A Praise Song for Bilal by Emily J. Lordi

A Praise Song for Bilal by Emily J. Lordi | special NewBlackMan (in Exile)
August 23rd is the 34th birthday of musical powerhouse Bilal and as good an occasion as any to offer a praise song for this under-sung singer. There are many reasons why after 12 years in the game Bilal seldom gets the credit he deserves. He has never presented himself as a musical genius, instead cultivating a laidback stoner-meets-the-Mad Hatter vibe; he isn’t young like Frank Ocean, enigmatic like D’Angelo, fabulous like Erykah or all over the scene like the Roots; he records with independent labels and is at heart a collaborator in a system of stars. But he is one of the one of the most brilliant and experimental voices in popular music today. And this year is a good one to celebrate since his album A Love Surreal proved that he’s only getting better with age--deeper into the black musical tradition and consequently further “out.”
We can start with the basic fact of his astounding vocal skills. Studio recordings may never do him justice, but anyone who has seen Bilal perform live will know that he has more technical and imaginative facility than he knows what to do with. Working in the jazz tradition and recalling Billie Holiday’s determination to never sing a song the same way twice, he and his band constantly unhinge song from song form to create new musical space and possibility. At the Prince tribute at Carnegie Hall this year, they transformed Prince’s 90-second incest ode “Sister” into an epic, multi-genre event. But it was at Bilal’s album release show for A Love Surreal that I truly grasped the phrase “talent to burn.” Everything seemed to come so easily that he had to keep pushing new limits--into soaring falsetto, intricate ad-libs, black diamond-level scats traded with his pianist. Hearing this voice without friction, a singer who had to create his own struggle and challenge lest boredom set in, felt like watching someone else’s dream of flying.
What makes Bilal special, in addition to his crazy chops, is that he is a consummate student of black music. A church boy-turned-performing arts school jazz vocalist and arranger who rejects the term “neosoul” as a label used to ghettoize black artists, he variously relates his musical sensibility to jazz, soul, punk, and hip hop. You can hear a whole spectrum of 20th-century music in his work. Sometimes he pays homage overtly by performing at tribute concerts to legends like Curtis Mayfield. But on a deeper level, he weaves a crystalline web of musical influence throughout his work. The voices that come through most clearly are chameleonic talents like Bilal himself: Prince of course, but also David Bowie, George Clinton, Sarah Vaughan. On Love for Sale’s “Make Me Over” from 2006 Bilal makes himself over in the sonic image of about five different singers (to my ear), from John Legend to Sly Stone.
Bilal has defined himself as an artist who moves forward by reaching back since the opening gambit of his 2001 debut, 1stBorn Second. He makes his entrance on that album with a hilarious throwback that winds the hip hop backronym together with the funk radio-DJ conceit: Wake up world, cause we’re about to bring you some more of it… And my name is Bilal, Beloved, Intelligent, Lustful, And Living it..., better known as Pimpin Le Jour… Or, as George Clinton had put it in “P.Funk,” Good evening… We have taken control as to bring you this special show… Welcome to station W-E-F-U-N-K, better known as We Funk, or deeper still, the Mothership Connection… By the end of 1stBorn Second, Bilal changes stations altogether to issue a furious critique of black children’s second-class status scored by Hendrix-style fuzz-heavy chords.
This year’s A Love Surreal turns inward to explore what Toni Cade Bambara called “the inner nation.” Bilal creates an ethereal, psychedelic soundscape through which to chart the complexities of love, from summer flirtations to seductions, laments and recoveries. His allusion to Coltrane’s 1965 masterpiece, A Love Supreme, signals that Coltrane’s spiritual album lights the way for Bilal’s otherworldly work. But I think Coltrane is also a guide because he models meticulous care for tradition. A legendary student of black music, Coltrane would tell an interviewer in 1960 that he had gotten “back to Sidney Bechet already” in his self-directed course of study through the jazz tradition. Bilal’s musical references follow a similar route back through time. When his voice doubles in “West Side Girl,” the resemblance to Prince is uncanny; the sexy ballad “Longing and Waiting” evokes 1970s Marvin Gaye; the refrain of “Astray” recalls the Chi-Lites’ “Have You Seen Her.”
“Slipping Away” is a brutal gem at the album’s center that reveals Bilal’s skills as a lyricist by capturing that moment of lost love when there is nothing more to say but you keep talking. While he begins by noting that your love is slipping away from me, I see it your eyes, I hear it in your voice, Bilal proceeds to cycle through clichés in a helpless attempt to stem the tide: Remember the times we had, before it all went south and fell apart… What can I do to change your mind, talk you back from the ledge?... Don’t jump ship…. The contrast between these empty words and Bilal’s Rick James-style high drama vocals is painful. The album recovers through a beautiful duet with pianist and long-time collaborator Robert Glasper called “Butterfly,” a song that reimagines Kid A-era Radiohead as anthemic instead of anemic: The struggle makes you beautiful, the struggle makes you fly. At a recent show at Harlem’s Marcus Garvey Park, Bilal dedicated this song “to all the hardworking women in the house tonight.” Whatever they did with the monitors made it sound like Bilal’s voice was coming at you through a spaceship.
These stunning moments reveal the meaning of Bilal’s super-chill persona: what he takes seriously is his music, not himself. This explains his willingness to push well beyond the “good” sound, nudging his pout-gritty tenor toward an annoying nasal sneer and leaving it all behind in a song-ripping scream. It is because his commitment to music trumps his ego that he has collaborated with other artists since his Soulquarian days and records guest spots that make everyone else sound better, from Beyoncé to Glasper to Georgia Anne Muldrow. It’s in the service of music that he will run back and forth across the stage in wild moments that only look cool because they’re so uncool. This is the serious play that drives Bilal’s art--play in the theatrical sense that teases drama into quotation marks, hyper-virtuosic play with all aspects of musical form, exalted jam session play with music-nerd friends who speak your hard-won language and can break new rules each time.
The last song on A Love Surreal starts like a blues—woke up this morning—and ends with a call to jump in the flowthat reflects Bilal’s musical ethos. As he told Michael Gonzales, “One of the things I got from jazz is that there are no wrong notes; it’s just the way you view it. You just keep moving forward in the flow, and if you keep your eyes open, you can see the beauty.” The album’s surreal musical trip brings us to a place that is more modest but no less important than Coltrane’s sacred quest, because the destination of this dream is a morning, at once ordinary and profound, when we could wake up and want to start again. In keeping with Bilal’s revisionary art, the last line of the album evokes inheritance, repetition, and generation all at once: Like Grandma used to always say, “Nothing new under the sun.” Nothing really new, maybe, but as Bilal’s music keeps reminding us, so much to work with and so much to love.
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Emily J. Lordi  is an assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and writes about contemporary African American literature and black popular culture, especially music.  Her first book,  Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature , reveals aesthetic connections between the literary works of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gayl Jones, Nikki Giovanni, and Linda Susan Jackson and the vocal art of several iconic women singers: Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin, and Etta James.