ALBUMS // Backxwash – God Has Nothing To Do With This Leave Him Out Of It
Post by Misha
‘God has nothing to do with this, leave him out of it.’
I’ve been thinking about these words for a while. As a title for Backxwash’s newest record it’s striking because it suggests not a godless world, but rather a world in which the idea of God has been so misused, so perverted, so stripped of love and grace that it becomes necessary to remind people that God and gross injustice ought not to belong in the same space. This is important because although I am not a person of faith, I understand enough to know that, insofar as God is a synonym for hope in the eye of the storm, no one should have their gods taken away from them.
In this way, the album reads like the reclaiming of a personal spirituality out of the ashes of the old and archaic. It is not all love and light. It accounts for pain, anger, and oppression. It grapples with the difficulty of forgiveness. In between the tortured cries of the title track and the oceanic depths of the album’s last song, Backxwash carves out of the classical religious space a place to explore her own faith. The things from which she draws strength, the comforts she wraps around herself in the harshest storms.
It is a kind of faith powerful enough to meet the barrage of challenges and indignities faced by Backxwash, a Black woman who is trans. And it is also a scathing indictment of the ways that religion – and Christianity in particular – has so profoundly failed to address those challenges.
Nowhere is this more searing than in the references to Backxwash’s strained relationship to her family, who throughout the narrative represent the weight and consequence of the church’s treatment of trans and other LGBTQ+ people. “Mama keep telling me to ask the Lord for forgiveness – I want war with these bitches,” she sings in the opening track, coming back a few songs later to add, “It’s been years since I talked to Granny, and I think it’s pretty sick how I lost a family.” Wounds are revealed deliberately over her characteristically caustic production, piecing together the experience of religion as a knife rather than a salve, which severs children from their parents and deprives them of fundamental lifelines.
At times, Backxwash’s music can sound like a reluctant battle cry. Her sound is ever fierce, ready to fight – and win, but there is a tenderness just under the surface that is impossible to miss. It is an overwhelming sense of being weary of the fight, of wishing to sing about love and comfort and instead singing about suicide and fear of walking down the street. You can hear it in the way she screams “FUCK” on “Into The Void,” her voice startlingly raw and explosive, as if to mimic the way that terror and dissociation violently impose themselves on her body and mind, regularly and without warning.
You can hear it in the plodding rhythm of ‘Adolescence,’ in the way she wearily explains, “my fear is how I navigate the planet,” and in the catalogue of self-medications that pepper her songs.
The album’s closing track, Redemption, is perhaps the best synthesis of the album’s themes. It provides some narrative resolution as it finds her pausing on her path through family conflict, personal demons, and systemic oppression to affirm her identity and the necessity of claiming it. “You think I broke your heart, I think it’s for survival” she says, speaking directly to her family. She then going on to offer some retrospective wisdom: “I wish I’d started sooner. Fuck the hallelujahs.”
As the song goes on it revisits the idea of forgiveness, bringing it to the center of understanding the album as a whole. Where the title track grapples with the cruelty of being told to ask for forgiveness for one’s identity, and many of the songs that follow investigate the consequences of such a deep rejection – self-harm, substance abuse, suicidal ideation – ‘Redemption’ turns the question of forgiveness back on those who caused the hurt. The first half of the song is a sharp, categorical “fuck them” to everything and everyone that made Backxwash feel shame for her identity. But the final words of the album are a recording of someone speaking, perhaps in a sermon:
“When we don’t forgive, we pay a toll in our bodies. Our physical health, our well-being goes down… We know we’re supposed to do it, we want to do it, but what do you do when your feelings about an issue won’t go away?”
It is a breathtaking moment because it captures so vividly the complexity of forgiveness in the context of oppressive systems. On the one hand, the immensity of what was taken – the loss of family, faith networks, self-confidence, years of support and love, and the and the deep well of rage that accompanies that loss – and on the other hand the desire to integrate the principle of forgiveness into one’s life for the sake of one’s own healing, one’s own soul. It is a task of Herculean proportions.
The album ends without providing any answers to the question that looms over its conclusion. One is left with the yearning to hear more tenderness in her next albums, not because there would be anything musically superior about it, but because these albums communicate so much more than their sounds, their gritty melodies, their skillful flows – they are, rather, records of lived experience. The hair raising discomfort of Backxwash’s sound, which I’ve sometimes seen referred to as horror-core, is a reflection of very real, heart wrenching fear.
Perhaps what faith looks like in the face of this reality is a question left to linger in a rare moment of peace. The wondering aloud about a time when forgiveness might be possible is, in itself, a tremendous act of hope.
Buy God Has Nothing To Do With It Leave Him Out Of It, as well as Backxwash’s previous albums, here. This album is out on Grimalkin, a queer focused record label and artist collective prioritizing QTBIPOC (especially Black artists) and supporting grassroots organizations through DIY release. Grimalkin also has a Patreon to compensate their artists and collective members which you can contribute to here.