Review: Jamila Woods’s LEGACY! LEGACY! Is a Chronicle of Black Trauma and Joy

The singer-songwriter imbues her sophomore effort with a multitude of intertextual meanings and nods to her predecessors.

Jamila Woods
Photo: Jagjaguwar

Jamila Woods imbues her sophomore effort, LEGACY! LEGACY!, with a multitude of intertextual meanings and nods to her artistic predecessors. With the exception of “FRIDA,” which is dedicated to famed Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, each track bears the name of a black artist, musician, or writer, assembling an illustrious creative lineage stretching from Muddy Waters’s southern blues to Sun Ra’s Afrofuturism. Being given this kind of insight into a cross-section of Woods’s influences is a small but mighty pleasure for all that it reveals about her creative process, but the musician takes it one step further, presenting the songs here as dialectical tribute, not merely homage.

A spoken-word poet and Pushcart Prize nominee, Woods proven herself an emotive wordsmith, and LEGACY! LEGACY!, like 2016’s Heavn before it, revels in the power of language. On the high-spirited “OCTAVIA,” she honors African-American slaves who illicitly taught themselves to read and write, framing that legacy of language within the accomplishments of science-fiction writer Octavia Butler and issuing a call to empowerment: “Don’t ever let a textbook scare you.” She delights in hyperbole on “GIOVANNI,” a tribute to her matrilineage inspired by Nikki Giovanni’s “Ego Tripping.” For Woods, words are both sword and shield in the way that they liberate one from adversity and honor the ego.

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Although the album explores intergenerational black trauma and joy, Woods’s personal insight into such experience functions as the album’s anchor and serves as a more accessible entry point. Inspired by an interview in which Jean-Michel Basquiat refused to divulge the source of his rage, “BASQUIAT” attests to the power of a not allowing other people to regard your anger as a spectacle. Backed by the jagged textures of descending guitar passages and insistent percussion, Woods divulges how concealing the particulars of her own anger allows her to claim absolute dominion over it: “I smile in your face, but the oven’s on high.” On “BALDWIN,” Woods criticizes the “precious lethal fear” and “casual violence” of white people: “My friend James/Says I should love you anyway…But you’re making it hard for me.” Throughout the album, Woods utilizes the knowledge of her forebears as a diving-off point, advancing or contradicting their ideas to relay her own message.

Often, Woods plays with her vocal delivery, extending and contorting her pronunciation and intonation to imbue her songs with a childlike air. An ode to the necessity of preserving independence in a relationship, “FRIDA” alludes to the home Kahlo shared with Diego Rivera, a pair of twin houses united by a bridge. The repetition in the refrain—“If I run, run, would you, you, you see, see, see me?”—brings to mind the rhythms of a playground game, and this guileless atmosphere casts a gentle, carefree light on the tangle of expectations a relationship can conjure. “SONIA” unfolds like a fairy tale: “Once upon a time, little girl on the grind/Met a boy, he was nice at the time.” Woods affirms the pain of a toxic relationship to validate it and ensure it cannot be erased, stating simply in the chorus: “It was bad, it was bad.” She sings the word “bad” as an oscillation, fluidly moving up and down the scale like a nursery rhyme.

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LEGACY! LEGACY! chronicles the adversity that women of color regularly face, but at the heart of Woods’s music is an urgent desire to heal and be healed. Throughout the album, from refusing to compromise her ideals (on “EARTHA”) to embracing her peculiarities (on “BETTY”), Woods stresses that the first step to healing is a regard for one’s own boundaries, values, and desires—or, to put it more simply, self-respect. That self-respect is emboldening and incendiary in the face of generations of devastating animosity, the rationale behind the battle cry on “ZORA”: “None of us are free, but some of us are brave.”

Score: 
 Label: Jagjaguwar  Release Date: May 10, 2019  Buy: Amazon

Sophia Ordaz

Sophia Ordaz was the editor in chief of The Echo. Her writing has also appeared in Spectrum Culture.

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