How Sudan Archives Made Me Fall In Love With Music Again
Written by Harley, one of our poetry writers, and edited by Seb, one of our editors!
The first time I heard of The Black Cat was with my cousin walking around Target. While discussing the concerts we had been to in the past, I told him I was going to see an indie rock artist Nilüfer Yanya there in a few weeks. He responded with how, back in 2016, he went to see Mitski there. When I went to the venue a few weeks later, it felt like the size of a studio apartment. The entrance to the venue was on the ground floor and you had to walk up three flights of stairs to where the stage itself was, flanked by full bars on both sides and a tiny arcade in the back left corner. A sign said that the capacity was 700. I saw Mitski earlier this year in The Anthem, a large soundstage off The Wharf in Washington D.C. for one of her two sold-out shows. The capacity of that stage was 7000.
Sudan Archives is the stage name for Brittney Denise Parks, an American multi-instrumentalist hailing from Chicago, now based in Los Angeles. While scrolling Twitter, I stumbled upon the album cover for her just released sophomore record Natural Brown Prom Queen. Album covers rarely offer a meaningful glance into the quality of the music itself but it drew me in immediately. The cover presents Parks with long pink hair surrounded by gold and white balloons you could find at a high school Homecoming dance. Parks is dressed in nothing but a velvet black skirt that stops at her waist, clam shells on her breasts that are accentuated with fluorescent piercings. After realizing one of my friends, Olivia, a musical soulmate of mine, was touting the album as their record of the year (a high honor when artists like Beyoncé dropped records this year), I gave it a listen and immediately went to buy the physical records of both this album and her debut, Athena, when the final track, “#513”, had finished.
The most fitting genre of Natural Brown Prom Queen is alternative R&B, but tacking alternative onto R&B – or really any genre – doesn’t feel like an apt descriptor. R&B is too vast of a genre to be distilled down into a few words, and adding the already vague “alternative” only complicates and muddies even more. If anything, Natural Brown Prom Queen collapses the walls around the genre like the albums of other artists under the “alternative R&B” tag such as Sampha, Kelela, and SZA. The album opens with “Home Maker.” Built around a wistful synth and metronomic drums, the song is the perfect statement thesis to the record’s varying themes: interiority, domesticity, and the power you can find with self-love and community. While these are well-trodden themes in this genre of music, the power of her performance and how pleasant all of these elements coalesce together make it memorable. The rest of the record rattles off the eclectic strengths of her artistry: a talented rapper’s cadence on tracks like the fluid “NBPQ (Topless),” a renowned violinist that can make her instrument sound great in dance music with “Selfish Soul,” and a vulnerable artist who pays attention to her forebears on the psychedelic “ChevyS10.” There is too much about the record’s beauty that is easier conveyed by simply hitting play on Spotify in your car or with your best headphones.
I was invited to see her live with my friend Olivia when I impulsively bought tickets to the show, learning that they also did as well a few months earlier before the album had even been released. At this point of the year, I was fatigued by going to concerts. While finding transcendence under the fluorescent lights and in a crowd of strangers was much needed during the pandemic, it became exhausting. This was my thirteenth concert and I was trying to stave off my credit card bill, as well as the increased risk of COVID-19 as the nation weaned off of COVID-19 measures. There were a lot of factors that were pulling me away from the concert: I had to pick up my parents from the airport the next morning, I just got off work from an eight-hour shift, I totaled my car earlier this week during Hurricane Fiona, and this concert meant one less day I get to spend with the guy that was not really my boyfriend while my parents were out of town. All of these issues practically evaporated in the air after a lemon drop shot and when Parks arrived on stage with her violin, opening the concert with “Home Maker,” a song that contained the indelible line of “Only bad bitches in my trellis,” practically establishing the sisterhood and community that made me fall in love with her music.
Seeing an artist live enables you to see them outside of the pristine polish of studio recordings. In this live setting, you were able to see the light glisten off her skin, spotlighting the tattoos that seem to somehow perfectly encapsulate the beauty of autonomy that she sings, raps, and talks about in her music. Her violin, an iconic part of her artistry like the flute to Lizzo, is given a better spotlight here with understated parts in songs like “Selfish Soul,” and in any cut off of Athena that commands your attention like an epic guitar solo in a classic rock song. When she leapt into the crowd for the sultry, sexy “Freakalizer” where she kicked dozens of balloons the same shade on the album cover, it felt like a high school prom—an event that she claimed to have inspired the album because she was never invited to hers. A lot of the understated parts of her music comes to life: the chants of “I’m not average” in “TBPQ (Topless)” seem much more visceral than when you were lying in the arms of a boy who did not make you feel desirable earlier in the week, and the psychedelic trance that is “ChevyS10” feels like whiplash from breaking your car suddenly, as you stand in the crowd, transfixed, by the strobe lights and the sinewy movement of Parks on stage.
Leaving the concert did not make me feel reinvigorated for future live music—I, in fact, sold or gave away the rest of my tickets for the year—but for the rest of the week and the months to come. I imagine most people would listen to Natural Brown Prom Queen and remark how it is simply great music; but for me, it is an album that got me through a year that made me feel unprepared for when life really starts to kick my ass. Parks grapples with a lot of different themes on her record: the silliness that is the idea of the status quo, self-love that is a response to a broken heart, even the dirty desire of sex. All of these things are not really grand ideas if you truly think about it, but the best type of music is the one that repackages familiar feelings like your mottled heartbreak, and projects them forward. The electricity of an orgasm, the euphoria of falling in love, the small games you play with someone you love who will only love you back on their own terms, for me all of these universal feelings now seemed colossal and beautiful after Sudan Archives entered my life.
When I stepped out of The Black Cat onto the street, I looked up at the marquee sign to see her name spelled out. I wondered how it would look a few years down the line when I am lined up along the marina on the Wharf where she is playing for a much bigger crowd of adoring fans that would walk through fire for her, like Mitski.
I often think about the line in “NBPQ (Topless”) where she sings
"Sometimes I think that if I was light-skinned
Then I would get into all the parties
Win all the Grammys, make the boys happy"
and I feel the need to think about how I do not trust this world to give her the flowers she deserves because of what she looks like.
As I walked away, I hoped that the world could prove to me different.
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This piece was written by one of our poetry writers, Harley. Reach them at @fain_t_, on Twitter!
This piece was edited by one of our editors, Seb. Reach them at @sebpetroni on Instagram.
