Moor Mother is a singer, poet and activist from Philadelphia. Her music reflects political realities and ideas through haunting yet beautiful production, centring black liberation at the core of her work. Moor Mother, because of this, pulls influences from jazz, blues, and rap, tying different historical elements of black culture together and creating a world for her music to breathe in. There is an ambient quality to her work, as much of the instrumentation feels like world building around the central poem that is being performed.
On the track ‘Liverpool Wins’, Moor Mother delivers a poem about the abolition of slavery of the ways that systemic racism and oppression reinvented itself to spread in to the veins of society through the huge sums of money slave owners were compensated. After slavery was abolished, slave owners were given about £20 million, which was roughly 40% of the annual treasury spending budget at the time. Reparations were in fact offered after slavery, but not to the slaves. These slave owners used the money given to them to set up schools, banks, churches, castles – the infrastructure of our society. Moor Mother tackles this on ‘Liverpool Wins’, while dissecting how the colonisers continue to see themselves as the saviours of humanity.
Moor Mother builds the track around the poem, having the instrumentation feel like a living, breathing entity responding and communicating to the words. She pulls in almost industrial feeling sounds and uses foley and experimental synths to create an underlying sense of dread and horror that reflects the subject matter perfectly. She manages to make the song feel like a poison slowly spreading through your veins as the track goes on, much like the poison spreading throughout society funded on the back of the payouts.
There are moments throughout the song in which Moor Mother directs your attention back to the poem by cutting everything else in a sudden tone change. One such example is when she speaks on ‘The Secrets of England’s Greatness’, a painting of Queen Elizabeth giving a bible to an African chief, kneeling by her feet, a representation of the colonialist mindset and the subject matter touched on throughout the rest of the song – an acknowledgement that the money used from these payouts was funnelled in to creating whiter religions and infrastructure that funnelled the same colonialist attitudes and outcomes right back in to the veins of society.