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Songs We Love: Moor Mother, 'Deadbeat Protest'

Moor Mother's album <em>Fetish Bones</em> came out last year.
Bob Sweeney
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Courtesy of the artist
Moor Mother's album Fetish Bones came out last year.

Camae Ayewa, who records under the name Moor Mother, doesn't waste time. The Philly-based artist and agitator stuffs every moment of her densely packed, combative songs with unease and piercing static — that she doesn't allow listeners a moment of peace or rest can only be part of the point.

"Trying to save my black life / By fetishizing my dead life / F*** / Get away from me," she roars in "Deadbeat Protest," an 83-second blurt of antagonistic aggression that makes Death Grips sound like Ed Sheeran. That gnarled F-bomb is telling: It's set against the grimy, industrial buzz of electronics, yet it still finds a way to clash harshly against the sounds that surround it. It's not a cathartic primal scream so much as the product of a search for new ways to set nerves on edge.

Though Ayewa shrouds her words in shards of sonic confrontation, her message is as blunt and compressed as her music: She's hungry, under attack, fists up, forever in peril. This is music of crisis and, as such, it takes — and makes — no room to breathe.

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Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)