Some songs show up with the subtleness of a brick through a window. They do exactly what they say they’re going to do, point out who the baddies are and then proceed to scream their message at you until you either agree with them or take yourselves and your attitudes somewhere else. Deportee’s “Black Women Are Not Cheap” does something a little different, of course. Deportee still has something to say, but he’s able to impart that message to you with enough swagger, melody, and individual personality that you might find yourself nodding along before you realize you’ve stumbled into a discussion about representation, dignity, and how easily women get flattened into scenery.
How did it start? In the surprisingly everyday moment of watching a music video and witnessing the brief and passive appearance of a woman as the target of attraction, or in the words of Deportee, being “gripped by a man with a camera to capture only my beauty for his enjoyment. In that shot, I didn’t have a voice or a presence, I was just… a moment.”
What follows is music that feels just as border-less, as borderless a spirit as Deportee the person has embodied; spanning reggae rhythms slipping through his dancehall cadence to hip-hop slang bubbling underneath his R&B melodies. It’s a tight, tight package that manages to deliver an important message in a palatable form.
It’s crucial that “Black Women Are Not Cheap” doesn’t come across as being on anyone’s shoulder, or like any kind of verbal sermon. What comes across is someone going through his own shit and channeling that frustration outward. He mixes in speaking word elements and with lyrics that evoke the type of thoughtful social awareness that makes the likes of Little Simz such a compelling proposition for listeners looking for both brains and style. Not that they sound at all alike; rather that the two possess a mutual understanding of the fact that the smart lyricism can have the greatest impact when packaged in a package that somebody actually wants to unpack, replay and then dive back in to the depths of.
Deportee treats genre like an all-you-can-eat buffet rather than a stringent doctrine on “Black Women Are Not Cheap”,and it succeeds because it understands the basic, yet profound, truth that being treated with respect has a specific type of cadence-one powerful enough to get noticed when it makes a plea that everyone who is human should pay the utmost attention to.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for publications in the US and former lead writer of Atop The Treehouse. Reviews music, film and TV shows for media aggregators.
