Meshell Ndegeocello Preaches ‘The Gospel’

Interview, From the Magazine, Meshell Ndegeocello

By John Murph I Oct. 15, 2024

“With this record, I’m not trying to punish you,” Ndegeocello says of *No More Water*. “I’m trying to help you heal.”
(Photo: Andre Wagner)

It was less a matter of “if” and more of “when.” Meshell Ndegeocello’s transfixing new album, No More Water: The Gospel Of James Baldwin (Blue Note), seems an inevitability when one considers her career trajectory.

Like Baldwin, the iconic Black American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet and sociopolitical commentator, Ndegeocello is one of our most fearless, intimate, enthralling and at times confrontational artists to emerge in the 20th century. As a multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, singer, bandleader and conceptualist, she’s amassed a resilient discography that started in 1993 with the release of her intoxicating debut album, Plantation Lullabies. That LP caught the zeitgeist of the then-emerging jazz-hip-hop-soul hybrid, simultaneously anticipating the neo-soul movement as she covered a waterfront of themes such as institutional racism, personal sexual conquests, romantic yearnings and the comforting ecstasy of ’70s soul music.

As Ndegeocello’s solo career progressed, she addressed other controversies, such as religious hypocrisy, homophobia, capitalism, unbridled carnal lust and emotional infidelity, some of which challenged the often-conservative American soul music status quo. Musically, she has proven to be just as audacious, with a restive spirit that has fueled her explorations into modern jazz, Afrobeat, reggae, electronica and undefinable pop. She’s often laced her music with spoken word excerpts and references to various literary giants such as Eldridge Cleaver, Gil Scott-Heron, Angela Davis and Dick Gregory.

The Roof, The Roof, The Roof Is On Fire …

“Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?”

—James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

No More Water arrived on Aug. 2, 2024, the exact day of Baldwin’s centennial. The album drops during a time when the United States is facing another contentious time. President Joe Biden dropped out of the election following a disastrous debate performance. Vice President Kamala Harris stepped in.

All of this comes in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, violent attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump, who was defeated in the 2020 election. Three years later, after authorities prosecuted more than 350 of the assailants, the U.S. Supreme Court limited which defendants accused of participating in the Capitol riot could be charged by federal prosecutors.

Also, in a 6–3 ruling this year, the Supreme Court granted Trump partial immunity from special counsel Jack Smith’s election subversion case. In a fragile U.S. democracy, which routinely demonstrates that not all its citizens are held accountable under its justice system, the Supreme Court seems to have given Trump and some of his followers a pass for their collective violence. This is Trump, the first U.S. president in history to be convicted of felony crimes (34 charges); who exhibited hateful disdain to women, people of color and immigrants during; and whose rhetoric emboldened hate groups such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.

When Ndegeocello recorded No More Water in 2020, the U.S. was at another boiling point. The country — and many other parts of the world — erupted in mostly Black Lives Matter-led protests after Derek Chauvin, a white Minneapolis police officer, killed unarmed George Floyd outside a grocery store. The world was already in the grips of a historic pandemic, but videotaped footage of Floyd’s murder lit the match for heated protests, many of which were already simmering with rage after the deaths of Breonna Taylor, killed inside her home by Louisville, Kentucky, police in March 2020; and Ahmaud Arbery, killed the month before by three white men while jogging in his neighborhood in Glynn County, Georgia.

Ndegeocello cites Arbery’s murder as inspiration for “What Did I Do?” a somber ballad marked by a lurking bass line, suspenseful synth chords and Justin Hick’s plaintive, soul-searching singing.

“That song started with the bass line,” Ndegeocello explained in late June, just weeks before embarking on a European and U.S. tour. “When I’m playing that bass line, I feel Ahmaud getting assaulted and eventually shot while jogging. Can you imagine someone chasing you down just for jogging? I cannot.”

The genesis of No More Water dates even further back, to the fall of 2016, when the Harlem Stage premiered The Gospel of James Baldwin: Can I Get a Witness, a commissioned theater piece Ndegeocello created with director Charlotte Brathwaite.

During the initial performances of The Gospel of James Baldwin, Barack Obama was ending his second term as U.S. president with the backdrop of the Black Lives Movement ascending in full swing after the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the murder of an unarmed Trayvon Martin and subsequent murders of other unarmed Black people in the U.S. that included Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray and nine victims of the Charleston church massacre.

“In 2016, I woke up from my delusions of being post-race,” Ndegeocello says, alluding to witnessing all of the atrocities in the aftermath of the U.S. electing its first Black president. “I woke up from my delusions of things were getting better. And [some things] are better. We are not dying of cankerous sores; we are not in chains. But the mentality of the political system is not that different. And that’s what The Fire Next Time ages in you. It gives you a blueprint. Baldwin breaks down the police; he breaks down the church. In a clear, succinct manner, he breaks down white society and the Black Muslim movement at the same time. [The struggle for equality for all] is not one-sided, because the color of my skin is not a unifying factor.”

