Beginning: Notes on Cleo Sol

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Gazelle Mba

Jul 17, 2024

When I first learned to write, I was told to show not say, to give a concrete example instead of simply stating what is. Who wants to read a sentence like Billy was sad, instead write he felt the tears creep up unbidden in the corners of his eyes or something like that. I organized and understood my writing life around a set of culturally affirmed principles without noticing how these rules and strictures altered the way I related to my emotions and my experiences with works of art.

I am shy of adjectives. Under normal circumstances, I would not call a work of art: good, beautiful, lovely. Except of course to my friends, those who know that living is always a rough, first draft that cannot be tidied or edited. Negative adjectives are more assimilable, to be disgusted or even frightened appears more high-brow and intellectual than the ease of delight. Writing for me, up to this point, has been a mode of self-erasure. Like cleaning fog from a window I remove traces of my human needs, feelings and desires from a text so that the subject can be seen more clearly. If I wrote of my love for a particular painting or album, it would be too revealing, too sticky. A sin if you will, an admission of vulnerability that condemns me (finally) as a bad critic, a mediocre writer.
In most reviews, I am distant, spectral. But here, in choosing to write about the artist Cleo Sol and my attunement towards her work I want to try a different approach. One that indulges in presence not absence and attends to the capacity of a work of art to stir us unashamedly. Cleo Sol is a soul singer from West London. So far in her career, she’s released a handful of EPs and four albums: Rose in the Dark, Mother, Heaven and Gold on the record label owned by her partner Inflo, Forever Living Originals. She does not give interviews- the work is the focus, she a mere vessel for its coming into the world- and does not tour with the fervour that other musicians do. Except for two sold out nights at London’s Royal Albert Hall, the second of which I attended.

Maybe it is unsurprising that I should throw shade at the unfiltered declaration of my own emotions in a piece of writing. My liability towards what is viewed by others as an excessive activation by life and its circumstances are well documented in culture; afterall I am black, African, a woman. Mostly I am supposed to and felt to be angry. In fact, I should be angry most of the time, but anger, for me, has always been impossible to hold and direct. My anger seeps inwards, attacking my cells, an infection. By containing my anger within myself, I can let cooler and more palatable emotions rise to the surface. It enables me to adopt the posture of self-seriousness and righteousness demanded of the critic; the one who is elevated above the work and the vast horde of onlookers.
I wasn't attending Cleo Sol at the Royal Albert Hall as a reviewer, or even as a die-hard fan. I went because I needed somewhere to go, a place that was not my home, where I could sit and focus my attention on a thing beyond me, beyond my capacities for a few hours. Before the concert starts I think: When was the last time I went to church? And maybe I should pray?
When I’m in a gallery or at the cinema, the distance between my body and the art work is manageable . Sometimes I can stand right up close as in the case of a painting or a sculpture, but I’m careful not to touch, the museum invites a strained awareness of one’s body and a desire to quieten the limbs and voice. A reduction of the self’s innate extravagance. In a concert, I am, we are further away. The singer is raised, celestial, set apart. They hover, in clouds of smoke, bathed in light. She walks on the stage, her hair tied back, wearing a sparkly black dress and gold jewelry. The concert begins, she opens her mouth to sing.
The first notes announce themselves in my spirit and not ears. My reasoning, my ‘critical faculties’ fall away. A reckoning with the core of myself, akin to Plato’s observations on music’s visceral impact: ‘because more than anything else rhythm and harmony find their way into the innermost and takes the strongest hold up on it.’ I would say it was rapturous, but I don’t want to be extra. But if I’m being honest, I would tell you that I cried the whole way through. As she swayed across the stage, the choir sang behind her and the crowd moved in unison. I was conscious of myself as a part of a much larger whole that extended beyond the hall we were gathered in, beyond London and the country even; a whole that was somehow concentrated in the dialogue between Cleo Sol’s voice and the instruments accompanying her.
Pain has its own rhythm: the tightening of muscles around the chest, the jaw, the shoulders, the propulsive beating of a heart or the head.

