It’s not often that, in real time, you can sense that someone will be the type of artist that’ll be studied, analyzed, and borrowed from for decades beyond their genesis. But Baltimore’s Abdu Ali has felt like one of those artists for nearly ten years. Their music intertwines the sounds of Baltimore club music, punk, rap, and jazz in a way that feels like a new genre is being carved out, but no one has come up with a suitable way to categorize it just yet. In the early days of Ali’s artistry—on projects like Invictos & Push + Slay—that multiplicity of sound was there, but the most prevalent feature was their rage. Industrial synths, unhinged wails, and club music 808s laid the foundation for Ali to share their feelings of being ignored (or, in some cases, discarded) by society for defiantly existing as their true self. That palatable fury came through in full force, but with that, Ali’s music often felt like it was best suited for witnessing in a venue setting, when the transferrable energy of nightlife crowds would physically bolster those feelings.
Over the past four years or so, Ali’s music has kept those core principles and energy in tact, but has been smoothed out by components of free jazz. The addition of that has drawn parallels between Ali and the likes of greats such as Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra, artists who used jazz in an unconventional format to articulate and imagine alternative worlds for Black people to thrive, completely apart from the ills of the physical realms they descended upon at birth.
The artistic evolution of Abdu Ali reached its highest peak last year when they released, FIYAH!!!, an album inspired by a literary magazine from the 1920’s titled FIRE!! made by queer Black writers and thinkers. The publication, according to Ali, felt like a direct reflection of their own career-long artistic mission. Through 14 tracks, the album is stitched together by gripping interludes, cries for the feeling of freedom, and openness about their mental health. It’s the type of album that feels like it can equally be enjoyed in a club, over a glass of wine in a dimly lit living room, or being studied in a college course centered around artistic expression. In a recent conversation, I talked with Ali about the time they took to make FIYAH!!!, how the literary magazine influenced their artistry, and how they’d like people to process their work.
How have you been feeling about the reception of your most recent album, FIYAH!!!?
The people are really loving it and I’m loving that the people are instantly being criticially engaged with the work. It’s not just like, ‘Oh it sounds good” or “I really like this song,” people are giving critical analysis. People are getting out what I want them to get out of the album.
This is by far the longest you’ve ever taken between albums. Mongo came out in 2016. What was going on with you in the time in between?
Chile. I was a mess. I always try to stay on my hustle and do my thing but me constantly touring for 4-5 years kinda drove me insane. I felt spiritually and mentally unbalanced. I really do love performing. You can’t fully understand Abdu Ali until you come to my show, but touring is work. It’s not fun. It's fun when you on stage and the people are giving you love or whatever, but it’s a lot of work. You gotta drive long hours, take a lot of flights, be hungry, be dehydrated, deal with shitty promoters, shitty sound. Even the after effects of touring can be tough because when you tour, you’re constantly on a high. When you come home it’s like, what is my life about? But I intentionally took a break so I could focus on creating an album. When you’re in a show space it’s completely different from being in a creativity space. When I’m on tour it’s really hard to make music and I was shook when I came back because I felt like I had nothing to say. But I had to realize that I have to take time for myself for that energy to come back.
What excites me about FIYAH!!! the most—and I been around since the beginning, literally was there when you made your first song—is being able to take it in when it was close to completion instead of every step of the way. Did you purposely isolate yourself from friends in order to get this done?
I’m really shy about sharing my music in general and sometimes you do need to not share your work with your close friends because they can’t sometimes provide a nuanced opinion on your work. It’s not that I purposely isolated myself from friends, I isolated myself from everybody. Last year I was pretty introverted which I needed to do to make this album. I even isolated myself from music; I tried not to listen to a lot of current music because it can influence your work heavily and I wanna be as original as possible.
One of coolest things about the project that most people probably don’t know is that it’s inspired by a literary magazine of the same title but a different spelling (Fire!!). It was published in New York City in 1926—damn near 100 years ago—and had work by people like Wallace Thurman, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Aaron Douglas, and the list goes on.
