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Freetown, Sierra Leone is the sound of people speaking Krio on the streetside, the sound of “Aw di bodi,” “Tel God tenki,” and “Ameen,” flowing into the hot, humid air. Freetown is the sound of kids running around in their uniforms, or the ones selling the fresh fruits on the top of their heads. The sound of mothers rocking their babies, wrapped in cloth across their breasts, to sleep. The sound of cars honking because there is only one stoplight in the entire city. The sound of the large pot outside boiling Aunty’s okra soup. Freetown is also the sound of my grandma telling me “Osh ya,” when I fell off my bike outside our townhouse in Southern California at the age of six. The sound of Arabic as my parents do Isha'a prayer in the other room. It’s also the sound of my dad playing “Desolation Road” by Bob Dylan on his laptop for me to hear. The sound of my mother on the phone with her sister as the Real Housewives of Atlanta plays on our living room TV. For my parents, Freetown is the sound of love and loss, memories and war, family and freedom.

In Devonte Hynes’s, more frequently known as Blood Orange, album Freetown Sound (2016), critics attempted to figure out what made his album encapsulate the sound of a city on the Atlantic coast of West Africa. For it’s not just any city. My dad used to tell me stories when I was younger about the significance of Freetown. It’s the capital of Sierra Leone, yes, but it is also a major port city that played a crucial role during the transatlantic slave trade. He would recount that the “free” represented the formally enslaved and liberated Black people who settled there during the 18th century. When Blood Orange’s album dropped, Western music publications did not care for the sounds of the city as they were drawn more to the idea of West African grooves. Publications, like Pitchfork, focused on his incorporation of Sierra Leonean Krio (Pitchfork only refers to it as “a particular African dialect”), gravitated to the moments of funk, and were troubled by the ones that lacked drums and bass.

I was personally troubled by how Pitchfork refers to his album as a “deconstruction” of West African style. Specifically, it was said by interviewer Marcus J. Moore who is, without doubt, cultivated and acclaimed in his work on Black contemporary music in the US. Still, I wasn’t quite sure what Moore meant until he asked immediately after why Blood Orange chose to deconstruct the alleged West African element, wondering if the removal of drums and bass was deliberate. According to Mark Abel’s  Groove: An Aesthetic of Measured Time, it is a common argument that “‘groove,’ has its origins in West African music, in particular, in the drumming which is a central element of the music of that part of the world” (Abel 61). The assumption that “groove” is a defining element of West African sound is one that music critic and academic Marcus J. Moore carries, but one that Mark Abel rejects in his chapter “Is Groove African?”. 

We must ask ourselves if Blood Orange’s lack of groove is a deconstruction of West African sound, a displacement from the Freetown sound, or rather, pointing us to another way of understanding West African musical elements. With 80s-inspired pop-synth songs such as “Better Than Me” featuring Carly Rae Jepsen (you know, the Canadian pop star who sang “Call Me Maybe”) and “Best to You” featuring Empress Of, we get a feminine layered voice that underlines ballads of jealousy and heartbreak. Where can we locate the “Africaness” to the album from pop songs like these without identifying groove? 

To answer those questions, let’s turn to the music video for “Better Than Me.” It was hard for me to grasp (truthfully, it’s still hard for me to point or lock down) the tempo and rhythm of the song. Listening to the song from a traditional, Western understanding of time, the timing feels off–clapping your hands or moving your head in a consistent, equal repeating manner proves impossible. The melody and rhythm flees, but then pause and come back to us. The music video visualizes the unevenness of the song through choreography and motion. Mark Abel writes “Temporal regularity can be explained by the needs of the dancers or by the evenness of physical activities such as walking” (88). Abel further explains how African music exists outside a Western time measurement system, and we can see this arise in Blood Orange’s song as well as the album as a whole.

Blood Orange and the ensemble dancers perform a modern dance routine as the song “Better Than Me” plays through the music video. Modern dance is characterized as a style of dance that rebels against formality, engages with improvisational techniques, and disconnects movement from time to free up space and possibility (Cunningham). There are even points in the video where the natural movements of the dancers slowed down through editing, negotiating a different temporal relation to the music. 

