Merrill Garbus knows how to entertain. She was once a children’s puppeteer, after all, which means she needed to be on her game all the time lest she lose the audience. When she began performing as Tune-Yards, she figured out a way to reach festival audiences as a one-woman band by playing punk-rock ukulele while slamming drums and electronically looping and layering her swooping, soaring vocals. But with Tune-Yards’ latest album, “I Can Feel You Creep into my Private Life” (4AD), Garbus encountered perhaps her toughest challenge yet.
Much of the album plays like a ruthless self-interrogation about white privilege, cultural appropriation and living a life where the personal often becomes the political. In the song “Colonizer,” Garbus incriminates herself for being part of the problem: “I smell the blood in my voice,” she sings. Garbus once studied in Kenya, where she immersed herself in African music, a foundation of much of her songwriting. Her lyrics haven’t shied from her conflicted feelings about how race, music, money and power intersect, but never quite so directly as on the new album.
“It’s an interesting question, as a white person investigating her whiteness and how whiteness works and trying to do it in a productive way, and where you cross the line into self-punishment and self-indulgence,” she says. “That I can make a record about the guilt of being white is in itself a form of white privilege. The first record (Tune-Yards’ 2009 debut album) was called ‘White Guilt’ before it became ‘Bird-Brains.’ Part of this is about being a white person influenced by black music, and it has felt in the past like a type of violent self-investigation. To me it feels like Bertolt Brecht, how he would put reality in front of people.”
Garbus strived to make her presentation of reality personal without becoming solipsistic. In her view, a loaded term such as “white guilt” is part of a broader struggle. “Colonizer,” she says, is sung “in a matter-of-fact voice, and where I say ‘I use my white woman’s voice to tell stories of my travels with African men,’ that’s about me. The question isn’t about self-flagellation, but about what is whiteness, and what has this done to me? White people are also dealing with the consequences of white privilege and we have to look at it even when it makes us uncomfortable.”
Hence the grooves, which are among the most dexterous and unabashedly danceable of Garbus’ career. Working with bassist and co-producer Nate Brenner, Garbus sought to balance the cerebral lyrics with body music strong enough to stand on its own. “Look at albums by musicians of color that have come out in the last five years and how artists like Solange and Blood Orange are staring down issues that we deem political,” she says. “I find those albums completely full of joy and brilliant musicality. That’s my challenge. I hope there are plenty of people who just enjoy the music, and only years down the line do they really pay attention to the lyrics and they’re like, ‘Ohhh …’ Because that’s how music works — people ingest it in different ways at different times at their own pace.”
Now that Garbus is on tour playing the new songs, are her fans connecting with the moral and political challenges embedded within the buoyant arrangements?
“TBD?” she says. “Talk about uncomfortable, I was just assured by a friend who does a lot of this kind of work that being confused and uncomfortable is part of dealing with these issues. Honestly, we’re out here on the road, and I think this might not work, because white people are not used to this. But this (music) is the place I’ve always put my personal questions, which inevitably are political questions.”
There’s another step, Garbus says, and she’s determined to follow through. The band’s website will soon provide footnotes of sorts and point listeners to additional resources for researching the issues raised in the lyrics.
“Here’s this music and we’re dancing and enjoying it, but I am raising questions, obsessing about race, arguing with friends about cultural appropriation, and the obvious question is what should I do?” she says. “The next step for me is providing a way for people to move through the music into the next thing, so we don’t just sing about white privilege but also become effective co-conspirators in the fight for justice. Will it work? I don’t know. But we’re chipping away at something.”
Greg Kot co-hosts “Sound Opinions” at 8 p.m. Friday and 2 and 11 p.m. Saturday on WBEZ-FM 91.5.
Greg Kot is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @gregkot
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