“Mum Does the Washing” Is the Spoken-Word Anthem I Didn’t Know I Needed
This miraculous song by Nigerian British poet Joshua Idehen is a manifesto, stand-up routine, and dancefloor banger rolled into one.
I don’t have anything against spoken-word music, but I’m not usually rushing to hear an album if I come across that descriptor. I’m just too attracted to the possibilities of melody, rhythm, and phrasing to get very excited about a vocalist whose approach might involve a certain inattention to those qualities. There are exceptions, of course—I love Gil Scott-Heron and Bill Callahan as much as anybody; for a long time, my favorite Kanye song was the slam-poetic power ballad “Never Let Me Down”—but this is my truth. I like poetry on the page. We may be a few years into a sprechgesang renaissance, but if I’m listening to music, I’d rather hear someone who can sing or rap.
So I’m not sure what inspired me to click on “Mum Does the Washing,” by Joshua Idehen, a Nigerian British poet now based in Sweden, while poking around Bandcamp for new music the other day. The evocative Englishness of the title, maybe, or a note about Idehen’s past contributions to albums I’ve enjoyed by the various bands of the London jazz woodwind player Shabaka Hutchings, or just because I like the turquoise-lit portrait of the artist looking dapper and insouciant on the cover of the EP. In any case, I’m very glad I did.
I love this song, but I don’t want to tell you too much about it. The first time I heard it, in headphones, I was laughing out loud in surprise and delight by the end, so hard that my girlfriend was like, what the hell are you listening to, and I played it again for her on speakers, and she had more or less the same reaction. It would be a shame to ruin that experience for someone else.
So I’ll say just a few things. The basic premise is that Idehen uses the image of someone’s mum doing the washing—your mum, to quote him directly—as a device for talking about the various isms and ideologies that compete for control of our modern world. He repeats the title ad absurdum, tweaking it slightly each time to land a new blow on a new deserving target. One part of the fun is in the individual punchlines themselves; another important one is in the sheer number of mums doing the washing that accumulate over the song’s four minutes.
Idehen’s subject matter is just about as heavy as it could possibly be. If he didn’t deliver it with such stylish conviction and flamboyant wit, “Mum Does the Washing,” like so much spoken-word before it, would be in danger of feeling more like a lecture than a song. But by the alchemy of charisma, sharp writing, and a gorgeous vocal sample and jubilant rhythm from Idehen’s producer and musical collaborator Ludvig Parment, it feels not just like a song, but one you might even consider dancing to if you heard it at a party.
In its attempt to understand and explain ideas nearly as big as life itself by setting them to a good enough groove, “Mum Does the Washing” reminds me a little of “Everybody’s Free to Wear Sunscreen,” Baz Luhrman’s freak spoken-word hit from 1997. But where that song tends toward corny sentimentalism, this one is a merciless critique: apt for our age of alienation, inequality, and despair. Somehow, it still makes me smile.
