“To kind of guide you along the way,” chimes in Harris-White (even over the phone the two seem very close and have a tendency to finish each other’s trains of thought). “To ease the pain, change the situation up. […] Naturally, this album is going to be about black, queer women because we are two black, queer women. We’re story tellers at the end of the day and we’re just trying to tell a story about us and our experiences.”
The couple met back when they both were students in Seattle. “I used to go crash parties at the University of Washington,” says Harris-White. “I went to a small arts college not too far away and they just didn’t have the same sorts of events. I’d be crashing these parties and bumping into Stasia a bunch of times. We became friends from there and eventually started dating. When we were both in our senior year in college Stasia went on ‘study abroad’ trip to Cape Town. I started messing around on garage band and sending her stuff. Meanwhile she was writing a bunch of poetry and when she came back we were just so done with school and we just needed a way to release.”
After several free mix-tapes on Band Camp, the duo broke some serious ground with a cameo on Shabazz Palaces’ 2011 album Black Up, followed shortly by a signing to Sub Pop Records and the release of THEEsatisfaction’s debut full-length, awE naturalE. Such is the gravity of Shabazz Palaces in Seattle’s still nascent hip hop scene that many reviews of awE naturalE treat the album and its makers as something of an adjunct to Black Up. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Though both THEEsatisfaction and Shabazz Palaces make cameos on each other’s albums, each artist has a wildly different aesthetic. Whist Black Up occupies a synthetic, nocturnal, somewhat sinister sound world owing much to current trends in bass music, awE naturalE is an altogether livelier, more organic experience. Off beat hip hop collides with Erykah Badu-esque neo-soul. There are samples of old jazz records too, and warm vinyl crackle. The overall aesthetic belongs more to the legacy of ‘60s and ‘70s soul and jazz than to club music.
“We like to think that we were alive in the ’60s and ’70s in another life,” laughs Harris-White. “We just really love listening to music from that time, looking at pictures, watching footage from Soul Train. We listen to Curtis Mayfield, Gill Scott Herron, Chaka Khan…”
“And the speeches too!” Irons interrupts, “Stuff like Malcolm X. We listen to a lot of that too.”
The duo’s love of retro is perhaps most evident in the video clip for QueenS, a lushly lit film of Irons, Harris-White and a host of other black women putting on makeup, hanging about on lounges and dancing. The video was inspired by the multimedia works of Brooklyn artist Mickalene Thomas. “There was a series of pieces she did which all involved black women with natural hair,” says Harris-White, “black women just lying around and enjoying themselves with all these different fabrics and patterns. It’s very ‘70s”.
One of Mickalene Thomas’ trademarks is a process of creating collages and then painting over them. It’s an approach that parallels THEEsatisfaction’s own – samples are pulled together into a sonic collage which acts as a canvass for the two singer’s brush strokes. “Definitely!” enthuses Harris-White, “that’s a cool connection.”
The breadth of sources which THEEsatisfaction draw from is impressive. Musically, it’s not hard to find evidence of any of the defining genres of black America – jazz, soul, hip hop, blues etc. Lyrically, the duo name-check Orson Welles and Archie Bunker, or spill Egyptian mythology into Bible references. If you had to sum up THEEsatisfaction, you would come equally close with the revolutionary call to arms of Earthseed: “THEEsatisfaction couldn’t give a fuck about the fascists!” – as you would with the refrain from QueenS: “Whatever you do, don’t funk with my groove.” Both lines are accurate but neither is a complete representation of the duo. That both these lines appear in the album some 40 seconds apart is all the more indicative of THEEsatisfaction’s duality. From the political to the personal, the sound of awE naturalE is passionate, heady and convinced. This is a band that wears their hearts on their sleeves and their influences on the ink in their arms.
BY HENRY ANDERSON
