NON-PROFIT MUSIC FOR THE PROTESTS: Various Artists – The Blackwashing

Sequenced exquisitely and stacked to the nines with take after take of excellent independently-made music, The Blackwashing does what good art is supposed to do: provide perspective. Its twenty-four tracks range from fresh voices and old souls, guitar-slingers and keyboardists, people of all talents and levels of fame turning out to demonstrate the range of Black excellence. You could start from any side and come out on the end with a satisfying listening experience.

Though the message is clear, the approach to elucidating that message varies widely across the tape. The Blackwashing simply contains too many styles here to count succinctly. There’s rap aplenty, from gios4ma’s panned, paranoid “thervltion” to ahomari’s stark, excoriating “N**ger” to Orlando Kennedy’s über-fluid bars on “Preparation” to the apocalyptic heat of Moodie Black’s “picket fence”. There’s electronic-based music, from Camp Candle’s silky smooth “NRT” to Model Decoy’s wonderfully-constructed alt-R&B fusion “Shiparound” to Vritia’s closing tones in relaxed electro-jazz instrumental “Milk”. Rock tracks, like Imani Coppola’s biting garage-punk number “Woke Up White” and Marcus Machado’s Alabama Shakes-like barn-burner “Code Black”, hold just as much of a presence. And then there are the experimental moments, the truly risky maneuvers that still shine: rA Washington’s menacing collage of speeches and news snippets, “Jimmy Angels All [for the fire this time]”; Ebonee A.D.’s fractured, imaginative “Whole Different Mirror”; and Kimya Dawson’s fragile, affecting spoken word piece, “At The Seams”. 

This doesn’t nearly cover the breadth of music on this tape, and every single one of these tracks finds a home somewhere here thanks to mynameisbluesky, a Massachusetts-based musician who lends a marvelous curatorial sense to this project. Though the energies may vary and the moods run the gamut, the momentum rarely lets upland that’s ideal for a compilation featuring so many voices. The Blackwashing is a whole that’s more than the sum of its parts, and that’s a remarkable feat that shouldn’t be overlooked.

100% of the proceeds of record sales will go to racial justice organizations!