Shirlette Ammons’s latest album, a fascinating dissection of what it feels like to see and be seen as a queer person of color, was sparked by an unexpected break from this attention.
The bulk of Spectacles—the third full-length album and first since 2016 from the Durham poet and rapper—was written during COVID-19 isolation. Like many people during that interruption from the world as we know it, Ammons sought new challenges to occupy her time. One of those was a music production course that her wife had bought for her birthday, the February before the pandemic hit, and she used those newfound skills to cut demos.
Toiling in solitude, the typically engaging, involved performer and community presence discovered something about herself.
“‘I realized that I’m not really an extrovert,” Ammons recalls. “Because you just end up playing, you be on autopilot and play out these roles all the time without thinking about them. But then when there’s a wrench thrown in the norm, you really have to reckon with yourself. I was like, ‘Oh shit, I just be doing things just because I’m used to doing them.’ I really liked myself being holed up in a room with all my little gadgets and doodads.”
With the curtains drawn, the performative aspect of living with eyes always considering and judging her was gone. The songs she wrote away from life’s stage consider the impact of the audience’s gaze, many of whom are looking on with cisgender, heteronormative perspectives.
The first of those songs, “Neighborhood Headlines,” considers prying eyes and the rumors they spread on local social media pages. “So we’ll just let them say it / Say what happened / Even though it ain’t what happened / And that’s the end,” she spits, her patient flow mirroring the inevitability of speculation and distortion.
Ammons’s lens on the concept zoomed out as the writing process continued, with the title track feeling the glare of constant attention but also drawing confidence from it: “Spectacles you think we wearing dancin’ shoes / The way they clockin’ every move.”
But the stress engendered by that rubbernecking is constant. “Ain’t it funny make you covet what you can’t touch / Them intimidators thinkin’ we inferior,” Ammons observes on “Spades.”
This feeling of being ogled as an oddity has followed Ammons since she was born in the tiny eastern North Carolina hamlet of Beautancus. The cover of Spectacles, a picture featuring her and her identical twin as young girls, enforces this theme, and the songs return to it several times. Her twin, Shorlette (who also lives in Durham), is featured in a spoken interlude, describing, in her genetically duplicative voice, a “game of ‘guess the twin’ I didn’t choose to play.”
“That puts you on display all the time,” Shirlette says of the sisters’ twinship. “We dressed alike until we were like 18. People would make us stand side by side at different gatherings, family gatherings, and at church and different things, and literally just dissect us and try to determine what the differences between us were. You just kind of become like a little dinner party act in some way.”
The album’s power comes from using this intensely personal experience and others that followed as an anchor to explore the similar experiences of Ammons’s Black and queer peers, with the contributions of other local musicians adding to an affirming expression of community.
Ammons’s experience as a producer on PBS documentary projects A Chef’s Life and Somewhere South shines through as she pulls together various spoken accounts from folks with diverse and profound talents—musician Mykki Blanco, chef/writer Tunde Wey, DJ Doowap, and poets Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Fred Moten. On two interludes, the chorus of voices describe the impacts of constantly feeling on display, coded language, social media rumormongering, and more.
“The coolest thing I learned about working in documentary film and TV is the importance of knowing how to gather people who have certain skills,” Ammons says, “because if you try to do all that shit yourself, you will fail.”
That approach elevates the album, as she turned over her demos to be transformed by musical director and drummer Brevan Hampden and a full band when COVID let up. Megafaun’s Phil Cook produced and contributed some vocals, piano, and other instrumentation. Cook, a frequent collaborator, imparts a spacious, otherworldly feel to the tracks but lets the band’s funky, proto-hip-hop vibe shine through, merging his signature aesthetic with that of the rapper and her other backers.
That kind of collaboration shines all over Spectacles: Talented and distinct artists consistently meet each other halfway and allow their sound to be changed by the interaction.
Cook’s and Ammons’s voices merge with rootsy boom-bap intensity at the close of “Neighborhood Headlines.” Sylvan Esso’s Amelia Meath, another frequent collaborator, sounds like different artists entirely on her two appearances, matching the outsize empathy of “Hello” with a welcoming coo and the percolating provocations of “Delight” with devilishly aloof speak-singing.
Ammons is equally adaptable to these shifting vibes, skillfully skipping atop the jittering bass of “Delight,” confidently striding through the loping groove of “Hello,” and slinking anxiously amid the skronk of “Neighborhood Headlines.”
On “Clown Faces,” she melts through watery effects into an ethereal ballad along with former Carolina Chocolate Drop Justin Robinson and Veldt singer Danny Chavis, expressing both unity and consternation when confronted by an audience that doesn’t care to distinguish between tear-stained faces as they “pay a shell / For show and tell.”
While the pandemic showed Ammons how much she often values seclusion, her work as a poet, which often finds her working alone, has taught her the value of bringing in other talents to sharpen her music.
“I hope it comes off as a respect for my limitations,” she says of her collaborative approach. “I don’t want a song to suffer because my ego wouldn’t allow me to get out of the way of it.”
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