Sudan Archives - Come Meh Way (2017)

The artist is speaking.

There are several motifs that repeat throughout a Sudan Archives music video: groups of people swiveling in slow motion, hair in its most hypnotic and intimate rhythms, aesthetics of Black fabulosity, and her phenomenal fiddle. She loves a prayerful twirl, and so do I. She loves a dual composition, and so do I.

I honestly couldn’t decide which video to feature, which is why you’ll see a couple of other ones at the end. I ultimately chose this video because it has all the best elements of a Sudan Archives video, and because Ghana looks beautiful here. Funnily enough, this was filmed on her first trip outside of the US, while she was on a trip to teach young students there how to produce and make music.

Something I adore about Sudan’s videos is their sense of place. The video for ‘Homemaker’ has her doing choreography in the aisles of a furniture resale store. In ‘Nont for Sale’ her crew of renegades hangs out outside of a hair salon, and then saunters through a beauty supply. In ‘Confessions,’ the quintessential American house is about both childhood secrets and adult desires. Even when she’s not in an identifiable place, as in the video for ‘Glorious’ (my favorite song), the costuming, nails, and sheer scale of glamour detail her worldbuilding, and make it specific.

Note that it’s no small feat to maintain specificity while making diasporic art. Diaspora, for some artists, has become synonymous with generalized experiences of being foreign, rather than about the creolization and improvisation of particular cultures and experiences. Sudan’s work, unlike the dreary diaspora melting pot style of art, retains the integrity of an Irish jig, or a Cameroonian melody, and a Cincinnati-born hip hop beat without boiling them down into one thing.

Scene from ‘Confessions’ where two people are sitting in a bedroom, one of them is having their hair braided by the other

Brittney Denise Parks, or Sudan as people refer to her, is a meticulous artist at every level. In addition to writing, composing, and producing her own music, she’s also often the creative vision behind her music videos. Unsurprisingly, she’s described herself as a “visual artist that happens to make music.” Altogether, her songs and videos tell the same stories in different forms, stories about being both from somewhere and towards somewhere, having both an origin and a destination in an industry and world that want to remove both — a prerequisite of futurism. The Archives in her name is even more fitting when you consider that her cosmic body of music, visual, and artistic work is aimed at preservation: of the community, of culture, and of the self.

Upside down on the pole with a fiddle in ‘Selfish Soul’, like what can’t she do?

Sudan Archives is the first artist in this newsletter series to have multiple videos featured in a newsletter and I think you can see why.