Songs of Protest: The Deeply Rooted Words of Eryn Allen Kane and Aja Monet

A tree planted by water is a dedication to inner sanctity and peace. Eryn Allen Kane and Aja Monet remind us how important sharing your voice is and how it can impact the world. Through spoken word poetry, they declare that hopelessness is not our horizon and healing is a duty and obligation.

Music is one of society’s best teachers. In Songs of Protest, writers analyze some of music’s greatest hits, using their findings to make sense of the world around them.

Written by Nico Grayson

Photos courtesy of Lenny Gilmore and Hades

In a loud world inundated with the sounds of humankind, noise serves as a witness, an echo, and most importantly, a disorder of silence. From the soft, ultrarapid flapping of a bird's wings, to the slow, steady clamoring of a factory machine, most essential things happen in the presence of noise. The past decade has been filled with shouts rumbling in the streets for criminal justice reform, the return of Indigenous land, LGBTQ+ and women’s rights, climate justice, and most notably the Black Lives Matter movement, which has sparked revolutionary action far beyond American borders since 2013. What makes music so incredibly powerful is how it serves as an organization of these sounds — as a revolutionary tool for the consolidation of community.

In the 2019 R&B album a tree planted by water, R&B musician Eryn Allen Kane sings alongside spoken word poet Aja Monet to craft a magical blend of acoustic neo-soul rhythms and rhymes, telling a story of liberation. Through the use of spoken word poetry, free jazz influence, and symbolic imagery of the natural world, Kane and Monet express tones of atonement, fostering the listener towards finding inner sanctitude, peace, and strength in resistance to global conditions. 

Born in Detroit and raised in Chicago, Kane grew up listening to classic soul, blues, and cultural music from across the globe. This influence is reflected in her songs, as they point to the very essence of soul. Raised in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York to parents of Cuban and Jamaican descent, Monet continues to follow the legacy of storytellers participating and assembling in social movements, exploring gender, race, migration, and spirituality with her work as a surrealist blues poet and organizer. The aforementioned album opens up with “Deeply Rooted,” a poem that declares the necessity of musical intentionality under systems of oppression and chaos, urging the listener to pay close attention to how we are all connected:

Everyone's singing these days with no song

We've forgotten what a voice is

How it sprawls over the world, forever changed

Humbles the ears, cleans out the trash from a heart

Sitting in the attic of a fourth dimension house with no windows

These stylistic choices work well together to speak simultaneously of society and against it as they touch on the true power of words and ideas, and how these in-turn become our material reality. Released in 2019, approaching the peak of the Black Lives Matter movement, one of the most impactful social movements under modern globalization. While intersectional issues stemming from colonialism concerning race, class, gender, religion, and ability continue to polarize the United States, to resist is to create space for joy and peace within the work of dismantling individualized structures fueled by hierarchy and vertical categorization. Under this context, Kane’s work makes the effort to be thematically optimistic in nature and representative of its title – an admirable, deeply rooted work of art, serving as an all-encompassing shade tree to the ears and hearts that dwell amongst it.

Image courtesy of Eryn Allen Kane

In terms of production and auditory techniques, whilst Kane and Monet speak of “trembling legends, guitar strings, and harmonic hands” in “Deeply Rooted,” the sounds of shakers, strings, high-hats, and fluttering keys dance in the background. With this, sonic techniques ringing familiar to those of the free jazz movement of the 1960's are highlighted, as well as thematic influence from historically renowned poets and activists such as Maya Angelou and Gwendolyn Brooks. Like spoken word, the sonic influence of free jazz serves as an anchor, like a close friend who you know you can always rely on to tell you the truth. Many impactful jazz composers have been known to mix dissonance with harmonious chords for the purpose of reassuring the listener. But in terms of lyrical influence, “Love Supreme” takes a more modern twist on classic uses of personification and other poetic rhetoric. The stylistic decision to revolve around spoken word poetry and free jazz as mediums of protest in this day and age is a powerful decision, rekindling a historic flame into a robust fire. It melts away a modern audience’s cold sense of disillusionment under the conditions of our techno-feudalistic, dystopian reality, asking us to search inside for what feels real.

In the spoken word piece “Sawt al-Hurriya” (or “Voice of freedom” in Arabic), Kane uses nature imagery and symbolism as crucial mediums for messages of hope. Inspired by a song of the same name by Egyptian band Cairokee, the track compares themes of divine courage and hopefulness to a bird’s ability to fly between manmade boundaries. Kane also uses imagery in the form of trees, clouds, water, and wind in direct contrast with prisons, cities, streets, cages, borders, and bridges as she declares:

A bird sings from no fly zone between the temples, churches and mosques

Shoulder to shoulder with Heaven, above the guns below

She is a ballad in the chest of an open sky

Born of coral clouds

The wind that blows through a quiet in the streets

A niching in your throat

The flag trembling in a cage

Is still a prison murmuring, sobbing in the distance

The spoken word poetry of a tree planted by water takes listeners on a journey of self-reflection, so that we may show up for ourselves fully in order to show up our loved ones and our community at large. Kane’s intention to incorporate healing into her album through “Deeply Rooted,” “Sawt al-Hurriya,”and “Love Supreme” is clear throughout nearly every stanza, covering a range of themes from the radical healing of generational wounds, to the challenging of our own limiting beliefs, and the practicing of gratitude. These are harnessed as revolutionary forms of resistance in a world that profits off of harming our humanity instead of healing it. Overall, the deeply rooted, spoken words of Eryn Allen Kane and Aja Monet remind us that having courage in our innermost selves gives us the inalienable right to rejoice: “Courage is a melody arranged by pulse or purpose / Hovering over waves of hope and peace / What flies and flies, recurring echoes of dreams / The voice is a weapon, a howl that rings in your ears / And wonders if you have a heart to stand in.”

To allow words and sounds to swaddle us in their true source of power through dissonance, harmony, and melody is to absorb the fluid reality that these spoken poems and songs attempt to reflect. Thus, music can serve to be therapeutic, enveloping, and liberating — rooted in a holistic conception of the body, mind, and spirit. As a mode of immaterial production, it is both a person-to-person experience, as well as a collective memory. This is what makes music such a revolutionary tool. Kane and Monet remind us that the goodness of our humanity is something that we long to come together and embrace: “This rejoice, this righteous delight, this reunion, a longing to be held.”

These musicians remind us that now is the time we must not forget the good side of human nature: the side that loves and cares and rebuilds, and how we continue to fight must implement this good side into our structure, our laws, and our administration — “How we witnessed the horror of mankind and did not become that which horrified us — A love supreme.” Social movements all come down to science, message, and time — all of which music represents simultaneously, especially as a form of protest. In this way, music is like a prophecy, a metaphor of the real, and always two steps ahead of a society’s visual and material conditions. If we can understand this to be true, then we can understand Eryn Allen Kane and Aja Monet’s declaration of just how powerful our voices truly are, and how much we owe it to ourselves and each other to make healing, love, and forgiveness our main priorities.