The myth of the ‘tortured artist’ is a trope so familiar to our collective consciousness that it has already received its rightful reckoning several times over. Give the phrase a quick search online and you’ll be flooded with critical op-eds pinning its origin on capitalism’s endemic hostility to the arts or our tendency to romanticise – rather than aim to understand – those suffering from poor mental health. What the current pandemic has forced into our conversation however, is to question a different cliché pervading the artistic process that has not yet undergone the same scrutiny: does art really flourish in times of crisis?
On Essential, the third and final installment of her ‘Pieces’ album trilogy, Eki Shola certainly makes the case. Narrowly escaping the Sonoma County wildfires that claimed her home in October 2017, the California-based British musician was already no stranger to making art in the face of adversity as she set out to write her latest effort, something she has only become more familiar with in recent months. Her two albums from last year, Possible and Drift, were both written directly in the fallout left by the flames; “the fire unlocked something in me” reads the liner notes to the former, “when everything’s gone, you have nothing left to lose”.
Turning the screw even further, Essential places us relentlessly in the present moment. As lead single “Change the System” begins, Shola draws us into the thick domestic monotony brought upon by lockdown: “Coronavirus with self-isolation proclaimed a must / Makes the hours meld together from morn to noon to dusk”. Drift had seen her combat her emotional displacement at losing her home by cocooning herself in the warm familiarity of continuous, rhythmic grooves, but here that same familiarity warps into oppressive claustrophobia; the accompanying music video is all fish eye lenses and close ups that come just a little too close.
Refusing to buckle to the onset of panic, Shola instead embraces and repurposes it as fuel to express her outrage at her adoptive country’s inept government, a mindset she encourages her listener to share in: “Catastrophe opens up possibility / Transmute fear into conscious disruptability”. Her enforced isolation is reclaimed as a “perfect storm for creating” – a bold assertion were it not for the sheer volume of material offered up on Essential. Following two albums in 2019 with a project which clocks in at over 80 minutes is impressive enough, before you realise that as well as performing all the instruments on record, Shola produced, mixed, and mastered every single one of the album’s nineteen tracks. Essential is many things, but lacking creativity is not one of them.
"Pain isn’t an exhibition, it’s an equaliser; we’re encouraged not to gawp at Shola’s inner turmoil but to empathise with it, understand it, and act upon it."
A nondescript title like “Change the System” might have been considered a play at revolution rather than the real thing, had it not been penned by such an insightful songwriter. A trained physician herself, Shola knows better than most the unacceptable working conditions currently placed on American medical professionals, and rails at the absurdity of a lack of PPE and hospital wage cuts during a global health crisis. Her vocal delivery shifts from swaying harmonies to barbed spoken word: “Healthcare for all should be a mandated addition” goes the rallying cry amidst appeals for mass unionisation. This isn’t a vague attempt at progressive posturing; this is a manifesto.
Not everywhere on Essential are the calls for collective action so neatly put, however. The stream of consciousness diatribe that anchors “Ignorance Veil” does leave us with some evocative imagery in its final lines (“Raping Mother Earth of her diamonds and pearls / Who knows for how long this crying, bleeding, heated up earth will continue to twirl?”) though its clumsier moments do run the risk of navel-gazing. An admission of guilt at not being able to be vegan for environmental reasons (“Hate to admit I love meat, was too tough to commit for life”) is confusing followed in the next verse by the rhetorical question “Sorting out the recyclables / What else am I supposed to do?”; elsewhere the impact of a direct demand for “an action plan from unbiased scientists / Working in accordance with empathetic and ethical leaders / Open to journalists” is dampened by an underwhelming simile for overpopulation: “We’re like a bad case of a spreading infected pimple”.
The times when Shola’s lyricism cuts deepest often arrive in places where she trusts the listener to fill in the gaps. In the back half of the next track, “Blippity Glip”, without warning the song swaps out its downtempo hi-hat triplets for an addictive synth earworm that sounds borrowed from minimal techno. All the while, Shola repeats an abstract refrain “Space is empty / Is always full” which leaves an unidentifiable melancholia more moving than any simile, a trick repeated on album highlight “Trapped” where in between wordless backing vocals we’re left alone to wrestle with the uncomfortable question “Why does it seem like struggle is the default?”.
When she chooses to abandon words entirely, here too Shola’s compositions shine. Despite being the longest of the bunch, the arrangements on “Roots” are delicate enough that the song never tires, and opener “Quiet” might be similarly sparse but nevertheless boasts the album’s most memorable melody.
In truth, the question of art flourishing in times of crisis and the myth of the tortured artist were never completely separate (after all, one quite clearly helps enable the other). But if good art really does arise from societies under duress, Shola proves it isn’t through suffering for suffering’s sake. On Essential, pain isn’t an exhibition, it’s an equaliser; we’re encouraged not to gawp at Shola’s inner turmoil but to empathise with it, understand it, and act upon it. “A crisis”, she writes, “as excruciating as it may be to endure, allows an intricate view into the breakdown of structure, systems, and life the way we know it”. Perhaps good art can be inspired by hardship. But what makes it great isn’t found by wallowing in despair; it lies in our determination to envision better times.
