The Best (Black) Album of 2015

The Best (Black) Album of 2015Curated by Lawrence Ware | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Contributors: I. Augustus Durham + Charles Hughes + Stevie Johnson + Emily Lordi + Mark Anthony Neal
Editor's note:
As we reflect upon the trauma and injustice visited upon Black folks in America and around the world in the past year, let us not lose sight of the beauty. 2015 was an incredible year for black music—but, really, the brilliance began in late 2014. In November, D’Angelo stunned the world by releasing his virtuosic protest album Black Messiah, and, in December, J. Cole’s beautifully introspective concept album 2014 Forest Hills Drive dropped. Then, in 2015, Kendrick Lamar, Vince Staples, Jill Scott, Erykah Badu, Drake, Miguel, and even Darlene Love released incredible albums.

So, amid all this excellent music, the question became: What is the best black album of 2015?

I asked dear friends and colleagues make the case for which album they believe towers above the rest. Their selections were at once insightful and surprising--covering the breadth, complexity, and beauty of black music released in 2015. I thank them for their contributions.
--Lawrence Ware
+++I. Augustus Durham is a third-year doctoral candidate in English at Duke University. His work focuses on blackness, melancholy and genius.The American Mythology—Donnie My 2015 New Year’s Resolution was to purchase (black) music. Therefore, choosing a piece for the “Best of 2015” is difficult because a number of albums fit the bill, e.g., this (“Out of the Clouds”!) or this (“Something’s Coming”!). But I settled here:Donnie’s The American Mythology is admittedly “a project that would be his therapy and therapy for the nation of people he loves so dearly”. This sonic couch session, which is to say an extended love ballad reclined, arrives some years after his previous projects The Daily News (2007) and The Colored Section (2002). However, what fosters the project’s intrigue is the nature of its execution in the cause of tracking “an epic narrative that was written based on the archetype of the classic myth. It’s a new and exciting way of facing the world’s problems by way of allegory”. These literary allusions confirm the album, all of 23.5 minutes, as a text! But what is that classic myth: This is the land of the free, home of the brave (“Protester”)? I, too, sing America, even if its dream has become prolonged sleepwalking (“America”, “American Freak”)? All the world’s a stage (“Playground”, “Broadway”)? Religion is the opiate of the masses (“Rainbow Apostolic”)? You can’t take it with you (“All This Stuff”)?Or is it the myth of a music industry that is so individuated, even unto the rise of the single, that an album where the “artist” becomes a part of the “ensemble” is jarring yet, somehow, hopeful?+++Charles Hughes is the Director of the Memphis Center at Rhodes College, where he designs courses, programs and partnerships. A scholar of black history and culture, he is author of Country Soul, one of Rolling Stones’ 10 best books on music published in 2015. Summertime ’06—Vince StaplesI love Kendrick Lamar’s maximalism, but I found myself equally drawn to a murkier and more intimate L.A. hip-hop manifesto. Vince Staples’s Summertime ’06 shares themes with Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, from police violence to the struggle for salvation, and also that album’s interest in a larger paradox that Staples articulates in his album’s title track: “My teacher told me we was slaves/My mother told me we was kings/I don’t know who to listen to/I guess we’re somewhere in between.” Indeed, the “in between” animates Staples’s vivid lyrics and structures his unsettling sonic landscape. Beyond its clear debt to the West Coast rap continuum, Summertime ’06 also recalls the bluesy sludge of Houston screw or ominous throb of post-punk bands like Suicide. Staples’s voice careens and murmurs across these spare tracks, often in tandem with other vocalists whose presence (and occasional dissonance) lend a note of disquiet and even menace to ostensibly playful songs like “Lemme Know” or “Hang N Bang.” (Dr. Ari Eisenberg observes that Staples’s atonal harmonies with Jhene Aiko on “Lemme Know” recall Exene Cervenka and John Doe in L.A. punk pioneers X.)  Both lyrically and musically, Staples follows Ralph Ellison’s advice to “finger the jagged grain of a brutal experience” in order to find the “near-tragic, near-comic lyricism” at its core. Although Summertime ‘06 ends abruptly – Staples’ vocals cut into static in mid-verse – this powerful album signals a vibrant journey to come.
+++Stevie Johnson is the Director of Operations for the Division of Student Affairs at the University of Central Oklahoma and a Ph.D student in the Higher Education Administration Program at the University of Oklahoma.  Stevie is also known as DJ View. He has been a producer/DJ for 7 years.  Check out his soundclound page at www.soundcloud.com/therealdjview.   
