After many a listen, I think it’s safe to say that Kendrick Lamar has created what is the best album so far in 2017 with DAMN. I will need to circle back with his other albums, but it seems to have the narrative clarity of To Pimp A Butterfly and the fiery hooks of good kid, m.A.A.d city. In the album he begins by taking a walk, where he is presumably shot and has entire life flash before him in a series of meditations on police brutality, Black masculinity, fame, lust, love and and spirituality. By the end, it appears he is revived or resurrected, and ready to quickly return to his next project.
This is easily the best produced album of his career, where he really manages to lace together an array of sounds seamlessly. Even though he’s at the top of his career, a real rap king, DAMN. has a decidedly indie feel to it, as he switches from vicious flows to sensitive R&B, guided by production featuring James Blake, auto-tuned Kaytranada vocals, Rihanna, U2, BADNOTGOOD, and Mike WiLL Made-It, among others.
For me, there are some highlights on the album: “DNA.” is where Kendrick is his most forceful, reclaiming and asserting his ancestry and power against contemporary white supremacist media that wants to erase it; “XXX.” is one of the most technically ambitious songs, mixing U2 rock arrangements with sirens and other sound effects, getting at the heart of the politics of the album with, “Hail Mary / Jesus and Joseph / The great American flag is wrapped in drag with explosives”; and “LOYALTY.” which allows Kendrick to trade bars with Rihanna in what is likely the most commercially viable track on the album (after “HUMBLE.” and its recent success).
Kendrick is a divisive figure to be sure. His politics are imperfect, but unlike many other rappers, he genuinely seems to care about Compton and has a self-consciousness that renders everything he does an exploration in self-identity, purpose and survival as Black man in this Trump era. To that extent, I look forward to make more listening sessions with DAMN. and am eager to see how he pushes the envelope next.
Run the Jewels took the hip hip world by storm in 2014 with the release of their 2nd album RTJ2. With a Christmas Eve surprise, they released their 3rd album RTJ3 several weeks ahead of schedule. Unlike their last album, the latest effort trades some of the world play and playful barbs for more overtly political tunes. None of this is surprising, given Killer Mike’s own political interests and support for Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primary season.
What is surprising, however, is how protest often times meets dance or concert anthem, from the frenzied beat and samples on “Call Ticketron” to the desire-filled “Panther Like A Panther,” anchored by a swaggering chorus from the rapper Trina. The music, most often, seems to invoke a sense that we are as a nation fighting for our lives, which is a feeling that is easy to latch onto, even if it makes for a more intentional listening, careful listening experience.
For those expecting an RTJ2 reboot, you’ll probably be disappointed. But if you understand the stakes for staying alive and fighting back, RTJ3 rumbles forward, infused with more melodic hooks, looser dance beats, and a sense of riotous anger, what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the language of the oppressed.”
Though the year was saturated by a series of high profile releases, it was also filled out by smaller scale, but no less compelling, EPs. There are some of my favorites of 2016.
15. Raiza Biza - Day & Night
14. Kiss Me All Night - Junior Boys
13. Lil Tracey - AJ Tracey
12. HER- SiR
11. Voices - Madame Gandhi
10. Still Dreaming- Fatima
9. South Of Heaven - Cosima
8. Coconut Oil - Lizzo
7. I Just Wanna Dance - TIFFANY
6. blisters - serpentwithfeet
5. Alwasta - Oddisee
There’s an ease and confidence to every track on this EP that is rare to find, particularly when you’re rapping about injustices of racism, slavery, and xenophobia among others. What’s notable, as well, is how he slows down his rapping, using funk, soul, and jazz instrumentation to great affect. Start with “Asked About You.”
4. H.E.R. Volume 1- H.E.R.
H.E.R. has decided to remain anonymous at the moment, but the mystique doesn’t detract from the quality of richly textured, gorgeously sung R&B tracks. This is a huge surprise for 2016, but easily some of the year’s most seductive music. “Focus” is a definitive standout, lead by cascading beats urging you to “Focus on me.”