The song is an example of how Blood Orange is not necessarily deconstructing West African elements through a play with time and space or a lack of percussion in favor of pop synths. Rather, he places his music outside of Western standards and measures of music. For critics, it is a deconstruction because the album embodies a dismissal of structure. The sounds of Freetown, the sounds of West Africa, lie in the album's ability to reimagine a new kind of temporality. Freetown Sound is a rupture and collage. Freetown is the sound of breaking and imagining. Freetown is the sound of a hazy dream you can’t quite recall or see. The sound of hope buried within the darkness.

[freetowns0unds]

I was thirteen years old when Freetown Sound first came out. I had only been thirteen for a little over a month. According to my Spotify history, I listened to my first Blood Orange song at age thirteen. There it is, “You’re Not Good Enough” by Blood Orange (off his sophomore album Cupid Deluxe, but I found it through the Palo Alto movie soundtrack) added to my Spotify likes on exactly June 26, 2016. Freetown Sound would come out two days later; and me, I wouldn’t listen to the album in its entirety until August 21, 2017. Nine months into Trump’s presidency, the blossoming into my teenage years were defined by fear and anxiety. In the span between Summer 2016 and the end of Summer 2017, darkness arose and embraced a fourteen-year-old Black girl from the suburbs whose loss of innocence was marked by the televising of black deaths.

Freetown Sound situates itself perfectly in the landscape of when Kendrick Lamar released To Pimp a Butterfly (2015) and Beyonce dropped Lemonade (2016). It was birthed during the time of Kendrick rapping, “We hate the po-po / Wanna kill us dead in the street fo sho’” on late-night talk shows and Beyonce fashioned in an outfit reminiscent of the Black Panthers in her “Formation” live performances. However, Freetown Sound introduces something different in the realm of Black protest music in mainstream culture. I don’t want to follow the line of thought that validates Blood Orange by referring to Beyonce and Kendrick Lamar as “performative.” I’m not even going to follow the argument that Beyonce and Kendrick Lamar lack radical potential in the ways in which they only offer a type of protest palpable to white liberalism. Although tempting, I cannot fully deny that Freetown Sound or Blood Orange aren’t without critiques in those areas either. What set Blood Orange’s Freetown Sound apart from the other albums was the glimmers of hope offered in discussions of pain and trauma. 

The album gave me a new way to understand grief and loss without physical displays (or sounds) of brutalization and violence. I came of age during a time when the brutality placed upon black bodies, their screams and blood, played out on my phone screen for me to watch over and over again, without even meaning to. What impact does it have on a young black girl to see her white peers reposting the murder and assault of black lives as some representation of their allyship and empathy; to see them type out, “We see you. We hear you. We stand with you,” as they attempt to reproduce the terrors of my community. 

One of Freetown Sound’s most devastating songs would have to be “Hands Up.” That being said that song is also a striking continuation of Blood Orange’s pop influences. He sings with a nasality on top of lush synths and a catchy beat. The sound, both vocally and instrumentally, is reminiscent of the female pop stars he typically produces for (Kylie Minogue, Sky Ferririra, early Solange Knowles, and almost Britney Spears in 2013). For me, there is a nostalgia to the vocal styling of “Hands Up,” that is eerily reminiscent of Britney Spears’ “Oops!...I Did It Again.” Both have verses sung in a whimpering and pleading manner, hinting at a type of innocence; the singers’ augmentation in the heaven-like, ethereal-sounding pre-choruses, stress innocence as they stretch out the melody of each line. Then, the innocence breaks, and falls apart, to the reveal of a hard-hitting chorus that inspires sensuous dancing.

