“Do you listen to Sudan Archives?” Most of the time, but not every time, the response to this question is one of confusion. How can one listen to the archives of a country? Sudan Archives is, in fact, a twenty-nine-year-old musician—a singer, rapper, producer, arranger, lyricist, and violinist. She creates a “fiddle-punk sound,” as she describes it, that blends folk, ambient, soul, house, and whatever other tradition she feels is available for the taking. Sudan (the name that her colleagues, her fans, and, increasingly, her intimates call her) begins composing by striking a riff on one of her five violins, which she uses differently from most other American producers. A balladeer trots out the strings, like a show dog, to heighten the atmosphere of desperation in songs that are meant to be performed by destroyed women and repentant men. Sudan pursues technical, rather than emotional, manipulation. She is the violin’s domme. The songs creep into existence in her basement studio, where the two of them can be alone. A D.I.Y. queen, Sudan will pump a riff into her digital-production program to deconstruct it. She can coax from the violin the sounds of an accordion, a guitar, a drum. A string orchestra. “I can perform my song live and have twenty violins,” she explained. “And they’re all me.”
“She reminds me of Kanye West, except she’s a woman and a violinist,” one of Sudan’s collaborators said recently. Sudan, too, wants to be a provocateur; when we spoke, she balked at the idea of performing in an orchestra, where she’d be expected to play “slavery songs.” For much of her six-year public career, which has taken place in the indie/alternative music world, she has made herself the reputational custodian of her misunderstood workmate. For her real and imagined audience of overly Westernized listeners, Sudan has developed a motto: “In so many places in the world, the violin brings the party.” It is the fiddle, she corrects—the preferred instrument of the underclass.
The artist, whose government name is Brittney Denise Parks, was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, not in Sudan. Her music and her performance borrow from the style of Sudanese fiddlers whom she found on YouTube, the “archives” in question. Sudan is the American who enthusiastically joins the diaspora through a kind of awed rechristening. Like those Sudanese fiddlers, who dance and sing as they play, she does not stand still when she performs. She has used choreography inspired by video games: twirling her bow as if it were a sword or a snake (she has one, named Goldie), as if she were a charmer, or a warrior. Lately, she has equipped herself with a studded quiver, drawing her bow like an archer. She uses tech that allows her to go completely wireless onstage. (“What else is prohibiting me from being wild?” she recalls thinking.) Her violin now dangles from her, and when she grasps it to play she treats it as an extension of her erotic self.
While opening for the musician Caroline Polachek, on a recent tour, Sudan occasionally came on during the headliner’s set for a blink-and-you-miss-it solo. She would enter stage left, dressed in pleated leather, and gradually slide onto her knees. (Like Hendrix, she said.) She has considered using a shock-white Viper, an electric violin modelled on the guitar, which is associated with heavy-metal white guys. “It could be corny,” Sudan said. “But I’m going to make it sexy.”
Sudan has called herself “a visual artist who just happens to make music.” Her material is her body. She has personas, who have put on and slipped out of many different types of Black drag. Early on, Sudan wore flowing cotton dresses and kente skirts, exuding an aura of Earth Mother sobriety. For her first album, “Athena,” from 2019, she became the picture of the arch Afropunk, who, with her black lipstick and her sculptural, green-tinged braids, emitted a different kind of seriousness. She abstracted her strings, filling the atmosphere with synths, stoking a feeling of psychedelia. For “Natural Brown Prom Queen,” her second album, which she released last year, Sudan created her best persona: a character called Britt, who seems not to be a character at all but, rather, “the girl next door from Cincinnati who drives around the city with the top down and shows up to high-school prom in a pink furry bikini with a thong hanging out of her denim skirt,” to quote a press release.
