Listening to Small Axe 52
11 April 2017
Listening to Small Axe 52
by Tiana Reid
While working on Small Axe 52, I kept hearing it. In the inaugural Small Axe playlist, you can hear what I heard: a “no capitalist” chorus, Nicole Awai’s “oozing between [the] mediums” of visual art and music, influences of Nina Simone and Wu-Tang Clan, Jamaica Kincaid’s voice, and much more. A good chunk of this playlist includes the “reggae revival” discussed in Kezia Page’s “Bongo Futures,” which was published in Small Axe 52. Other references were less to-the-letter, like Edna Manley’s 1936 mahogany sculpture, Market Women, which takes shape in Langston Hughes’s literary imagination of “old women” in Paris and Mexico.