The pop production and vocality of “Hands Up” diverge from the song’s theme of police brutality. It almost sounds more like a coming-of-age anthem, carrying the a similar tone to Britney Spears when she sings about how “She’s not that innocent.” The song can almost be placed within the score Blood Orange did for the teen drama film Palo Alto (that I watched when I was 13). The song’s composition is romantic and full of yearning, tension, and sudden change. Even listening to the lyrics, “You were just another loudmouth, cute-faced girl,” makes me nostalgic, struck with hope. In this sense, the artist defamiliarizes the performance of black pain “in which terror can hardly be discerned,” similar to how Fred Moten does when he declares, “Defamilarizing the familiar, I hope to illuminate the terror of the mundane and quotidian rather than exploit the shocking spectacle” (Moten 3). In his song, Blood Orange places terror and brutalization against the backdrop of coming-of-age and innocence. It drew parallels to my own fragmented experience with pain as a Black teenage girl. The daily pain was inscribed into my daily life as I went to school, scrolled through Instagram, fought with friends, had crushes, rebelled against parents, felt my youth fleeting.

One can argue that the style of the song distracts from the lyrics, “Keep your hood off when you’re walking ‘cause they (Hands up)” and denies the pain of recounting a phrase and scenario that holds so much weight in the black community. What does it mean for Blood Orange to not reproduce the darkness and grief through sound but still write lyrics that intentionally emphasize it? In Blood Orange’s denial of producing pain through musical composition, he situates listeners in a different space. Pain manifests itself in Blood Orange’s pop sounds of pleasure, and so I look to when Moten writes about  “The possibility of pain and pleasure mixing in the scene and in its originary and subsequent recountings” (Moten 4). Saidiya Hartman would argue that this mixing represses the encounter of suffering. The layering of pop sounds, nostalgia, and romance in “Hands Up” erases the grief tied to the actual event of police brutality. However, for Moten, the song’s composition and tone holds the ability to resist “formations of identity and interpretations” through the challenge it brings through its divergence and fragmentation.

“Hands Up” ends with a recording from a Black Lives Matter protest, but then gets interrupted by a clipping from Time magazine’s 2015 interview with rapper Vince Staples. The song’s conclusion encapsulates how Blood Orange never attempted to fully capture the devastation of police brutality. The abrupt cut between protest and performance demonstrates the potential of unresovilability. Each time I listen to “Hands Up,” as well as Freetown Sound in its entirety, there is always an openness waiting for me. Blood Orange unsettles black identity rather than arriving at an understanding of it. He allows for contradictions and jarring transitions to emerge so that his music turns back in on itself. The beauty lies in his ability to not necessarily move listeners forward, but instead, around the untraceable landscape of blackness. Blood Orange’s Freetown Sound is a record of fear and celebration. It's also the tension between Black joy and trauma that remains inexplicable through language, but natural to feel. 

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Freetown Sound does not only allow pleasure to coexist with pain. For Blood Orange’s Freetown Sound, the past also coexists with the present. Freetown is not only a place in West Africa where Blood Orange’s father was born, but Freetown exists within Blood Orange’s life as an artist in NYC. 

In Western culture, it is hard to reckon with time in a way that does not engage with the idea of moving forward or some type of chronological linearity. When critics saw the name of Blood Orange’s 2016 album, they believed it would be historical, ancestral. Entertainment Weekly described the album, “This record is steeped in history: the title refers to Freetown, Sierra Leone, where your father was born. But the album feels really current, too. Songs like “Hands Up” reference the killings of unarmed black teenagers.” For the Western music critic, Africaness signifies a type of past while Blackness operates in the present. There is a lot to be said about the critic’s idea of Freetown as a pre-modern site for the album while the theme of being black in the States brings it to the present. Similar to how Marcus J. Moore believes Blood Orange deconstructs West African sound, Entertainment Weekly seems to suggest that the artist modernizes, refashions, and revamps the album’s Sierra Leonean “roots.” The publication attempts to position (West) Africa within a Eurocentric construction of history that parallels James Snead’s explication of Hegel: “The African is also always already there, or perhaps always there before, whereas the European is headed there or, better, not yet there” (Snead 650). Entertainment Weekly positions blackness in Blood Orange’s album as a type of Europeaness that gets the album to its modernity; the publication argues that the blackness of the album is what gets us to the present.