3. Cam & China - Cam & China
It’s hard for women to crack into the hip hop scene, and it’s rare you see twins rapping together. But enter Cam & China, who hail from the L.A. area, and infect every beat with that West Coast swagger. The songs are overflowing with meditations on sex and desire, but they’re infectious at the same time. Start with “Playets.”
2. Lamentations - Moses Sumney
Moses is insanely talented. Seriously. When I saw him live as the opener at James Blake, I was impressed at how he loops a lot of instrumentation over a powerful, well defined to create a full band of 1. Lamentations is a soul, meditative look into Black, Jewish identity. “Worth It” is a real standout, one of the year’s best.
1. Prima Donna - Vince Staples
Vince Staples solidifies himself as a talent on the level of Kendrick Lamar with this EP. Though his production aligns more with Danny Brown, he delivers an emotional, probing look into Black masculinity that sets himself apart from so many other male hip hop artists. Start with “Loco” and delve into any of the other tracks.
This list of top 50 songs was incredibly difficult to put together. There are so many talented artists, and a lot of EPs and other smaller releases that were worth picking from. But here it is:
2016 started off as a pretty slow year for music, but it quickly turned into one of the strongest years in recent for hip hop, for queer artists, and communities of color. What is notable about this year is how many of top 25 albums are from first time artists. If some individuals have created what they have created in their debut effort, it’s likely in the next five years, we’ll see another batch of tremendous 2nd albums.
25. Cashmere - Swet Shop Boys
With this Pakistani-Muslim centered hip hop sound, the group charts a new sonic landscape in hip hop, using humor along the way to critique xenophobia and racial inequality in a global world.
24. Tkay - Tkay Maidza
Maidza, born in Zimbabwe and residing in Australia, came out of nowhere. Her debut album channels M.I.A, Azealia Banks, and more traditional pop sensibilities, often times beating these other artists at their own game.
23. untitled unmastered - Kendrick Lamar
Kendrick Lamar’s collection of loosely associated hip hop tunes is less a collection of B-sides and more the logical extension of a jazz and jam band influenced sound he cultivated in his most recent album. Some of his strongest tracks to date are included here.
22. Hedonism - Cakes da Killa
Le1f and Cakes were two of most promising queer Black rappers to emerge in recent years. Cakes, however, is the only one to shine in his debut album. Using a laser-focused deep house sound, he pushes hip hop into its danceable extreme, using Peaches and other surprise guest vocalists to great affect.
21. The Colour In Anything - James Blake
James Blake has a knack for electronically emotional music, and The Colour In Anything is his maximal opus. It’s one of the year’s longest album but also one of the most continually surprising. The interplay of sounds continues to provide fodder for close listening, time and time again.
20. Negus - Kemba
On this album, Bronx-based rapper Kemba channels #BlackLivesMatter better than almost any other music maker today. Using unique samples of Angela Davis and TV pundits, it has the rare Afro-futuristic quality that reminds me of Shabazz Palaces and other recent left-field hip hop producers.
19. Ology - Gallant
Gallant has the range and then some. This R&B album showcases the best male vocals of the year, and is a testament to his ability, time and time again, to capture our attention with stripped down, emotionally-charged tunes.
18. Mùsica de Terra - Batuk
Almost certainly to be one of the most underrated albums of the year, Batuk’s debut is a Pan-African electro-dance album from a South African group who uses Mozambique vocalists. It imbues a feminist and racial consciousness into dance music that is often times not there.
17. Atrocity Exhibition - Danny Brown
This hip hop album is so filthy, but the superb production and intensity of the rapping makes it easily the number three hip hop album of the year. When you pay for beats like Brown did, the effort really pays off. He’s one of the rappers I’m most excited to see what he does next.