After the concert, I listened obsessively. It became almost a daily practice, I could listen to the same song again and again and again and again and it felt like I had never heard it before.
I didn’t realize what had happened to me until much later. I had become ‘attuned’ with the music of Cleo Sol. I picked up this useful term while revisiting Zadie Smith’s essay on Joni Mitchell, where the writer describes hating Michell’s caterwauling and then one day being reduced to tears. Listening to Blue, for Smith invoked a sudden ‘leap of faith’ that moved her into ‘something soaring and positive and sublime.’ It was similar with me. I didn’t hear Cleo Sol until I truly heard her; the hours gone past spent in the company of her music were dress rehearsals for this strange, mysterious, inexplicable event. When she sang, it was as though a lock was broken, I could exhale, an internal pressure valve finally released. Her voice held all the emotions I brought into the hall with me, frustration, fear, anxiety, sadness, and held them in a loving embrace. The communion with another soul through art was also a process of meeting myself again.
I once read Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation while riding on the Northern Line. I was 21 and severely confused by it, in more honest terms, I did not understand it. I am 26 now and for the purposes of this essay, I returned to it and found it a revelation. They do not tell you that reading is living, that there are experiences we must have, people we must meet, things we must do before the right words can find us and we can find the right words. I mean this as both a reader and a writer. In many ways, not understanding an essay called Against Interpretation seems like an honest way to engage with a text of that subject matter. Being in the presence of a work of art and resisting the desire to interpret it to death, in favour of a co-existence, does not have to deny the mind and its impulses but might precede from an understanding that the mind is not disconnected from all that surrounds it.

Cleo Sol - Gold: lyrics and songs | Deezer

I’ve come to separate what it means to love something from the act of writing. In love, I try to assume the best version of myself, the least fearful, the most brave but when I write, I cower, I fold, and lose sight of the animating force that should in theory guide my writing: love. Criticism involves a kind of sacrifice. I let go of an innocent appraisal of the work, in order to seek out the hidden intentions beneath its surface. The hermeneutics of suspicion has been my foundation for so long, I am not sure how to think without it. When the aim of critique, as Pierre Macherey via Terry Eagleton observes, ‘is to know the work as it cannot know itself’ then that presumes a self-mastery that I do not currently believe myself to possess. What if instead of side-eyeing the spiritual dishevelment of works of art, writing becomes a means to witness the commonalities between my fraying edges and the object I critique? Writing as a mutual seeing, open to the blindspots and ambiguities that lie on both sides of the subject-object equation.
The only way I can really describe her voice is to say that it feels like greeting someone you’ve known your whole life at the end of a very long and grueling day. Someone with whom you share a relationship with few or no seams at least for the moment. Or I could say it is the sensation of stretching out unreservedly as a child and someone drapes a blanket over you or carries you to your bed when it is late at night. Or the laughter around a kitchen table with those closest to you. There is something of Nina Simone, Minnie Ripperton, Joni Mitchell, Jill Scott, Erykah Badu in her too.
14. When an artist gets under our skin, like Joni Mitchell and Zadie Smith or like Cleo Sol and I, there is some discomfort and an experience of loss. Cleo Sol exposed me to strangers on the bus, who avoided my gaze as I sat on the 148 sobbing, my concealer a blur, my wig askew. Smith writes that Joni causes her to shed: ‘uncontrollable tears. An emotional overcoming, disconcertingly distant from happiness, more like joy- if joy is the recognition of an almost intolerable beauty.’ Joy like a lightning strike, joy like swimming in a bright blue basin, whose depths are unfathomable, against interpretation. But you are floating, your eyes closed, the sun touches your face. A river of pleasure.
15. To become attached to a work of art- occasionally against our wishes- is to give away a piece of ourselves. We admit our capacity to touch and be touched. Smith is right, the beauty does feel intolerable, too much to bear. How can I love something so much? Smith says that she ‘can’t listen to Joni Mitchell in a room with other people, or an iPod, walking the streets. Too risky. I can never guarantee that I’m going to be able to get through the song without being made transparent.- to anybody and everything to the whole world.’ The risk of transparency is also what makes life worth it. That we might be truly seen, in our deepest imperfections, recognized by another person or a song, or painting is both everything I’ve ever wanted and everything I’ve feared. But I’m done hiding. I jump into the basin. I run outside to watch the grey clouds wander like hungry dogs. I’m there to witness the roar of thunder and the lightning flame across the sky. I say I love you, I love this. I step into the light, the light by which we see light, and grab hold of it- it’s there waiting: joy.