However, the blackness of Freetown Sound does not provide a linear transformation of its West African references. The historicity of the album does not solely come from the title. When it comes to blackness and historicity, Snead continues to write about understanding the notion of time in black cuture through “those occasions when history ‘jumps the rails and has to be restarted at the point where it goes wild’” (655). The album situates itself in a complicated, unmappable history. There is no origin, although some people would argue that the origin is “obviously” Freetown. That fails to be true when we look at the construction of the album. Freetown Sound begins with a sampling of Ashlee Haze’s 2015 spoken word “For Black Girls (The Missy Elliot Poem).” Then, as the album plays through each song, Blood Orange interupts them with cuts from Boogie Down Production’s ‘Why is that?" (1989), the documentary Black is… Black Ain’t (1994), Venus Extrvaganza in the documentary Paris is Burning (1990), and Ta-Nehisi Coates “Is Violence a Function of Our Culture” (2015) alongside so many more.

Freetown Sound is neither a current or historical album. Time is scattered within the album and exists outside a linear, chronological conception. Blood Orange jumps back and forth, neither here nor there. Through samplings and interpolations, clippings and recordings, Blood Orange disorients our sense of place and time. He describes the record  as “ADD” in response to Entertainment Weekly, saying:

“I was really intentionally trying to make things move quickly to keep [people’s] attention…I used to do that stuff when I was younger, like on VHS. You’d cut out the commercials and press record again. It was such a mixture of different things. But the more you did that over a month period, just trying to make a perfect tape of some kind, [the more] you realized it created such a real sense of you and where you’re at. That’s what I was trying to do musically with the album”

What Blood Orange does not realize is that unintentionally, in his attempt to capture the attention of others and piece together where he is at, he placed himself in a type of sociality, a play between different histories and experiences. In Freetown Sound, Blood Orange evokes what James Snead refers to as the “cut.” Within what appears to be his album’s progression and development, the artist interrupts himself, only to get back on where he left off later. What Blood Orange refers to as “ADD” in order to express his inability to focus on one linear train of development, Snead calls “a kind of cultural coverage, this magic of the ‘cut’ attempts to confront accident and rupture not by covering them over, but by making room for them inside the system” (652). Freetown Sound figures more like a sonic collage than a map or chart of Blood Orange’s identity. The songs don’t seamlessly transition to each other on the album. The artist once compared the record to flipping through the same few radio stations in a singular car ride, and there is no better way to put it. 

Blood Orange tends to repeat melodic schemes within his record. These schemes aren’t strategically placed, but happen randomly, where one song sounds reminiscent of another, but you are quite sure where it is picking up from.  There is no trace to help us understand how we got here, but we are somehow back where we left off. Each song evokes a fragmentation, not necessarily complete, but left waiting for Blood Orange.

Music criticism loves to evaluate albums on their ability to progress and develop. No artist wants to hear from Rolling Stone or Pitchfork about how each song on their album sounds the same. When making their albums, musicians strive for cohesion born out of constant invention. Repetition is tolerated, only if it is re-invention, something new must be born within each occurrence. I was at least conditioned to believe that. Every time I noticed a repetition, I was determined to find the differentiation. I would say, “Yes, this reoccurred, but it also transformed,” because I was apprehensive about the idea of suspension. Where am I, where is the music, if not progressing? To answer this question, I look to the song “E.V.P” off Freetown Sound which goes like this:

Two step in the cut Spotlights in the cut Chances are you never saw What made you who you are

These are the first lines in the song, but you hear it broken down and repeated throughout. They are not extended, or even developed, but pieces of the sound echo in the back. Similar to the repeated melodies and the samplings, the repetition of these lines does not hide in the background, but we cannot predict when they will arise. The “cuts” come as a surprise.  An alternative to progression is seeing the potential in the surprise, the jolts, the interruptions. Not as a means to move us toward the future, but find that the present, what we deem as “current,” is interlaced with hints and pieces of the past.