16. Oh No - Jessy Lanza
It’s hard to find dance-pop that makes you feel so free. Lanza’s latest reclaims multiple sounds and blends them together into gorgeous production that unfurls around simple instrumentation. It’s driven by blunt delivery that speaks to her self-awareness and deep reflection underlying the album.
15. Nothing’s Real - Shura
It’s really hard to find a flaw in this debut pop album. Though she heavily references the 1980s, her delivery is decidedly modern. It’s like Carly Rae Jepsen’s EMOTION: filled with female-centered, radio-ready tunes, it might not always be the most inspiring, but you can’t stop listening all the same.
14. For All We Know - NAO
It’s a little long at the end, but NAO’s debut R&B album excellently navigates the vague emotional landscapes of broken relationships, resting on big vocals that demonstrate a classical jazz training, and beats that evoke the best of slinking and seductive electronica that marks forward-thinking UK production.
13. 99.9% - KAYTRANADA
Hailing from Montreal by way of Haiti, this openly-gay electronic music producer’s debut uses his trademark electronic beats rooted in Chicago house with a slew of talented hip hop and R&B vocalists. He also has some tricks up his sleeve, with songs like “Lite Spots” creating a contrast with Latin American sounds.
12. Puberty 2 - Mitski
Though is a melancholic LP, Mitski manages to make one of the year’s most precise testaments to womanhood and living as a woman of color in this world. At just over 31 minutes, the dense, alt-rock sound, with pop and folk influences peppered in, depression, anxiety, love and longing hit the listener squarely in the jaw, but this is precisely what we need to feel.
11. HEAVN - Jamila Woods
Chicago, unsurprisingly, is the epicenter of soul-searching, politically focused music by Black artists in 2016. Jamila Wood’s R&B debut is a woozy and testament to the joys of Black womanhood on Chicago’s South Side. Though Woods don’t have a huge vocal range, she uses her voice to great effect, wobbling through time with wit and grace.
10. Redemption - DAWN
Coming in at number 10 is DAWN’s excellent dance album. The final in a trilogy, Redemption is her most assured and confident effort to date. It manages to fuse electronic sounds and heavy vocal manipulation with bass clarinets and brass instruments. The result is a reflective space where DAWN looks back at her own music making and the agency of strong female R&B singers.
9. MY WOMAN - Angel Olsen
Angel Olsen’s last album was also one of the year’s best. Her latest effort trades in a rougher-around-the-edges folk sound for a mix of pop and classic rock ‘n’ roll sounds. The result is delightful and often times inspired. Olsen can seem lighthearted but her songs are tough and defiant, pushing you to listen more closely and to mediate deeply on living and loving in the world.
8. HOPELESSNESS - ANOHNI
HOPELESSNESS is the album that best lays out the horrors we have all experienced intimately in 2016. It’s about queerness, colonialism, xenophobia, environmental destruction, and the failed promises of American democracy. It’s also boldly experimental, with a rich tableau of sounds that nobody else is making. It’s vulnerability that is barbed at the edges, moving us from complacency into action.
7. Telefone - noname
This is another Chicago debut album by a strong female vocalist who uses a Neo Soul sound inspired by free form rap. Every track seems to contain in itself a universe of sound and feeling yet still work as cohesive whole. The arrangements are often dense, and deserving of multiple listens, but once you unlock the magic, you’re hooked on noname’s critiques of anti-Blackness, and grateful for her ability to hold space for a better future for other Black women and for Chicago.
6. Blond(e) - Frank Ocean
Likely to be my most divisive top 10 choice, I 100% admire what Frank Ocean did with Blond(e). No, it is not Channel Orange but it’s a fundamentally more mature album. Here Ocean navigates the complexities of Black masculinity as a celebrity, using a hodgepodge of sounds and influences to move through loneliness, isolation, drug-induced release, and ultimately ecstasy and reclamation. It took me about ten listens to fully appreciate everything, but every time I return to “Solo,” “Nights,” or “Seigfried” I’m so glad I give this labor of love the time it deserved.
