accept the love they crave. In a nice turn of stereotypes, the male voice is the one subjected to logic, rather than the administrator of it. Tei Shin lilts, “I told you I don’t want to be friends, What’s it gonna take for you to believe me?” To get really into the circuitry involved here would require it’s own piece, and this is not the website or time for that. So we’re onto the next song.

Janet Mock speaks over a saccharine saxophone, and again speaks about doing more—or “the most”—saying “why would I want to do the least?” An interesting and unnecessary dichotomy, but it unearths something about this activist, which is prevalent in many radicals: oppositional discourse, which frames two modes of being as the only extant philosophies. This song is mostly a platform for Janet’s thoughts, but features some pleasant atmospheric broken beat and the sax I mentioned earlier. Hynes does make a vocal appearance to talk about cheeks and eyes and say the word “jewel” and feel himself, but primarily as an afterthought to give musicality to what would otherwise be a lecture sidebar.

The sixth track ‘Family’ (Ft. Janet Mock), which is the only songs to titularly feature Janet Mock, follows suit. It’s hard to measure the platitudes within the song, since Hynes’s Blood Orange has such a large pop platform. It’s tempting to write off the speech in ‘Family’ as a “needless to say” moment in which Mock discusses the process of choosing family. This feels like an idea that’s widespread enough in any realm of queer or minority culture I can think of that it’s no longer an ideology with verbal momentum. Conversely the track doesn’t expand enough on the subject or appeal to any personal detail that would include non-queer folk in the understanding of why it might be necessary to deselect and rebuild your family. But it’s pleasant to listen to, very easy on the ears.

And just when you’re feeling disheartened about this whole LP, ‘Charcoal Baby’ pops off. More solid dream pop riffs initiate the track, but it’s incorrect to think that Hynes is taking a firm musical stance, or pivoting for that matter. Musically ‘Charcoal Baby’ leans on the Prince-reminiscent hook, “Can you break sometimes?” The lyrics, as well as the instrumentation, do little to offer meaning which the first half of the album felt rich with, and tends to rely on its digestibility. Cue a nice interlude in ‘Vulture Baby,’ and we’re ready for the next track.

‘Chewing Gum’ (Ft. A$AP Rocky and Project Pat) files in next with some of the most powerful harmonics on the album. But has the drawback of featuring A$AP Rocky. ‘Chewing Gum’ takes a surprising lyrical turn with this guest, which as far as I can tell has only ever spoken about fucking. Mostly, his verses are about how someone has a great pussy that they don’t stop fucking. A couple of nice things A$AP does is:

Credit his ex with being cool
Credit his ex with being fly
Indicate that he shops at Guess, and offer them a fire plug
Shout out Earl Sweatshirt, which is always a good idea

That’s more good things than I expected to find when I started this list. But it’s not enough.

Anyway, Ian Isiah makes a soulful appearance on the deconstructed gospel track ‘Holy Will’ (Ft. Ian Isiah). Post-Gospel one might call it. Not I though. The album gets back on track with a plaintive song focusing on a self-oriented idea of finding home. Hynes steers the track through a few different musical motifs, at times instrumentally vacant, and at others somewhere between synth pop and sparse hip-hop. The track is simple in each turn with Isiah clambering to the top of his virtuoso, not always to my pleasure, but impressive nonetheless.

‘Dagenham Dream’ is a more lyrically ambitions track which features ambulance sirens to assert its poignancy. What begins as a poetic, though oblique eulogy, quickly transforms into another soliloquy by Mock, which at this point is preaching—or is at least set up ceremoniously to talk about—self-actualization and the interference that parents or mentors (being from a previous generalization more powerfully steeped in the process of normalization) insert early on into the process of self actualization. The reason for this interview or series of snippets, what have you, eludes me.

With ‘Nappy Wonder' we have a return to the reliance on a hook, in Hynes’s refrain “Feelings never had no ethics/ Feelings never have been ethical.” The most succinctly critical and meaningful line in the album, according to my review. As can be seen in the pace of this review, less and less is found to extract in each proceeding song. This is why we’re moving on to ‘Runnin’ (Feat. Georgia Anne Muldrow).

‘Runnin’ (Ft. Georgia Anne Muldrow) is rife with mixed metaphors and rich cascading harmonies featuring juicy reverb in addition to Muldrow. “You and your soul are never not one,” she says. “Rise and shine,” she says. Do you know why? Why you should rise and shine? It’s because “You and your soul are never not one/ Hold on, yeah.” Honestly, despite my snark, it’s a charming lullaby of a song. A song for the adults. “Just hold on to your mighty way of being,” she says. That’s actually really comforting. But then Hynes does the thing I no longer like, having Mock talk about showing up for herself again. As much as I encourage self-care and self-intimacy and support and love, there is so little here that is articulate that it nearly seems to parody. But parody what? I don’t know, making an identity politics album maybe?

A rich synth pad starts up ‘Out of Your League’ (Ft. Steve Lacy) and quickly introduces a compelling sparse big-beat. It’s a trick. It’s another trick. It’s just enough to keep me listening in tandem to my duty to discuss the album. This is actually a good song against which I have no grievances, but I’m so emotionally drained by this point that it just feels like a hollow apology for the previous twenty minutes. But then ‘Minetta Creek’ comes on and the same unpretentious bop which Hynes does so well continues the precedent set with ‘Out of Your League.’ Playing much with fore and background, ‘Minetta Creek’ features a slowly progressing melody with occasional washed out guitar riffs, sonically situated far away. Though it may just be a quirk, it’s a welcome flare and works to tie the latter portion of the album back to the earlier pieces.

‘Smoke’ closes out the album and is a conspicuous head nod to Elliot Smith’s vocal layering—or just as easily Bon Iver, given the askew harmonics. The guitar playing is folksy with a little funk with highly embellished resonance. “The sun comes in/ My heart fulfills within,” comprises over half the song, to let you know that it’s ending on a triumphant note. Not that there is anything clearly overcome.

If you’ve carried the pretext of the album with you this far, you can assume that identity is a prevailing force. And the thing that’s you, but that you don’t perform that well because you’re performing for someone else and/or society, and somehow those two things are separate: the performance and your identity, but your soul and you are never not one so there’s something inside you that is neither you nor your soul but issues directives to your body and that is the villain, but also actually your body’s compliance is also the villain, and maybe you triumph or maybe this whole album was a tautology that had an idea to grapple with but linguistically took it nowhere except through time.

Which I guess is what the album did for me too. ⛰️