HEAVN, Joe

Let's start with the music. My aversion to R&B music is mostly due to my possibly false presumption that most of it sounds like music you'd here at a spa. That's largely avoided on HEAVN. Jamila Woods' vocals are comforting at certain points, but she gets that edge when required, both confident and moving. The rhythm section comes alive at certain points too—think "Blk Girl Soldier," where the drums and guitars have a nice little battle. There are more rhythms than blues is a succinct way to put it.

But the importance of the music is outweighed by the themes on HEAVN. I keep thinking about a tweet I saw one time that basically said that privilege prevents white people from relating to the black experience, that's it's not fucking possible, and that all we can do is empathize and provide whatever allyship is required of us. "HEAVN is about black girlhood," says Jamila Woods. I am neither black nor a girl, so HEAVN is never going to be as personal an album to me as it potentially is to others. That's no one's fault; I'm not sure there's even any fault to hand out.

All I can do is empathize and hope there is something I can do to help if I am called upon. I'm thinking about the interlude "Assata's Daughters," which quotes young women in that organization (a Chicago group of young women who protest police violence) as they state a pledge. "We must love each other and support each other"—maybe I can relate to this—but wait—"We have nothing to lose but our chains"—nope, to say that I could relate to this would be white privilege for sure.

There's something I can do besides empathize, of course. I can self-educate. I can seek information on what it means to say "chains." I can see that black people are disproportionately murdered by police. I can see that 1 in 1000 Black Americans have died from coronavirus. I can see that black people are over-represented in the prison population. And so on. It's not hard to find that Woods is speaking truth through HEAVN. 

It's a truth I need to here as many times as I can, and in that context, HEAVN is an unmitigated success. But it's not a truth I can relate to. I don't need to relate to the documented struggles of minority populations, but I do occasionally need to relate to the music that I listen to. So in this very specific context—the "how much do I like this album of music" context—I cannot say that I appreciate it to its fullest extent.

But I can say that I am well beyond mirroring the behavior of the white people in the "Popsicle" interlude. It would be unfair to group every artist with the R&B genre tag together. Jamila Woods clearly has the ability to make some pretty good-to-great music that transcends the trappings of her genre.

GRADE: 3 pukes out of 5