5. LEMONADE - Beyoncé
If you don’t like this Beyoncé album, watch out because the Beyhive and the adjacent stans will come for you. This album is, if truth be hold, pretty much perfect. It’s everything Beyoncé needed to do to move from a pop star to pop activist in 2016, a year filled with anguish. The theme of the album borrows from Bjork’s Vulnicura--a meditation on the stages of grief surrounding a relationship breakdown. Beyoncé does for the mainstream what Bjork did for experimental music, and it’s a feat that still surprises me.
From the joyful fuck you of “Sorry” to the Southern twang of “Daddy Lessons” to “Freedom,” her most anthemic work to date, Beyoncé fully inhabits her musical and production abilities, creating a full video experience that might have an longer legacy than the music itself.
4. Coloring Book - Chance the Rapper
The year’s most joyous album is actually a gospel rap mixtape from Chance the Rapper. Not even technically an album, what Chance manages to do in the space of nearly a hour is uplift, and his enthusiasm is truly infectious. From the gospel choir backing a series of guest verses by 2 Chainz and Lil Wayne in “No Problem” to “Summer Friends,” with its smooth, sweet groves that feels straight out of a Bon Iver album to the frenetic drunkenness of “All Night,” it’s hard to find a bad track.
However, “Blessings” might be the standout. Here Chance stretches out his verses, with jazz trumpets and gospel lines creating a dense arrangement around him. Here he shows himself to be as talented, and memorable, as other emerging greats like Kendrick Lamar or Danny Brown.
3. Freetown Sound - Blood Orange
To crack the top 3 in 2016, you really had to be flawless, and Blood Orange really delivered. Though his first two albums were also strong, Freetown Sound is on an entirely other level. Loosely associative, blending pop, house, R&B, and disco sounds, Freetown Sound evokes the roaming desires of New York: a city replete with queer gestures and feelings, where your body funnels in an infinitely rich history and culture of racial, gender-based, and sexual identifications.
“E.V.P.” is a slicked out disco track that feels right when you hit your stride on a beautiful sunny whereas “Hands Up” or “Hadron Collider” speak to the risks and abuses against Black bodies in urban spaces. But many of the joys are also in unexpected moments like “Desirée,” a hazy track that speaks to a realization of being alone and confident in yourself, even with all of the people around you.
2. We Got It From Here... - A Tribe Called Quest
A Tribe Called Quest might be the old vanguard of rap music, but We Got It From Here feels less like an old school hip hop album and more like a bridge between the past and the future of hip hop. While features all of the classic elements of 1990s hip hop, from its intricate lyric structure to its social consciousness to a sound that continues to run counter to the trap rap sound of 2016, it’s decidedly of the moment, leaning on Kendrick Lamar and others to be political.
“We The People” is its most direct anthem against the hateful rhetoric of Donald Trump while “Kids...” is one the most playful tracks, Andre 3000 trading verses with Q-Tip in a track about the myths we’ve taught about living in the world. The sum of the album feels so fully realized. Like D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, it’s clear 18 year doesn’t seem like too long.
1. A Seat At the Table - Solange
When I first heard Solange’s A Seat At The Table, I was absolutely floored. Though instantly approachable, this is album is dazzling in its complexity: no note or beat is out of place, and a talented team of beat makers, guest vocalists, and post-production staff lend their best talents to this effort. Solange had previously released a lot of great music but this stands out far above anything else she’s done. She was always outspoken, but this album is the biggest affront to white supremacy in a year when white supremacy has become emboldened.
I shudder every time she reaches the high note at the end of “Cranes In The Sky.” I feel the anger well up every time she sings “You have a right to be mad.” And I move my hips when the funky bass line and pianos of “Junie” crescendo. This is not an album that everyone will connect with, but as Solange herself realizes that isn’t important. She will inhabit her joy and beauty through the music that she creates.
