In A Little Devil in America, Hanif Abdurraqib writes, “A country is something that happens to you. History is a series of thefts, or migrations, or escapes, and along the way, new bodies are added to a lineage.” Here, Abdurraqib is setting the stage of Josephine Baker’s life and the legacy of jazz she’d leave behind in Paris.
While English singer Joy Crookes is often compared to Amy Winehouse, the 23-year-old course-corrects by saying that they both were heavily influenced by Black jazz musicians like Baker. “When you connect to an artist, it’s just an oxytocin bond, isn’t it?” Crookes says. “I’m quite moved by finding a soul mate in an artist of another time, from another place.”
The child of both Bangladeshi and Irish immigrants, Crookes grew up in a London neighborhood called Elephant and Castle, which has a distinct musical history of its own, fueled by its vast Latin and Caribbean populations. In her debut album, Skin, which dropped in October, the soundscape glides across genre, giving clues at her other inspirations (Solange, Kate Nash, Billie Holiday, D’Angelo). In the months after the album dropped, its impact rippled outward: It reached the top five on the U.K. charts, she performed it at sold-out shows, played a series of secret shows across the United States, and made her U.S. television debut on Late Night with Seth Meyers. It’s been a long journey since she was discovered at 15 by her current manager—but something about Joy Crookes has long felt inevitable.
“I feel like there’s this mental shift that has to happen with finishing an album—there’s an element of letting go once that’s very hard to work through,” Crookes says. “Once it’s out there in the world, people are going to interpret it as they want and need.” The room for interpretation and the loss of control that comes with it are what’s most daunting to Crookes. There’s risk in the vulnerability. She writes songs to her mother, her nani, the city of London and its violent colonialist history, a lover losing the will to live. She doesn’t shy away from looking at the mosaic of experiences that make up a person’s youth, her youth—the exuberance, the heartbreak, the unfolding, the displacement—and she refuses to let the overwhelm of it all prevent her from trying to capture it. There’s a richness both to the quality of her voice and the sense of self she’s come to in her writing.
Carlota Guerrero
One muse stands out from the others: the city that has been the backdrop to her life. There’s a beautiful tension that comes with loving a place and holding it accountable because of the love you have for it. While she’s known for professing her love to London in songs like “London Mine,” in a track from Skin called “19th Floor,” Crookes maps out the gentrification of the neighborhood around her nani’s apartment building, where she grew up: Cinema skylines that I don’t recognize / Strip the life out of these streets / It’s a daylight robbery.
“I often romanticize my London, because I am so in love with my London,” Crookes says. “And I think that when you love something so much, you’re often so ready to defend it. But I can’t help but be really honest about it too.” Voice notes from her nani and uncle are also a whisper of her London.
During the pandemic, that London became much smaller, of course. While people quipped about King Lear on the Internet and quietly pleaded with themselves to produce something, anything from within the confines of isolation, Crookes had her head down, working on her first album. “I’ve found the pandemic quite hard to grapple with,” she says. “I worked on music every day, I created a timetable to keep myself busy where I literally accounted for every hour. It wasn’t easy. I just took control of what I could in a time when no one had any control.” And there is no control—COVID-19 continues to expose so many government failings, from health care to housing. Think I got a neighbor that’s been feeling blue / But maybe that’s a symptom / Fucking with a kingdom that never fought for you. The album exists as a bit of a time capsule—both of “the before times” and a period of reflection and realization during isolation.
Joy Crookes
Mental health is a topic Crookes is open to discussing, both in the press and on social media. The album’s title track was never meant to be public. She’d originally written it for someone she loved who “no longer felt life was worth living,” and she’d hoped to remind them “how needed they are”—a message she also wanted to share widely during the pandemic. Accompanying the song is a visually disarming music video in which Crookes slowly, excruciatingly moves around London on a bed with an exhausted lover, asking them, Don’t you know the skin that you’re given was made to be lived in?
“I think that music videos give me the chance to translate some of my interpretations around my music and use visual symbolism to create something memorable as well,” she says. In the video for her song “Feet Don’t Fail Me Now,” there’s a moment where she’s “wearing a white sari and doing a wheelie” as men encircle her. “When we wear white saris in my culture, it means that your husband has died and you’re very viscerally defined as being a widow,” Crookes says. “Just the fact that there’s a lot of Bangladeshi people in the video, and a lot of Bangladeshi men in that moment—that’s more to show that, in my experience, our community can be the most complicit in wanting people, particularly women, to be one-dimensional. We know it’s easy to point the finger, but I think it’s much harder to actually hold yourself accountable.”
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The last time Crookes did a show in Los Angeles in 2019, she had a difficult time lining up a venue, so she posted on Instagram that she’d be playing in her friend’s backyard. By the time she started playing, the sun was setting and the yard was full. People sat on rooftops and cars all around the neighborhood to listen to her sing. “Just showing up and being honest is a virtue,” she says.
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Don’t Call Joy Crookes an Old Soul
Source: Filipino Journal Articles
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