Anthony Joseph - Rowing up River to Get Our Names Back

While often atmospheric in its thematic registers, ranging from spaces of the subterranean underground to the intergalactic, and equally so with its sonic registers, ranging from doubly articulated vocals to the reverb echo, there is indeed something like a core to Rowing Up River to Get Our Names Back. Taken as a suite, the three tracks that make up the middle, if not heart and soul, of the album—“Tony,” “A Juba for Janet,” and “Churches of Sound (The Benítez Rojo)”—put on display how the cultures and histories of the Black diaspora always constitute both the downbeat and backbeat for Anthony, not just his music but perhaps even his very consciousness. We can hear it in the deep pain when “Churches of Sound” moves into a poetic ode when Anthony notes that Lord Kitchener’s Calypso “croon reached Ghana / just in time for Independence,” and in “A Juba for Janet” with its dub soundscape, and yet again with the Afrobeat undertones of “Tony.” If “Churches of Sound” is closer to an ode, “Tony” might be a paean; significant no less because it contains the lyrics from which the album gets its name. It is here that Anthony uses the conceit of seeing Tony Oladipo Allen perform in France to proclaim his admiration of Allen’s virtuosity as a drummer (“He was duplicitous / a conjure man / with seven hands.”), arguably as significant as any of his counterparts including Art Blakey and Max Roach.

If Rowing Up River to Get Our Names Back has an anthem it might well be “An Afrofuturist Poem.” The penultimate track on album, and the shortest at 4:41, Anthony opens the song with the line “I am my mother’s son …,” seemingly in reference to Toni Morrison’s famous lines about sons in her novel Beloved, before announcing numerous other sources that constitute his personal and artistic genealogy including his father, I & I, and oil. But in the middle of the song, the bass subsides and for a full 30 seconds Anthony waxes “We must arrive new mythologies / and syntax / and modes of expression / which are fixed beyond comparison / to alien transmission.”

The resonances of Afrofuturism are everywhere on this album as both Anthony’s lyrics and Dave Okumu’s production try to “ride through space.” There are mentions of “anti-matter propulsion” and “Afronauts” elsewhere, but the song that emblematizes Afrofuturism as more than merely spatial temporality is the album’s lead track. “Satellite” is a reminder and encomium that, facing the conditions of modernity, Black folks across space and time have always been curious, if not compelled, by a yearning for the beyond, a beyond outside of the here and now, and sometimes back into the past to press into the future. In this sense, “Satellite” shares a sonic accord and political vision with the Soulquarians’ “Heaven Somewhere,” on a version that featured Omar. In an album where Anthony plays with order, sequence, and boundaries, such as when he inverts “alpha and omega” to “omega and alpha” or rearranges the postcolonial model of “core and periphery,” he concludes that there is, or at least can be, a center: “Moving through / the center / connected to everything (yeah, yeah) / spun out of galaxies / and diasporas / and still at the center / of all that is.”

Tracklist:
1. Satellite
2. Black History
3. Tony
4. A Juba for Janet
5. Churches of Sound (The Benitez-Rojo)
6. An Afro Futurist Poem
7. Milwaukee & Ashland