It’s crazy because they made it when they were just becoming who they are to the world and it was made in Harlem in this place they called the Niggerati Manor.
Why did you name the album after that? What did this publication do for you creatively, just as a person absorbing it?
As a Black queer person in America, it was just so refreshing and affirming to see people that I looked up to that were gay, lesbian, queer Black people almost 100 years ago make a body of work that’s not just good, but it’s buck and provocative. It talks about sexuality and colorism. All these things you wouldn’t expect people to be talking about at that time. A lot of people don't know, but it was very hard for them to get funding for that book because people saw it as too radical. Even the NAACP wasn’t trying to give them money because it didn’t represent the “upstanding Negro” they were tryna paint at that time. The book really just felt like me and what I try to do with my music.
I wanna talk about the concept of accessibility when it comes to Black alternative artists and how that can be conflicting sometimes. On your first couple projects like Invictos and Push + Slay, you were reimagining the limits of Baltimore Club. But even still, because of how the music was arranged, it wasn’t easy to grasp for everybody. Your average listener of club music wasn’t expecting somebody to flip the genre in that type of way. Fast forward to Mongo and now with the new album, the sounds started to become more well-rounded musically. Would you say you’ve had a more universal reception since you started to rethink how you wanna make music with adding jazz and funk?
In the beginning it was more of me being a baby musician and not really knowing how to shape my sound and make it accessible to my damn self. It wasn’t matured yet. So a lot of people not being able to understand it was me not being at a place where I’m mature with my sound. But then on the other end, people really can’t take experimental music—which I think is funny especially with the Baltimore Club music that I was making. I took the baton from Blaqstarr who is one of my favorite music artists of all time. When I heard Blaqstarr’s “Rider Girl” and “Tote It” and all these amazing Baltimore Club classic tracks, it made me realize that club music can be radical yet tangible songs. A whole moment. I felt like nobody was able to do that before—maybe Miss Tony. Blaqstarr was otherworldly. I knew that was gonna be the backbone of my music. But as the years went by I started learning more, I did get to a point where I wanted my music to be enjoyable by everybody. Good music is music that everybody can touch. I don’t really care for avant garde artists that make music that is purposely inaccessible because it comes off as elitist.
You have a song on FIYAH!!! titled “Spiraling.” Earlier you talked about having to recalibrate yourself mentally and spiritually. Would you say this song is the soundtrack to that process?
Shoutout to DJ Haram, one of the best DJs and producers in the world. She just does it right every time she makes me a beat. I sent her the vocals for the chorus and I asked can she make music around it. Also shoutout to Juliana Huxtable who uses the word “spiraling” a lot. But the song isn’t just about me, it’s about what I think a lot of millennials are going through right now with mental health and tryna navigate the internet and all these distractions. We the first generation that always has a mirror up. We always analyzing ourselves and each other. This is really new for the human experience in general and I can’t wait for 20 years later when they’ll write all these social analysis books about how this is fucking our heads up. When those words came to my brain, I definitely was in an emo moment and wasn’t feeling great about life. I made that at a moment when I was not feeling my best.
What would you say is the most challenging aspect of putting an album together?
Getting money to make it. But I feel kind of blessed because once I stopped touring, the material just started flooding to me. I never really have writer’s block. I never felt like it was challenging to make the music but it was challenging to make it cohesive. That was the biggest thing to me. This is also my first time working with session musicians and organizing that. The technicalities of recording this was the hardest.
Did the time you took to make this give you more clarity?
For sure. It gave me a lot and it grounded me. I have a lot of rage when it comes to navigating the music industry because I feel like it’s bullshit. We live in America where there is bigotry, but I feel like I’m double marginalized being queer and being Black and living in a city like Baltimore where it’s disenfranchised. Overall I felt more clarity but I can’t take a break like that again because people start forgetting about your ass. It’s people out here putting out hella music so I gotta make sure I’m up to date. Those booking requests start to simmer down when you not dropping music.
