Tunde Adebimpe Sneers at the Moon

Tunde Adebimpe has been thinking about space. Going up there, looking down at the earth—and maybe, as the meme goes, being blasted into the moon, a reprieve from this weary world. Thee Black Boltz, the TV on the Radio singer’s debut solo album, begins with a spoken-word recording that sounds like a transmission to a shuttle in orbit, before segueing into the opening lines of the raucous single “Magnetic”: “I was thinking ’bout my time and space/I was thinkin’ ’bout the human race/In the age of tenderness and rage/Had me kickin’ through the end of days.” 

As Adebimpe guides us through a slate of existential concerns like an astronaut contemplating his smallness from above, he kicks and squirms with an intellectual sneer, punking out his distinctively husky voice alongside jaunty synthesizers and electrified guitars that signal everything is not OK. And when he sings forlornly about the man who ate the moon on the track of the same name, he sounds like both a fable-maker and soothsayer. Thee Black Boltz is pretty timely in its way—I can’t help but think of a certain billionaire who provided the cock-rocket that, early this week, shot Katy Perry into actual space (or, at least, the most inner reaches of space) for 11 minutes. “Talk about a ridiculous story,” Adebimpe sings on “Ate the Moon,” as guitars edge into frazzled metal territory. “The man who ate the moon/High tide and you can’t ignore it.” 

Maybe Adebimpe is vibrating on a higher plane, or maybe he’s just been reading about all the billionaire rocket crashes over the last few years and catching the zeitgeist, but it’s almost unbelievable that he dropped Thee Black Boltz this specific week. Space, the notoriously final frontier, is currently being framed by more than one oppressively wealthy man as a solution to the problems of Earthlings, or at least some Earthlings—though I don’t know how sending Mrs. Firework herself above the atmosphere helped anything but her own image as an out-of-touch flop star. The splashy, pinkwashed Blue Origin trip’s passengers are currently tripping over themselves to argue their vanity ride did anything for anyone but themselves, using feminism as a cudgel: Gayle King suggested the all-woman, mostly-celebrity crew was “inspiring” women and girls back on the planet. 

In her defense, I am inspired—to further entrench my support of the working class musicians who can’t even fathom a living wage, much less dream about a trip above the Kármán line. I’m inspired to forget about the time I’ve wasted listening to Perry’s latest, 143, an artistic and commercial dud. And I’m inspired to listen even deeper to Thee Black Boltz. “So many devils and so little sympathy,” Adebimpe warns on one of my favorite tracks, “Blue,” over a curl of drum machine and misty, Depeche Mode-style keyboards. “We’ll be bathed in the blue/Earth’s talking revolution sound, it’s coming soon.”