Night always arrives early in Saigon. As I sit on my balcony at 6 PM, the sky is dark, save the low key that move swiftly in the breeze, illuminated by occasional bursts of lightning. Tonight, however, there is no rain, only electricity. This energy seems to produced from the city. I’ve never been to Asia before, so I have no other frame of reference, but it’s as if you blended together the traffic of Mexico City, the winding, tropical roads of Rio de Janeiro, and threw in a million motorbikes, you’d have Saigon.
Which probably brings you, and many others to the ever important: why Saigon, why for a whole eight days?
The answer is not simple. Part of it was finding an amazing deal on flights, and not on the sketchy Chinese airlines you’re worried might crash over a vast ocean. Part of it was cost. Even in the business center of Vietnam, its largest city, it’s hard to spend more 12 USD on a meal unless you do multi-course, or add on the fancy cocktails.
But part of it was also the fact that the United States, just twenty years before I was born, bombed South Vietnam almost into oblivion, in one of the costliest, most deadly, ruthless, pointless wars in history. It’s good to get to know countries for whom you bear part of the responsibility of violence, given your American citizenship.
Another part was the fact that unlike Thailand or other parts of Asia (like Hong Kong, Manila, etc.), Vietnam, and Saigon as part of that, do not have a well-developed public LGBTQ scene. This isn’t to say that organizing doesn’t happen, and they are certainly holding Pride marches now, but from an everyday perspective, there is not a well-defined LGBTQ social and cultural force that shapes a lot of other cities.
Presumably, going to a place 9,000 miles away by yourself, without knowing the language, in a culture that doesn’t embrace queerness in the slightest, you’re going to feel alienated. A few days into the city all of that is true, compounded by the fact it’s one of the least pedestrian friendly cities I’ve ever been in. With many parts of the cities without sidewalks or even stop lights, it’s almost impossible to get around without taking Uber or some other car service. Despite being in a city of 10 million, I’m so powerless (and alone) in many ways.
Still, I’ll take the disconnect I’m feeling with everything that’s memorable so far. Saigon reminds me so much of Latin America, though it is developing in so many ways, it exudes a confidence, the culture driven by residents who endure a lot on a daily basis but create a tremendous culture of leisure nonetheless. Many places shut down during the heat of the afternoon sun. And cafes, serving that thick, strong, sweetened iced coffee ubiquitous to SE Asia, blast air conditioning and WiFi, to help you unwind.
Down little alleyways and up several flights of stairs sit hidden gems: restaurants concocting rustic, perfectly executed Vietnamese dishes, like an assortment of sautéed mushrooms, in a spicy, oily, lemongrass infused sate sauce. A new crop of restaurants infuse Asian styles into a plethora of ingredients: wood fired pizza gets transformed with salmon, miso, shrimp or Japanese vegetables. Saigon, it could be said, is a city of intimate pleasures, driven by centuries of competing colonial influences.
Everywhere, too, are touches of hyper-capitalism: there are more cranes dotted throughout the primary tourist and business districts than I’ve seen in Williamsburg or SoMa. The Bitexco Tower, modeled after a lotus flower, stretches 60 odd stories above the city. Flashy rooftop bars, sometimes selling drinks at New York City prices, are as much a part of the city’s fabric as the 70 cent fresh beers for sale at street vendors. Unlike Northern Vietnam, South Vietnam’s growth has exploded. Even as Western countries continue to exploit Vietnamese for labor, the Vietnamese politicians and city planners have taken some of the worst of Western capitalism.
Finally, and not surprisingly of course, gay men use Grindr, Tinder, Hornet and other apps like many others around the world. Like New York City or many other cities I’ve encountered, sex is the primary driver of queer male culture. “Top/Bot” features in a vast majority of profiles. Sex workers pop up from time to time. And profiles with “HF” signal various PnP sexual subcultures. But there is also what I sense to a great loneliness. In a city of 10 million, there are maybe 2 or 3 gay-owned bars, and I’ve yet to see a single queer couple openly holding hands or showing affection.
