With the release of his sixth studio album, WE ARE (2021),Footnote 1 Jon Batiste transformed from late night bandleader to center-stage popular music celebrity.Footnote 2 The album helped secure five GRAMMY awards for Batiste and his team and garnered critical and commercial success. A multi-genre offering, WE ARE received nods in R&B, contemporary classical, and American roots awards categories. The album comes in at thirteen tracks with a 38-minute play time. There is also a nineteen-track deluxe edition that adds five remixes and the 12/8 soul jam “WORK IT OUT.”Footnote 3 Conceptually, WE ARE is a multi-genre excavation of U.S. popular music that bridges the gap between the politics of the Civil Rights era and the summer of 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, which inspired the creation of the album's title track.Footnote 4
Batiste is a member of one of New Orleans's most respected musical families.Footnote 5 His father, Michael, is a member of the Batiste Brothers Band and played bass with Jackie Wilson and Isaac Hayes on the so-called “Chitlin’ Circuit.” Growing up, Batiste lived just outside of New Orleans in Kenner, but WE ARE leans strongly into the New Orleans aspects of Batiste's upbringing.Footnote 6 The ethical center of “TELL THE TRUTH” is built around Michael Batiste's parting words before his son left for Juilliard: “I'm thinking ‘bout my papa/now that I'm a star … before you drive off, boy/better know who you are/He said tell it like it is.” The “Uptown” remix of the track from the deluxe album reimagines the song as a Black Masking Indian chant featuring Big Chief Romeo Bougere of the 9th Ward Hunters and the 79rs Gang on vocals and Michael Batiste on a stank-face-inducing electric bass.
“BOY HOOD,” “MOVEMENT 11,” and “ADULTHOOD” make up a mini suite in the middle of the album.Footnote 7 The intentional space between “boy” and “hood” in “BOY HOOD”'s title evokes the state of being a boy and the neighborhoods of Batiste's childhood as he sings about No Limit soldiers, bubblegum, church on Sundays, and the pre-2008 colors of a Popeye's bag (red, white, and blue). Joining him on the track are alumni of two of his high school music programs: PJ Morton, who is a graduate of St. Augustine High School, and Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews, who was classmates with Batiste at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts (NOCCA). “BOY HOOD” pays homage to New Orleans hip-hop with bounce-like high hats on a beat produced by Florida native Jahaan Sweet. “MOVEMENT 11” is a 2-minute-long piano and violin instrumental meant to evoke the experience of growing up, which received a GRAMMY nod for best contemporary classical composition. Lastly, “ADULTHOOD” is an R&B bop that delves into relationships and grown folks’ stuff over a laid-back groove with crisp rim shots and an electric bass track by Batiste. In the final moments of the song, the Hot 8 Brass Band cut loose to play the track out.
Batiste's smooth falsetto is comparable to that of the late New Orleans pianist James Booker, whom Batiste cites as part of his musical lineage alongside Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole in the lyrics of “BOY HOOD.”Footnote 8 This falsetto is the highlight of the track “CRY,” which mourns “the loss of the innocence,” “the struggle of the immigrants,” and “wrongful imprisonment.” Batiste gives the audience a moment to sit with their feelings, suggesting, like affect theorist Ann Cvetkovich outlines, that sadness and depression can be a resource for political action.Footnote 9 The penultimate track, “SING,” serves as a joyful antidote to “CRY”'s inertia: “On the verge of cryin’/I don't feel like tryin’/But instead I'll sing.” Beginning only with a sparse, Fender Rhodes-like synthesizer, Batiste's vocals, and hand percussion, the song works its way into a vocable-driven force that's difficult not to sing along with.
Reflecting on WE ARE winning the Album of the Year, Batiste later said, “So much went into that moment, piano lessons, Civil Rights marches….”Footnote 10 The significance of WE ARE's success includes Batiste becoming the first Black artist to win Album of the Year since Herbie Hancock in 2008. In recent years, voter snubs of Black artists like Kendrick Lamar and Beyoncé for less critically acclaimed white artists inspired the #GrammysSoWhite hashtag. Indeed, the whiteness of the Recording Academy's membership has long shaped the aesthetic preferences of the GRAMMYs, leading to a critical mass of choices that uphold white supremacy. Many of the white artists themselves even disagreed with their wins. In 2014 Macklemore's The Heist won Best Rap Album over Kendrick Lamar's good kid m.A.A.d. city, leading Macklemore to awkwardly issue a public apology to Lamar. Moreover in 2017, Adele tearfully admitted in her acceptance speech for Album of the Year that Beyoncé's Lemonade was the album deserving of the award. As musicologist and sound engineer Jasmine Henry notes, the Recording Academy has long upheld white elite socioeconomic interests, often relying on rhetorics of abstract liberalism to do so.Footnote 11 WE ARE centers genres of Black music that are legible to the Recording Academy, making it also a logical pick by an institution struggling to uproot its own whiteness.
However, this isn't the only context for WE ARE. Batiste's win reverberated through New Orleans, making GRAMMY winners of many musicians. Among them were the Hot 8 Brass Band, for whom the win felt particularly meaningful. The band laid down tracks for “ADULTHOOD” at Esplanade Studios in 2019. By the time the album dropped in March 2021, the musicians’ lives had been upended by the pandemic, which silenced live music and endangered many artists’ livelihoods. Then in August, Hurricane Ida knocked out power to large areas of the city for almost 2 weeks. While the city was still shrouded in darkness, the Hot 8's beloved bandleader, Bennie Pete, passed away from complications related to sarcoidosis and COVID-19. The GRAMMY win fulfilled one of Bennie's professional goals, making it deeply significant to band members. Hot 8 trumpet player Christopher Cotton relayed that, “We was all excited, mainly, for Bennie to get the GRAMMY.”Footnote 12 That excitement was amplified by sharing the win with Batiste and so many others in the city who contributed to the album—from the professional musicians filling the liner notes to the children in the St. Augustine High School Marching 100.Footnote 13 The music of New Orleans is often unrightfully held at arm's length from mainstream popular music success, but with WE ARE, Batiste brought his family and city along to enjoy their moment center stage.
Kyle DeCoste (him/his) is a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at Columbia University. He is co-author with the Stooges Brass Band of Can't Be Faded: Twenty Years in the New Orleans Brass Band Game, for which he won the American Folklore Society's 2021 Zora Neale Hurston Prize. His dissertation, which he will be defending in the fall, is titled “Imagining Innocence: Black Popular Music and the Poetics of Childhood.”
