Dominique Fils-Aimé: Stay Tuned!
My favourite records are always about voice — about finding voice, making space for voices, listening to voices. Even in music that is traditionally instrumental, voices pushing through to be heard.
Stay Tuned! is an extraordinary album that takes a singular voice to create a multi-layered and nuanced exploration of love, hate, history, present, soft, hard — and all the opposites and the areas in between. The wondrous Dominique Fils-Aimé is called a revelation for a reason.
Every song on Stay Tuned! is voice: layering words, sound and power, in every song. Thinking about how voice finds expression is inescapable when thinking of Dominique Fils-Aimé. It’s experimental in sound and experimental in expression. It pushes through to communicate widely, but it never loses its specificity.
Each song is written by Fils-Aimé and contains multitudes — multiple ideas, multiple genres, and the layered multiplicity of her voice. “Good Feeling”, an allusion to Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good” opens the record, acknowledges the past and then lays the foundation for the album. We hear the hum transform into words: “it is a new dawn, a new day” — as listeners we are ready to hear something new. This short, 51-second opener is also exemplary of the mix between Fils-Aimé’s virtuosity as well as artistry. Her stint on reality TV demonstrated that she has the chops to sing anything, but the arrangement of her voice on this record creates images of duets, quartets and choirs.
Having to push through the anti-Blackness of Quebec — exemplified through, as she said to me in an interview, a school system that taught nothing about people that look like her, and a jazz festival that accepted a white woman performing a revue of “slave songs”, supported by protesters arguing that this was fine because there are no black women singing blues or jazz in Montreal. Stay Tuned!’s title and contents demand attention to the Black experience in Quebec and Canada. This is clearly essential and important work.
This second part of a three-album project focuses on the development of Black music and the rise of feminism. Her stunning vocals tell stories personal and political, and she’s always reaching towards understanding across cultures: “I have experienced the comfort of Canada with roots in Haiti. It is my responsibility to raise awareness towards the inequities that still remain in the system we live in. Montreal invites culture, but when people are trying to hold on to the past, it’s about changing and evolving so that everyone becomes heard in their differences and is free to explore different cultures.”
Stay Tuned! is a 14-song argument for thinking differently. In the same way that this is arguably a jazz record, but it is also gospel, doowop, R&B, and dubstep — sometimes in the same song as with “Freedom” —Fils-Aimé provides a way of seeing beyond genre. Through music she demonstrates the reality of what happens when we, as people, engage with each other.
The Quebec government seems right now to not be interested in anything that deviates too much from what the government views as “core culture”, wanting to encourage what is referred to as “interculturism”. This is defined as taking for granted the centrality of francophone culture, from there working to integrate other minorities into a common public culture, or so we are told.
But, as Fils-Aimé’s words, music and voice demonstrate, that’s not the case. When you bring different people, genres, ideas together, everything changes. She provides direction. “I can tell just by your face, you crave this way out, you need this way out,” she sings on “Creative Interference”.
We are invited into the intimate spaces of Fils-Aimé’s mind: recognizing, speaking and responding to culture opens up opportunities for connections as well as narratives of what it means to be a person in the world, a woman, and specifically a Black woman.
This brings me to the poetic element of Fils-Aimé’s work here — each song can be read in different ways. A song like “Gun Burial” can be read as a conversation with a lover, but also a conversation with society — and the repetition here, as in most of the songs on the record, offer the listener an experience whereby words and voice act as rhythm and percussion, but they also gesture towards potential interpretations: “mind over matter,” she sings, “do you mind if it matters? Do you mind, do you matter?” Speaking outwards to an audience of you, asking about who is thinking, who is minding, who matters, and what this might mean.
She’s sultry on “Somebody”, haunting on “There is Probably Fire” (and a few more), and can definitely transform head nods into dance moves on a song like “Freedom”. She speaks to women — “go get it girl” on “Where there is Smoke” and men, on “Magic Whistle” providing warning and reinforcement: “Run little boy run little boy / Know they will hold you down / Know they will hold you back.” This song also evokes traditional Indigenous and African Spirituality in Puerto Rico, through its repetition of the colonial word used to describe these cultural practitioners: bruja.
There are also references to the Little Rock Nine, Fats Waller and more — every listen reveals something new. Like an aural depiction of Martiniquan scholar Édouard Glissant’s créolité, it describes a culture composed of more than just one thing. Montreal is this. Toronto is this too. Bajan scholar Kamau Brathwaite has spoken of cultural intersection and linguistic cross-fertilization within the concept of creolization. In Éloge de la Créolité/In praise of Creoleness, Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, describe how créolité “is not expressing a synthesis, not just expressing a crossing…It is expressing a kaleidoscopic totality”.
Dominique Fils-Aimé’s Stay Tuned! is this kaleidoscopic totality in all its complexity and beauty.
Near the end of the album she takes listeners to church in “Joy River” — The choir sings plaintively and then, the four/four time bass bounce starts, the tambourine and the handclaps alongside the comforting chords of the piano and the instructive repetition of the lyrics leads us to easily be able to join in singing “I’ve got joy like a river in my soul”.
But the last moments are left as a reminder that where this music and all that comes with it stems from is the soul. The past is in the present — she does not shy away from it — and she is “addicted” — there will be more, thankfully. As Haitian scholar Michel Trouillot has written, “History is the fruit of power…The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots.”
Dominique Fils-Aimé has met this challenge through her music. She teaches us about the power of what she calls “Constructive Interference” and has created an album that underlines the specificity of the Black experience, the female experience, Haitian experience, the immigrant experience, the Montreal experience, her experience. Joyous, essential, stunning, sonic intersectionality — just listen.