Worst yet, I heard a heartbreaking story of a man who has been HIV+ for a few years now and reports that doctors can, or will, regularly deny him treatments or services because of his status. These stories happen everywhere, including in the US, but I wonder how many of them are actually told openly. In my experience, relatively little has been written about the complexities of queer culture in Vietnam.
In the upcoming days, it’ll be interesting to see how my opinions change, how I come to view things differently. Until then, much love from the tropical heat of Saigon.
If you don’t know Kojey Radical (hailing from London), you should. Not only does his provide soulful, politically-conscious rap, he creates memorable visuals. Intense, visceral, 22nd century.
A new month means a new playlist. And November is about celebrating some deep cuts throughout the year, and some of the best new music of the past few weeks, featuring everyone from Saba (with guest verses by the excellent Chicago crew) to a remix from Batuk, a South African dance group. Whereas the last playlist was more soulful, this is more electronic/dance inspired.
Going into the deep cuts for fall. Featuring some upcoming folks like H.E.R., Swet Shop Boys, Cakes Da Killa and others, and some more established names like Erykah Badu, Kendrick Lamar, Justice and Gold Panda.
In a year almost overfilled with young music talent, it’s hard to pick a breakout artist. Jamila Woods had a tremendous Neo soul album in HEAVN. Solange hit #1 with A Seat At The Table. Chance the Rapper had runaway success with his mixtape Coloring Book. James Blake exploded with his guest song on Beyoncé’s LEMONADE. And Gallant proved with Ology that he has one of the best voices in the business.
But Kaytranada, it seems, has been everywhere, and his output has been tremendous. 99.9% is one of those rare electronic albums that captures the ethos of deep house, but blends African beats, hip hop and R&B into a glittering, uplifting, dance LP. As importantly, he also managed to great a number of visually interesting music videos to accompany the album.
Lite Spots, in particular, speaks to our contemporary moment by using a dancing robot, and is heartwarming all the same time. “You’re The One” uses an older Black visual storytelling method to a campy effect.
When Kaytranada was not working on his debut LP, he released the mixtape companion to 99.9% called 0.001%. Those much looser in style, with shorter edits, the similar mix of musical styles, with deep use of samples, to create another inspired, textural piece of work. It’s the perfect roughness to the careful polish of 99.9%.
Even with all of these other releases, he has not stopped. Just the other day he released a gorgeous edit of Solange “Cranes In the Sky,” one the highlights from her latest album. It’s one of his softer productions: the subtle bass and otherwise ambient arrangement a perfect contrast to Solange’s soaring, heartfelt vocals.
This is stark contrast to the extended mix of Chance the Rapper’s “All Night,” a rap-dance hybrid about drinking and dance well into the night. Rather than changing the core architecture of the song, Kaytranada simply finds a way to tease out the memorable dance floor moments, working to lengthen musical time as it happens.
It’s hard to imagine what’s next for him. After seeing him perform an intimate tent venue at Panorama Music Festival over the summer, it’s clear he can take his sound to much bigger places, if he gets the audience to follow the risks he takes and respect the diverse, often times Black, artists he samples from. Here’s to hoping that happens, and that we also get many more Missy Elliott remixes, like “Sock It 2 Me.”
Ava DuVernay’s 13th, available for streaming on Netflix, is one of the year’s best documentaries, and what I am certain will be a classic documentary on racial inequality and our larger prison industrial complex in the United States.
In the film, DuVernay tracks the history of our prison system from the 13th amendment, which ended slavery in the United States but also opened up a loophole in which prisoners were, legally, considered owned by the state. Once the economy of the South collapsed, freed Blacks were arrested for minor offenses, imprisoned and then used once again as labor to help rebuild the South in a second wave of slavery.
