#DontSleep on Algebra Blessett’s Recovery by I. Augustus Durham

#DontSleep on Algebra Blessett’s Recoveryby I. Augustus Durham | @imeanswhatisays | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Breakups and heartbreaks have probably engendered some of the best music created. Whether country ballad or soul classic, genres have no premium on conveying the whimsy of the heart. That said, while the 2016 release of Beyoncé’s Lemonade signaled a pop album invested in overcoming those very obstacles of the heart, personally and corporately—even as metaphor—, Algebra Blessett’s 2014 Recovery, to my mind, provides the first taste of lemonade, albeit mixed with sweet tea.
Algebra’s discography begins in 2008 as she leads a Purpose driven life. Interspersed between her two albums, she collaborates with Esperanza Spalding among others, and even covers a remixed Justin Timberlake record where she sings the verse of the aforementioned songstress. However, this second album marks a radically different feeling from racial uplift and chronotopic love. Recovery is a project that performs emergency surgery on a patient in cardiac arrest.
The album unfolds almost as a cycle of sorts. The first track, “Exordium to Recovery (Give My Heart a Chance)”, suggests living in a post-op world where the heart intends to beat again. Mid-album, we find “Augment to Recovery (Give My Heart a Chance)”, presumably referencing the need to change the dressing of and continue the medication regimen for the wounded organ in order to get one’s proverbial (cardiac) weight up. The album speaks to a plethora of affective moves: impermissible/unrequited love (“Struggle to Be”; “Mystery”); protection, or lack thereof, of the heart (“Paper Heart”); passion and infatuation (“Nobody But You”; “Forever”’ “Danger Zone”); vulnerability in moving on (“Recovery”; “Better for Me”; “Writer’s Block”).
With all the vicissitudes the heart experiences on the album, it is no wonder that Algebra appears as a butterfly on the cover: the project actualizes how one moves from chrysalis to metamorphosis, retrograde to recovered. While one does not know whether Recovery is metaphorical, what it does elicit is an opportunity for self-reflection, to look back and wonder how you got over that. And so, a moment of transparency:
While I have never known “Becky with the good hair”, I have known “‘Robert’ in the Greek paraphernalia”. In fact, “Robert” and I spoke on the phone once; he told me how lucky I was, that I was with a great person. When someone you love, someone great, someone you feel lucky to be around, is so twisted that s/he treats your heart like a piece of hot toast, starving for retribution is only appropriate.
Lemonade, then, could illumine six virtues—intuition, denial, apathy, emptiness, loss, accountability—as opposed to deadly sins. However, if Recovery is its precursor, then the paramount lesson it teaches, in order to eventually savor lemons, is simple.
Although tight(ened) metaphors abound in totality, over and against the mixed and broken ones previously heard and seen, a record like “Formation” may offer the right and wrong “Exordium”: while in some cases, the best revenge is your paper, the bestest—the best of the best—revenge might actually be your survival.
Here is the strange and bitter(sweet) sip.
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I. Augustus Durham is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in English at Duke University. His work focuses on blackness, melancholy and genius.
Other essays from I. Augustus Durham:
KING Me: Soul for a Black Future
Mr. White! *said in echo*: Charting the Black(ness)