Black Gold

This song announces itself with intention: the tempo is deliberate and ceremonial, the chord changes carrying the weight of something that has been thought about for a long time before being spoken. There is a choir-like quality to the background voices, a gospel undertow beneath the jazz surface, and that combination transforms the track into something that functions closer to an anthem than a song. Spalding's vocal here is at its most declamatory — she isn't crooning or suggesting, she is asserting, and the fullness of her tone matches the gravity of the subject. The lyric circles the inheritance of Black life in America: the history held in the body, the worth that was never contingent on recognition, the gold that was always there even when the world spent centuries refusing to see it. It is a song that does not ask for permission. The production supports this — nothing is tentative, the horns enter like proclamations, the bass line is a foundation you could build on. Culturally this is part of a lineage that runs from Nina Simone through Erykah Badu to Spalding herself, Black artists using the structures of American popular music to say things those structures were not originally designed to accommodate. You listen to this when you need to remember what you are made of, or when you want someone you love to understand the same thing. It is music for mornings that demand something more than background.