Adrian Younge – The American Negro [Album Stream]

Adrian Younge has released a new album titled “The American Negro”.

“This is my What’s Going On record, to explain why we are where we are in the world,” LA-based multi-instrumentalist and composer Adrian Younge tells Apple Music. “It’s as if Marvin Gaye hooked up with James Baldwin to record with David Axelrod—there’s so many layers to be explored.” The former law professor and frequent collaborator of A Tribe Called Quest’s Ali Shaheed Muhammad has certainly assembled a mammoth undertaking with The American Negro. It’s not just a 26-track album written and played by Younge, interspersed with spoken-word interludes and orchestral backing, that documents the history of ingrained structural racism in America; it’s also accompanied by a podcast miniseries, Invisible Blackness, featuring guests such as Chuck D and Ladybug Mecca, as well as a short film, T.A.N., which Younge also wrote and directed. “I want people to understand the history of racism and how America has been built on a slavocracy—profiting from the forced labor of Black people,” Younge says. “It is a system America has pioneered and one it has yet to reconcile or resolve.” Here, Younge tells the story behind all of The American Negro’s songs.

Stream the massive 26-song offering in its entirety below.