Ego Death—The Internet The ears of Kedar Massenburg, former president of Motown Records and the originator of the term neo-soul, should be ablaze after hearing the Internet’s Grammy Nominated Album, Ego Death.  The eclectic, alternative California soul group poises itself to take over the reigns of R&B and soul that were once (still) ruled by the likes of Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, The Roots, Maxwell and D’Angelo.  The Odd Future collective of lead vocalist Syd tha Kyd and producer/architect Matt Martians, along with bass guitarists Patrick Paige, keyboardists Jameel Bruner, drummer Christopher Smith and vocalists/guitarists Steve Lacy have fashioned a masterpiece that goes against the grain of the ubiquitous misogynistic and sociocultural conceptual lenses that advance patriarchal views of what love (or lust) should embody.  
In fact, the album’s title commands the listener to check your ego at the door because you can be on top of the world (professionally or personally) right now, but in an instant you could be humbled.  From the beautiful bass lines on  “Get Away,” “Gabby” and “Special Affair,” to the seductive and melodic vocals from Syd, vis a vis the ignant, (yes ignant) production from Kaytranada on “Girl,” Ego Death’s instrumentation allows the listener to sonically reflect upon the intersectionality of race, class and gender while Syd, as the lead vocalist, gives an important perspective on same sex gender roles.  The Internet’s Ego Death is impeccable.  This is by far, the best album of 2015, but “…I Tried” to tell you.
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Emily J. Lordi is assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and author of the book Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature. Jazmine Sullivan, Reality ShowWhile Jazmine Sullivan is well known to R&B audiences as a supernova vocalist, she is also a brilliant songwriter, as her third album reveals. Here the 28-year-old Philly native deploys a variety of musical styles to depict a series of women whose stories rarely make it into popular music. Whether channeling optimistic petty criminals (“Silver Lining”) or passionate drug addicts (“Veins”), Sullivan’s throaty vocals and wordy lyrics evoke the cadences of real-time real talk. A primping gold digger depicts her internal life through internal rhymes in “Mascara”: And my tits get me trips to places I can’t pronounce right; he said he’d keep it coming if I keep my body tight. A left-out lover shouts out her lonely companions in “Brand New”: This one’s for all the baby mamas and the down ass chicks, remember y’all used to take bathroom pics in the crib and he said if he ever got rich, you’d be out this bitch—believed that shit… One of the last songs, “Masterpiece (Mona Lisa),” casts the “show” of “reality” in a positive light, celebrating the art of the ordinary woman. But that song is less an exception or a destination than the album’s rule: all of Sullivan’s characters embody artfulness through their no-shit-taking commitment to their own moral codes. She conveys this subjective morality concisely in “#HoodLove”: He ain’t always right, but he’s just right for me. And in the face of her jaw-dropping melisma on “me,” who’s going to argue with her?+++
Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of African + African-American Studies & Professor of English at Duke University where he directs the Center for Arts + Digital Culture + EntrepreneurshipCarefree Arrangements--Terri Lyne Carrington’s The Mosaic Project: Love & SoulIn the midst of continued State-sanctioned violence against Black women and girls, the #CareFreeBlackGirl hashtag is not an inconsequential response, despite its seeming disconnect from the realities of Black life, at least to some.. Rather the CFBG moment is, as Jamala Johns describes it, a moment of agency where Black girls and women “exhibit the qualities we all cherish to a wider audience that isn’t regularly exposed to the multitudes of black female creativity.” Drummer Terri Lyne Carrington did not have the benefit of such hashtags when she began her career more than thirty-years ago, though indeed if #carefree stands in as tension for an instrumentalist, whose job is to largely keep it in the pocket, while others improvise all around you, she found some value in this particular celebration of women-centered creativity.Carrington’s The Mosaic Project: Love and Soul,  a sequel of sorts to her Grammy Award winning The Mosaic Project (2011), would have been otherwise notable because of the cast of Black women creatives that join her including vocalists Lizz Wright, Natalie Cole, Chaka Khan, Lalah Hathaway, Jaguar Wright, Valerie Simpson and Nancy Wilson--what we might fashion as #CareFreeGrownBlackWomen.  And while Carrington remains in the pocket, the genius of the project is in the musical arrangements, where her freedom and creativity are writ large particularly on tracks like Luther Vandross’s “For You to Love” (with Oleta Adams), Bill Withers’ “You Just Can’t Smile It Away” (with Paula Cole) and Patrice Rushen’s “When I Found Love” which features Rushen on keyboards and Lizz Wright on vocals.