This is not a comeback tale; instead, it is nothing short of the revival of Kelela. A jubilee, of sorts, for a beloved artist who hasn’t been gone at all – she’s been listening. Since dipping ever so slightly beyond our reach, she has been setting the conditions under which she constructs her world and creates her art. This has been her way since the release of her first mixtape, CUT 4 ME, in 2013 up until her last release, Take Me Apart, in 2017 and the remix album that followed.
In 2019, Kelela created her own reading primer filled with articles, books, podcasts, videos and documentaries and started to send it out to her friends, family and business partners. She included resources like Reader on Misogynoir by Kandis Williams, The will to change by bell hooks and Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Umoja Noble. She sent links to the Seeing White podcast and IGTV videos from Sonya Renee Taylor about Black labour called, Are you stealing from Black folks? and More on Stealing from Black People: Right Relationship Beyond Capitalism. She even included work from Black men like Heavy: an American Memoir by Kiese Laymon and Damon Young’s viral article “Straight Black Men Are the White People of Black People”, adding personal notes like “Only thing I would add is that cis gay Black men are also the white people of Black people, especially in the creative industries where they are often allowed into positions of power right after white women.”
Additionally, she included documentaries that tied these radical texts back to her genre and medium of choice, dance music, through recommendations like (1996), which
