The Personal Is Protest

REV. OSAGYEFO Uhuru Sekou’s album In Times Like These does something I’ve never witnessed any other recorded musical project do: It sings before track one even begins. Printed on the inside of the album’s CD case is one of the most powerful commentaries on the 2016 U.S. presidential election I’ve read. “The Task of the Artist in the Time of Monsters,” written by Rev. Sekou, is simultaneously an artist statement, a poem, and a call to action for the world to engage passionately in “the art of loving and living.”

Sekou’s album is a rousing sermon that may re-energize social justice activists who listen to it, keeping them engaged in “the movement.” At the same time, it’s also an extended prayer of sorts, lamenting the wrongs of the world and asking God to alleviate society’s pains. “In times like these / we need a miracle,” Sekou sings in the chorus of the album’s title track, one of the project’s standouts.

However, despite his call for divine intervention, Sekou doesn’t allow believers in a higher power to sit back and rest assured that God will do the work they should be doing. He completes the chorus of the song “In Times Like These” with the much-appreciated but potentially controversial statement: “Ain’t nobody gonna save us / We the ones we’ve been waiting for.” In a time that calls for bold, social justice-minded commentary from artists, Sekou delivers.

Yet several songs on In Times Like These lack soul, their musical compositions being sanctuary-worn clichés. If the lyrics of a song mention God, it always seems to include the whine of an organ. Sekou has absorbed many of the African-American gospel tradition’s tropes, but didn’t imagine ways to subvert them and innovate a new sound. If he had paired these familiar melodies with surprising lyrics, with feats of storytelling imbued with intimacy and uniqueness, with tales that hadn’t been told before and/or were from his personal experiences—then, perhaps, Sekou might have overcome this pitfall.

Pastors almost universally begin their sermons with a story, however small, from their own life. Like great storytellers, skilled pastors know that specificity creates universality. Sekou—a pastor, theologian, and organizer—didn’t keep this truth in mind as he created In Times Like These.

What if he had done so? A glimpse at what his album could have been is the song “Loving You Is Killing Me.” The lyrics of the song are surprising due to their subject, which differs from the rest of the album: It’s a breakup song. “If love is a language,” Sekou sings, “you don’t know how to spell / If love is a story / you don’t have one to tell.” Later in the song, Sekou sings about planning to pick up the rest of his things from the home of the unnamed person who broke his heart. The song feels raw; it reminded me of my own conflicted love for this troubled nation.

And at the end of the track, when the music stops, Sekou says to the people who are with him, “Shit, I think we got a record.” I agree and disagree. Because while In Times Like These is in some ways a brilliant project, “Loving You Is Killing Me” offers a painful reminder of what more it could have been.