Jamila Woods
"Heavn"
(Closed Sessions (ASTERISK)(ASTERISK)(ASTERISK))
Chicago poet and rapper Jamila Woods' verses have shown up of late on tracks by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis ("White Privilege II") and Chance the Rapper ("Summer Sunday"), and she has a coming-out party on her full-length debut here. Joining the voices raised in this Black Lives Matter moment, her "VRY BLK" echoes the chilling detail in D'Angelo's "Charade." "Hello operator, emergency hotline," Woods rhymes in a deceptively singsong manner. "If I say 'I Can't Breathe,' will I become a chalk line?" "Heavn," whose title track quotes the Cure's "Just Like Heaven," is particularly impressive musically, considering Woods identifies as an activist as much as an artist. She says the album is "about black girlhood, about Chicago, about the people we miss who have gone on to prepare a place for us somewhere else, about the city-slash-world we aspire to live in."
Like Chance's "Coloring Book," "Heavn" isn't shy about infusing its hip-hop and jazz-inflected sound with gospel fervor and religious imagery. The initials in "LSD," produced by fellow Chicagoans oddCouple and featuring Chance, turn out to stand for nothing lysergic _ just Lake Shore Drive, the road that hugs Lake Michigan, whose waters she imagines as having healing, baptismal powers: "You gotta love me like I love the lake." The album is not available via most conventional outlets, but is streaming free at soundcloud.com/jamilawoods.
_Dan DeLuca
