A sense of mortality permeates Neneh Cherry’s new album, Broken Politics. “It seems sick to me now/It’s funny how fragile is a life/That can have everything now to nothing left at all/Amounts to little pieces,” she sings on “Deep Vein Thrombosis,” a lilting song about blood clots. In language so intimate as to be oblique—like she’s catching you up on an event you’ve already been following closely—Cherry tells stories that braid melancholy reflections of life experience with social commentary. Subjects like freedom of choice (“Black Monday”) and the European refugee crisis (“Kong”) sit alongside songs that illustrate feelings of waning self-confidence (“Natural Skin Deep”) and defeat (“Fallen Leaves”). Balancing out the heaviness of songs written by Cherry and her husband slash “creative… dialogue person” Cameron McVey is producer Four Tet (aka Kieran Hebden), who cushions Cherry’s vocals with the lush sounds of harps, flutes, and warm keyboards, and sometimes gives her step a pep with looped beats.
Broken Politics quietly expands the concept of what a singer-songwriter album looks like in 2018.
It’s a collection as multivalent as we’ve come to expect from Cherry, whose breakthrough smash “Buffalo Stance,” mixed rapping and singing, dance music and balladry, a sense of self-worth and calling out shitty men (in that case, a thirsty pimp). Almost 30 years after her solo debut, 1989’s Raw Like Sushi, Cherry, now 54, continues to confound expectations. Broken Politics is her fifth solo album, and perhaps her strongest and most sophisticated—every bit as vivid, sensitive, and forward-thinking as Joni Mitchell was in the mid-’70s (though decidedly less verbose). Broken Politics quietly expands the concept of what a singer-songwriter album looks like in 2018, and the results are almost uniformly arresting. This is, in my opinion, one of the best albums released this year in any genre or mode.
I spoke to Cherry over Skype on Tuesday, the day after she returned to London from Sierra Leone, where she buried her father, musician Ahmadu Jah, in his home village. She sounded slightly weary but remained matter of fact as she recalled attending the Islamic service for her father. Sitting in a curtained-off women’s section of the mosque, she said, did not bother her. “I just felt more that I was there and it was a tradition and I felt, in a way, very respectful of the way that particular thing is done,” she explained.
“I felt so honored to be a woman, I was so in awe of the women there,” she said of her time in Sierra Leone. “Of course, there are elements of life there that are hard that I don’t want to undermine, but a lot of Western ideas that women are so oppressed and it’s so awful and sexist—and there are aspects that are maybe of another time—but in general, what I felt more than anything was the strength and the beauty and this fascination with the female community. The women are very together and kind of running things.”
We went on to discuss her state of mind on Broken Politics, the magic of collaboration, aging in the music industry, and how creative life changes after one’s peak on the pop charts. An edited and condensed transcript of our discussion is below.
JEZEBEL: You’ve been talking about imbalances and shitty men from the start, before a lot of people were doing so in pop music. When you see the current mainstream conversations about equality, do you ever look back and think, “Wow, I was really prescient”?
NENEH CHERRY: I don’t think I ever felt like a fire-starter. I don’t think I’m leading a posse with my insights. I feel privileged to come up in a place where there was no question [of me] standing up against a wall at a dance, waiting to be asked to dance. I was always going to take my shoes off and hit the dance floor and try to engage with people, men and women. That’s just a metaphor.
I’ve been really inspired by my trip to Africa as a teen. I came out with a really strong sense of feeling… I don’t want to say “confident” because on some levels I’ve lacked a lot of confidence, but that driving force behind confidence, that search for freedom or breaking away from stereotypes and perceptions of how a young woman should be. I feel blessed to have been [able to adopt] a way of living where you’re looking to throw off things that are imprisoning you. It’s like searching for a type of freedom, even though that feeling is sometimes temporary. It’s about figuring out how to live things by your own rules in the little space that you occupy.
How does that ethos carry over to this album, Broken Politics?
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