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Robert Glasper Jr: Fuck Yo Feelings

Nineteen tracks recorded largely live in front of an audience — a jazz pianist assembling twenty guests and refusing to make a tidy record.

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Robert Glasper: Fuck Yo Feelings (2019)

Robert Glasper is the most consequential jazz musician of his generation in terms of influence outside jazz. A Houston-born pianist with proper conservatory credentials, he spent the 2010s dismantling the wall between jazz and contemporary Black popular music — not by making crossover records but by treating rappers and singers as musical peers.

Fuck Yo Feelings is the loosest expression of that project. It was recorded over a short period with a rotating cast in the room, released without much warning, and it sounds like it: unfinished in places, digressive, and much more alive than a carefully sequenced album would be.

What to listen for

"Gone" is the centrepiece — Cordae, Bilal and Herbie Hancock on one track, spanning three generations, with Hancock's presence functioning as an explicit blessing of the whole enterprise.

"Trade In Bars Yo" brings Hancock back and is the most straightforwardly jazz moment on the record.

"Endangered Black Woman" with Andra Day and the poet Staceyann Chin is the most serious thing here, and the one that justifies the album's existence on its own.

"Expectations" with Baby Rose, Rapsody and James Poyser is the best-assembled track, and Baby Rose's voice — low, cracked, unmistakable — is the discovery for most listeners.

"All I Do" with SiR is the Stevie Wonder reading, and "Fuck Yo Feelings" with Yebba is the vocal showpiece.

"Treal" with Yasiin Bey is the hip-hop high point, and "Liquid Swords" is the instrumental joke that turns into something serious.

Go deeper

Black Radio (2012) is the essential album and the one that changed the conversation; Black Radio 2 and Black Radio III continue it.

Terrace Martin, Kamasi Washington, Thundercat and Makaya McCraven are the wider movement, and Baby Rose's To Myself is the album this record most usefully points you towards.

How to hear it: this is a live-in-the-room record and it should be heard as one. The loose ends, the false starts, the tracks that stop rather than end — all of it is deliberate, and a listener expecting a tidy album will conclude it is unfinished. Approach it as a document of several very good musicians improvising together and it opens up immediately.

Play it once straight through before picking favourites; the shape only appears on the second pass.

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