The Fire Next Time refers to Baldwin’s 1963 masterpiece in which he writes to his nephew about the horrors of being Black in the U.S. during his time. A year prior to The Gospel of James Baldwin, award-winning journalist, essayist and novelist Ta-Nehisi Coates issued Between the World and Me, a nonfiction book written as a letter to Coates’ then-13-year-old son about his thoughts on being Black in America.

Coates’ Between the World and Me ignited worldwide renewed interest in The Fire Next Time, whose structure it recalls; Baldwin’s book inspired the title of Ndegeocello’s No More Water. Surprisingly, she hadn’t read The Fire Next Time until she co-created The Gospel of James Baldwin.

“My mind was blown; I was so ashamed that I hadn’t read that,” Ndegeocello says before explaining how the book helped her release some deep-seated resentment toward her now-deceased parents. “[The Fire Next Time] gave me more empathy toward them. Not only were they trying to raise children; they were experiencing white supremacy in a way that I could not imagine.”

Ndegeocello, however, had read a few of Baldwin’s other books prior to working on the theater piece. She grew up in Washington, D.C., which has long been a bastion for Black art, culture, education and upward economic and political mobility. Still, it wasn’t until Ndegeocello left D.C. that her literary horizons broadened.

“I grew up with Disney and Shakespeare; I was definitely brought up in the dominant culture,” Ndegeocello says about formative years in D.C. “It wasn’t until I moved to New York City when I was 22 that I met people like Beverly Jenkins, Greg Tate and Arthur Jafa that I expanded the knowing of myself. I was blessed to have people around me who didn’t treat me like I was ignorant, but they could see my provincialism.”

Baldwin: Mind, Body & Spirit

In conversation, Ndegeocello often speaks of Baldwin in the present tense, as though he’s physically still among us. Throughout No More Water, she sounds as if she’s interacting with Baldwin’s work as a living, breathing entity. With keen insight, she explores not only Baldwin’s incisive observations on race relations, queer life, love and life as an artist, she contextualizes them inside more recent movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter.

“Baldwin not only propelled me to my future; he helped me digest the past,” Ndegeocello says. “It was Baldwin who taught me that white culture really believes that it has something to offer that it thinks Black people need. It’s not until you realize that the American dream is something that you to have take part and parcel that you realize you have to figure out how it works for and against you.”

Ndegeocello, however, addresses Baldwin beyond the iconic civil rights intellectual and advocate. She makes listeners consider Baldwin as a complicated human being. In the liner notes, noted arts critic and essayist Hilton Als writes of giving Baldwin his body back.

“Hilton wants to give Baldwin back his cultural self,” Ndegeocello explains. “Baldwin became polemic in a way. His creative, artistic self shifted, and he became almost a spokesperson. There’s the creative, theatrical Baldwin, who wants to be in the zeitgeist of pop culture. There’s the essayist, the civil rights person. And then there’s Baldwin, the man whose father said he was unattractive; the man who did the church schtick; the man who is going through life thinking that he would never be loved.”

“In a kind of way, Baldwin has been idolized as an idealogue rather than a queer person of color,” adds Als, who also contributed text and spoken word to the album track “On The Mountain,” which zeroes in on the concept of delivering Baldwin’s body back to him. “In that idealization, what happens is the draining of their blood. I don’t want us to idolize him that way, because he’s a figure who deserves the complexity of a real, living person. He lives on the page. And he lives in our hearts.”

In this process of giving Baldwin back his body and complex humanity, Ndegeocello ponders what he would do if he was still living. “If Baldwin were still alive, I would ask, ‘In your heart of hearts, what creative project did you really want to do?’’’ she says. “What would Baldwin think of Lil Nas X? I would ask him, ‘Do you feel loved? How does it feel, living inside your body with your sexuality as you age? What was it like to lose three people that you knew and loved: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Medgar Evers?’”

Fire Music Reimagined

“All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations.”

—James Baldwin, Sonny’s Blues

No More Water unfolds with multiple timbral and emotional temperaments, underscored by jarring, vibrant, transfixing sonic collages that allude to the best work of Romare Bearden. Like Baldwin’s prose, the lyrics and spoken-word pieces on No More Water punch with unflinching force.

“I am a collagist; I come from that hip-hop world and go-go,” Ndegeocello says. “I started writing music in collage form: through sampling. I come from a jazz background, even though my bass playing is not virtuosic. But I think in a jazz virtuosic way. I want to be the musician who writes compositions that other musicians like to play. And within those rhythmic and harmonic structures, they can find things they want to play within the composition. It gives them a place for self-expression.”

