February 11, 2022 - AntiFragile Music
Shamir Bailey’s album Heterosexuality reads from start to finish like an exposé interview that immediately becomes more than the interviewer bargained for. It’s overflowing with Shamir’s signature radical honesty about a plethora of painful topics of modern American adulthood we always sugarcoat to cope with—identity, sexuality, government oppression, relationships with others, child-parent dynamics, generational trauma, anxiety, relationships with the self, marriage, reproduction, and the general angst of the human condition. It covers a lot of ground, like a survey through the wilds of Shamir’s psyche. Shamir grabs the mic, takes up space, breaks the pearls we are clutching, and loudly refuses to be boxed into an easily digestible “brand.” Instead he forces us to look at him as the human being with multitudes that he is, with and beyond identity as a queer artist.
Heterosexuality is darker than Shamir’s earlier work, and it burns with pain that was previously mentioned but is fully explored here with a sharp clarity of maturity and focus. Shamir still laughs in the face of genre and approaches songwriting with an expression-first freedom that effortlessly creates earworms while breaking musical convention. But in this new body of work, he pulls dirtier tools from his gargantuan musical toolbox—gritty sound effects, industrial noise and drum machines, 80s edge-of-the-world vibes vis-à-vis key signatures, punk anarchy, and (the most critical weapon) a vast and spectacular vocal range. Shamir wields the power, confident in his anger, direct like a bullet to the heart, and kind enough to let us know the reasons. ☔