Liner Notes for Shabaka & The Ancestors
Praying the Devil to Hell – Liner notes for Shabaka and the Ancestors
In the burning of the Republic, it is always the flattened mountain that performs the first act of self-immolation. Then the shacks (too close, a mouth with too many teeth jostling for attention) in protest of their own impoverishment. And the people within them follow. And art work in schools we can’t afford, and burning schools burning because we have nowhere to learn. Fire in the peripheries we’ve been relegated to. Queer black bodies spinning on the tip of a candle-flame. Borders incinerated, and Nonqawuse’s cattle and bibles and prayer beads and hymn books a-flame.
For those in coordination with the modalities of war and worship, who follow the fire and study incineration, it is not alarming at all that the Gods have begun to appear at their own places of worship.
They step off their gilded thrones; descending on billowy, sheep-skin clouds. They lowered themselves, ensconced in light, amongst blare and horn, and forlorn shrills and toots and booms. When they hid themselves in the blaring, repudiating their light for ours.
It is not alarming that the gods are knelt down in supplication at their own altars.
They have begun to pray to themselves. Prostrate at the feet of their own effigies. They had]ve begun to pray for themselves. Sacrificing their own truth for new ones, chanting under their breaths, “we need new hymns. We need new psalms.”
The country is simmering. Whispers in the deep have become a raging in the light. Machetes and hammers are aimed at inanimate statues. Buses blaze. Library crumble into ash. There is no value in the promise of the future when promises no longer suffice. Gods become irrelevant, impotent, when we possess the power to pray our own devils back to hell.
Wisdom of the Elders by Shabaka Hutchings and the Ancestors is one such aural orison. Recorded at Peter Auret’s homely studio in Linden, Sumo Sounds Recording Studios, the album is a psalm in nine parts. It unfurls, in episodes, much like a revolution.
First a murmur, a rumble in the distance. A bag full of desperation and desire dragged along the gravelly path between the past and now. A warning, an affirmation and a premonition. Then a demand; to be heard, to be loved. To drag the deities from the sanctified places. To place the salt of our tears on the pink of the tongues. We are longer only invoking. We are interceding and insisting. Then will be now!
The Sacred Cows have been slaughtered and their blood poisons the drinking wells. The gods are drunk on the sacramental wine and we can no longer wait on “Amen”. Yesterday is urgent.Tomorrow is now. We are our own elder. Our own saviours and sacrifices.