No More Water shows Ndegeocello surrounded by longstanding collaborators — guitarist Chris Bruce, saxophonist Josh Johnson, drummer Abe Rounds, keyboardists Jebin Bruni, Julius Rodriguez and Jake Sherman, and singers Justin Hicks and Kenita Miller. The album also features searing spoken word performances from acclaimed poet and political-social activists Staceyann Chin, Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza, poet Paul Thompson and French jazz radio host Caroline Fontanieu.

At various times, the album howls with clenched-teeth fury, sobs in soul-crushing despair, prances in queer joy with cautious optimism, investigates the deeper corridors of love and hate, and calls for unity and strength during exhausting, never-ending social activism.

No More Water opens with the contemplative and wry “Travels,” on which Ndegeocello embodies Baldwin, observing the plights of Black America and ruminating on his role in the advancement of the struggle, while living in France. More poignantly, it articulates why Baldwin fled the U.S.: so that he could breathe and be.

Ndegeocello inserts snippets of Chin vigorously reciting Baldwin’s famous 1963 lecture “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity” on two occasions on the album. “As an artist, you have this lofty idea of yourself when you’re young,” Ndegeocello says. “Hearing [“The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity”] really helped me. That speech hurts me; it uplifts me; it brings me to my knees; it makes me want to better myself. It’s the whole foundation of the Baldwin experience.”

Chin’s oratory gifts burn hotter on the incendiary “Raising The Roof,” which encapsulates the frustration Black America has endured watching police murder unarmed Black people with near-absolute immunity during the last decade; the rousing “Tsunami Rising,” on which she takes on white patriarchy and its oppression against Black women, particularly with regard to the policing of women’s bodies; and on the subversive “Thus Sayeth The Lorde,” where Chin channels the writings of Audre Lorde — one of Baldwin’s literary friends and contemporaries — to address conservative Christian-sanctioned patriarchy and misogyny.

The carnivalesque “Pride,” which percolates to an ebullient soca rhythm, surrounded by glitzy synth riffs, takes listeners inside what sounds like a rousing gay pride dance party from the perspective of a marginalized participant, dissecting the class stratification of the LGBTQ+ community based upon gender, race and gender identity.

“With ‘Pride,’ I wanted to express something that kind of had a disco feel — something inside of gay glamour that sounds like Sound of Blackness, Diana Ross or Sylvester. That music transforms my soul,” Ndegeocello says. Nevertheless, she has reservations about how some aspects of the queer community have been gobbled up for mainstream public consumption.

“I miss certain aspects of the closet,” says Ndegeocello. “I miss the underground myth of the music, parties and the clubs not being so commodified by the dominant culture. Baldwin taught me how to think for myself as a queer person, as a woman [and] as a two-spirited person. There’s a great essay about manhood and freaks that he wrote. It healed my lesbian machismo and my understanding of being a jazz musician. I wish every jazz musician would read Another Country. Baldwin talks about how the music affects us; and how we affect the music.”

Other standout cuts on No More Water include the bucolic “The Price Of The Ticket” sung from the perspective of an unarmed person pleading for their safety from trigger-happy police; the sanguine “Love,” which examines how true love helps us, in Baldwin’s words, to “take off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within”; and the transcendental “Down At The Cross,” on which Ndegeocello sings from the perspective of Baldwin facing his own demise.

We Don’t Need No Water

“Human freedom is a complex, difficult — and private — thing. If we can liken life, for a moment, to a furnace, then freedom is the fire which burns away illusion.” —James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name

No More Water speaks to America’s current turbulent times, especially for people of color, women and queer people in the aftermath of such recent Supreme Court decisions that repealed women the constitutional rights to have an abortion and ended race-conscious affirmative actions in higher education. There’s also the continuous onslaught of anti-LGBTQ bills, involving censorship against teaching queer culture and history, denying medical care to transgender people and abolishing drag queen performances.

If that’s not enough, there’s the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 on the horizon, which, if Trump is re-elected, calls for the president to have absolute power over the executive branch. It also seeks to abolish the Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency and partisan control of the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Commerce, among other federal agencies.

As timely and crucial as No More Water is, Ndegeocello worried briefly that the sentiments inside the music would be outdated, considering that she recorded it four years ago. “The fear of it being old — I had to catch myself,” she says. “I had to really think of my intention. The whole intention of this album is to perhaps [inspire] 10 out of 100 people to pick up a Baldwin book and teach it in their classes.

“Look how prophetic he is,” she continues. “We are experiencing what he talked about. There’s the crime; and then there’s the denial of the crime, which is the sickness. And that [sickness] is in the individual on a micro level and on the macro level of what we call the United States. That sickness will seethe inside you and become cancerous when you deny the past and don’t reconcile your betrayals, lies and missteps. With this record, I’m not trying to punish you; I’m trying to help you heal.” DB