Using key voices in the movement, including political figures, activists, and those that work at NGOs, the film charts how the prison system moves from this early post-13th amendment model to the cornerstone of policies that politicians using to garner the support of working class whites from the South, leading to the expansion of Jim Crow policies, and ultimately Richard Nixon’s racist “law and order” candidacy that lead to the explosion in our prison population. Under Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton, the War on Drugs became another way to disprorportionately lock up Black and Latino men, with Clinton’s expansion of “three strike” policies and mandatory minimum sentencing in the 1994 crime bill being particularly damaging to these communities.
What’s impressive about the film is that it also manages to connect to the present day: using the expanded visibility of police brutality and police shootings to show how this violence is not isolated, but rather an effect of the 13th amendment loophole, and the racism that this country was founded on. It also manages to link the development of “stand your ground” laws and the anti-immigrant SB1070 in Arizona (which greatly expanded the profit of a company running private detention centers) to ALEC, which has been active in feeding the prison industrial complex for decades. She also creates a chilling montage that links Donald Trump’s racist campaign rhetoric to that of the KKK and violence against the civil rights era protestors.
In 1 hour and 40 minutes, DuVernay explores elaborate, interconnected policies and histories to 100% obliterate the lie that people of color are fee in this country. They are fundamentally not, in part because generations have inherited cultural trauma, imposed conservative ideals in their own communities, and have been locked up, subsequently released, and continued to be denied access to food, housing, jobs and voting rights that could build political power against these discriminatory laws and systems.
For those who have been studying these systems for a while, there’s nothing necessarily new here, but the the documentary is a reminder that we all have to do more to help reform or dismantle (depending on your political ideology) the prison-industrial complex. For those who aren’t aware of the 13th amendment or these histories and policies, the documentary is surely eye-opening and extremely unsettling.
Tonight Moses Sumney, Vince Staples and James Blake are doing a concert at Radio City Music hall, so I made a little playlist of some of their best songs and deeper cuts.
This morning I had the pleasure of seeing a special advanced screening of Moonlight, Barry Jenkins' latest film that has been receiving rave reviews, even in mainstream publications. The film charts the life of Chiron (also referred to by the nicknames Black and Little), a Black character who comes of age in Miami, confronting taunts and torments of "faggot" as a child, his mother's drug addiction, and the unlikely bonding with another teenager, who also becomes the one that sends him away from Miami to Atlanta in a terrifying turn of events.
The narrative is cut into three parts, which leave significant gaps in what we know about the characters. Reviewers have said this is a fault in the screenplay. But I think the absence of certain details, gaps in meaning, render what is on the screen all the more powerful, as if to create more than simple a dramatic work. Instead, we have something that can only be described as poetry, guided by the soft, loose camera and the saturated color palette that leaps out in every sequence.
Chiron is told from a young age, by a man who discovers his cry for help one day, that he can make himself out to be anyone he's not. The sentiment is there, but Chiron is haunted by the constant negation and destruction of some part of him that he cannot control, and wants to express, without violence. By the third sequence, Chiron is, as a grown man, in a very different place than where he was before, but he reconnects out of the blue with his teenage friend, the only men he was ever involved with, resurrecting these past emotions. There’s a tremendous beautiful vulnerability that each actor playing Chiron embodies.
The final sequence is one of the best of the whole film. The chemistry between them, the anguished, unspoken desire, is palpable. Humor creeps in, but I'm still left in tears. The past traumas, told through the unique lens of Black masculinity, are inescapable. But when we find more people to let us be vulnerable, to finally step into the potential of our full being in the world, we can find some peace in the world.
Moonlight is set to be a classic of queer cinema: for the bold, poetic retelling of a common story, for loading the narrative with so many different things to consider, often without even having to say too much, and for having the rare naturalistic complexity that is all too hard to find in some familiar narrative tropes.
