Meanwhile, vinyl devotees, stuck inside, bought record numbers of the format. Musicians also re-invented their past personas into new iterations, ones that seemed more deeply human than ever, abandoning hyper-production in favour of rawness and the real. From pop-hued club euphoria, to face–melting death metal, and everything in between – our homes became dance floor and gig venue alike. Artists conjured audio solace through soundscapes, weirdly wonderful realms that played out in our imaginations, and tracks that spoke to our frustrations, and our joys. One lays bare the harrows of Black oppression, the other offers a vision of Black hope – presented by the same group within months of each other.Īs the Coronavirus pandemic ripped through the planet, isolating us to levels not seen in generations, music brought us together.
In 2020, we have two albums of the year, inextricably linked to each other, and to this time. In the process, they created a reckoning through sound, palimpsests of these months that will live forever in our collective sonic memories. So, Black artists turned their centuries-old fight for survival into song, speaking truth to power with music that expressed anguish and uprising. Nor was systemic racism dismantled within the music industry, either. However, that supposed reckoning for white supremacy tragically never came. The world’s attention was directed toward the violent persecution of Black people, as the killing of George Floyd, like so many before him, rang out across the globe. From the political to the personal, from tales grounded squarely on planet Earth to interstellar existences of their own creation, musicians, left with more time at home, recorded, responded, and released in real-time. Thankfully, artists expressed all we needed to with their albums. A year you could say endless words about, and still not find the right words at all.
0 kommentar(er)
