Aside from feeling like a prelude to the apocalypse, 2016 will go down as a banner year for ambitious albums exploring what it means to be a person of colour, especially in America. The timing is no coincidence: racist police brutality persists, and Donald Trump promises to entrench racial divides. The vibe of many of these records, notably Solange’s fluid A Seat At The Table and Blood Orange’s Freetown Sound, has been understated and contemplative. But one lesser-cited standout addresses issues of identity with firework-bright energy.
In June, Brooklyn-based musician Xenia Rubinos released her second album, Black Terry Cat, a vibrant voyage through her psyche – “Welcoming folks into the way I hear music,” as she says, calling from tour in Tucson, Arizona. She unleashes MIA-like invective on Mexican Chef, a tart skit about the undervalued work that keeps the States afloat. (“Brown cleans your house, brown takes the trash, brown even wipes your grandaddy’s ass,” she raps with a wink.) On I Won’t Say she quotes from civil rights activist Abbey Lincoln’s 1966 essay Who Will Revere The Black Woman?, and amid See Them’s gnashing synths, Rubinos poses the record’s key question: “You know where to put the brown girl when she’s fuckin’ it up. Where you gonna put the brown girl now she’s tearin’ it up?”
Born to a Puerto Rican mother and a Cuban father, 31-year-old Rubinos questions the limitations that other people put on her identity, including the artistic ghettoisation she experiences when her music is labelled “Latin”. Such pigeonholing flattens her sound’s wild abandon and ambition. She graduated from the prestigious Berklee College Of Music with a degree in jazz composition, got her start playing DIY house shows in her Brooklyn apartment, and is currently signed to ANTI-, a division of punk label Epitaph. Indeed, on Black Terry Cat, she thrashes as hard as Shellac, flows like Erykah Badu, and matches the strut of classic Daptone records. Because of this, she says, “It’s infuriating when I feel someone’s not listening and just looking at my face or name and assuming.”
That miscategorisation, coupled with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, inspired Rubinos to investigate her own heritage while writing Black Terry Cat. Tracing her roots back to her Spanish grandfather and African great-grandmother, she began defining as Afro-Latina (rather than the disputed ethnonyms Latino and Hispanic). She says she wasn’t aware of that designation when she was younger, but a surge in Latin media has finally offered proper representations of her background; even listicles about “things you only know when you have a Puerto Rican grandma” help, she says.
“Back then, I didn’t see myself [re]presented in media in any kind of way that was relatable or authentic,” says Rubinos. “It’s cool to have these things now to help me navigate my experience.”
Since its release, Black Terry Cat’s themes have felt ever more pressing. The emotionally frantic Black Stars was inspired by the death of Rubinos’s father after complications from Parkinson’s disease, but she says its lyrics took on extra meaning after 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot dead by police in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. The week we speak, there are reports of police killing more unarmed black men in Oklahoma and North Carolina. But, Rubinos says, it’s just as limiting to call her a “political artist” as it is to call her a Latin one. “Because I’m saying things about being a brown girl in America, suddenly it’s a protest album,” she says dismissively. “I’m just talking about real shit that’s happening around us.” She references Nina Simone: “She was socially engaged and wrote a lot of provocative songs, but she was a great composer, a great pianist, a great vocalist. To say she’s protest music, it limits the way people could view the larger scope of what she does.”
Nevertheless, Rubinos is hopeful that her record will help people through tricky conversations about race, society and emotion. “One thing I was curious about was how Cubans are able to carry their joy and their pain as if they were the same thing,” she says. “That’s part of this brown-girl magic I wondered if I could harness. In a live show, I feel the weight of what I’m saying, but it’s fun. I’m dancing and we’re all there together. I wish that’s what it could always be like, that we could have that conversation.”
In 2016’s musical discourse about race in America, Rubinos’s voice is one we should all be listening to.
Xenia Rubinos plays Birthdays, E8, Monday 24 October
