An Emotional Repercussion

Where does one begin with Blood Orange? With beats and rhythms that every dance/house/grime musician dreams of creating? The incalculable amount of collaborating artists? Or perhaps with the lyrics that seem so relevant after days filled with police brutality, racial profiling and gun violence? The new record, Freetown People, from British born Singer-songwriter Dev Hynes could not have dropped at a more appropriate time.

The lyrics on this album are an exegesis of the world that surrounds us, as well as the effects that it has on us both in our inward and outward appearance. It is a record for everyone and yet it feels as if Hynes speaks directly to the listener, commenting on one’s struggle with gender, race, sexuality and oppression.

The song “Hands Up,” with lyrics like “Keep your hood off when you’re walking” and ending it with a spoken “Don’t shoot” repeated five times; it is hard not to have an emotional reaction and the realization that this is not a record that one can simply put on in the background to relax to. Other songs like “Love Ya,” where the outro is a sample from the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates discussing the way one dresses so as to fit in or not attract negative attention to oneself, or “Chance,” where the repeated verse “All I ever wanted was a chance for myself,” examine racial prejudice.

Lyrics aside, this album also holds its own in regards to the instrumentation and can withstand any electronica that permeates the current music scene. Although this record is by Blood Orange, he largely takes up a background role. If Hynes does one thing better than writing and performing his own music, it is the direction in which he pushes the additional artists that appears with him on this record. Some of the best songs on the record are those that do not feature Hynes heavily. Rather, they are songs like “Best to You” featuring Empress Of, “Hadron Collider” with Nelly Furtado, and Debbie Harry on “E.V.P.” The greatest artists, though, are those who are not musicians but writers and activists like Ashlee Haze on “By Ourselves” and Venus Xtravaganza on “Desiree.” An entire article could be devoted to just the other artists he has accompanying with him on the record.

This is an album that is going to be impossible to ignore, and that’s a good thing. It is going to be a confronting record that brings up topics of race and police brutality, with songs explicitly about Trayvon Martin and the implications that occur because of the color of one’s skin. Freetown People is for the maltreated, the underappreciated and Hynes has carved out a perfect medium in which to discuss these topics.