“Natural Brown Prom Queen” is an anthem album. You sing along to it. The music surprised Sudan’s fans, in part because it felt like R. & B. The artist had expressed, in earlier interviews, that she could not bear the idea of “Oh, a Black girl, let’s put her in R. & B. or soul.” None of that sweaty-brow, glory-to-god belting from this singer, who hardly calls herself a singer. Like her peer experimentalists—FKA twigs, Kelsey Lu, and L’Rain come to mind—Sudan’s presentation (her stylist, Michael Umesi, calls it “Nubian Pünk”) sparks anxiety and excitement about her “difference.” She must be new, which means alone, because Black girls don’t normally present like that, vocalize like that. No other segment of the artist population is as stalked by ideas of how they should be. The notion of an “alt-Blackness” affirms the femmes and queer people, the marginalized among the marginalized, though the affirmation can have a flattening effect. “Natural Brown Prom Queen” is a key work because it does away with the binary for that millennial cohort. The artist says: I’m a trickster because I’m like my predecessors, not in spite of them.
Critics, Black and white, have pored over Sudan’s body of work, and over her body—more precisely, the ever-evolving image she has put forth of her Blackness, as she has become less aesthetically reliant on the shock of the muscular Black girl “brandishing” a violin. The Guardian described “Athena” as “some of the most viscerally gorgeous music put to record” in 2019, and Pitchfork listed “Natural Brown Prom Queen” as the second-best album of 2022, right behind Beyoncé’s “Renaissance.” There is a sense, in all the triumphant writing about Sudan, the reviews and essays where the aforementioned praise and other self-consciously “fierce” vocabulary spill over, that the critics feel they are working in tandem with the musician on an intellectual project. One review, by a Black writer, found continuity between “The Bluest Eye”—Toni Morrison’s novel about how self-loathing takes root in the fractured heart of the little Black girl—and the title track of Sudan’s second album. On the one hand, noticing (or even manufacturing) resonance among works across time is what we critics have to offer. The reviewer’s analysis could not have been sounder. But, when I asked Sudan about it, she bristled and said, “When people think of me as an artist, it feels so”—she raised her fingers in air quotes—“ ‘Black historical.’ I’m not doing it on purpose.” Sudan, critically beloved but still in the process of being discovered, does not want her champions to eternally consist of those who are in the know.
“Sometimes I feel like a certain type of Black people don’t like my music,” Sudan told me, matter-of-factly. “Natural Brown Prom Queen” seems to stem from a worry that her alt presentation has turned off lovers of mainstream Black American style. The woman who had made herself haughty and celestial on “Athena” came earthbound, and was talking about Chevy S10s on soundscapes that paid homage to the innovators of Detroit and Chicago, the Black home towns of her Black parents. Sudan, who, in her stage name, sheds Americanness, told me that she wants to be seen as a “bad bitch.” That idea of “badness” comes from the funk aesthetic—think of the sexual and musical authority of Betty Davis.
Sudan had resigned herself, as many touring artists have, to looking out at a white sea. But last year she performed at Hood Rave, a party for Black queer people in Los Angeles. She wondered if some Black audiences just hadn’t encountered her yet, if she should maybe play more shows in the hood, and expose them to her music. “I’m going to make them like it,” she said.
It was mid-spring, Coachella season. Sudan was preparing for her show in the desert, her second time performing at the music festival. During a rehearsal, in Burbank, I watched Sudan become her performance self. Sudan was initially a one-woman show. Lately, though, she has invited support musicians, including other violinists, to join her onstage. The musicians are always Black, and, more often than not, the violinists are Black women, creating a visual rejoinder to the myth that she is the only one.
That day in Burbank, Sudan was playing with a number of musicians, including another violinist and singer-songwriter, Prax Zxari, who had trained at the Berklee College of Music. Zxari wore an oversized sweatshirt, a green corset, a long denim skirt, and white boots. She stood erect as a bamboo shoot, violin tucked under her chin. Her eyes were trained on Sudan, who was dressed in exercisewear: she had wrapped her heavy locs in a blue bandanna and thrown a tennis skirt over her unitard, the waistband slung low enough to make it known that the unitard tapered off into a thong. Sudan had told her players not to worry about stage presence during the rehearsal, but as they practiced she swept the floor, extending her legs and shaking her ass, remembering to dart her almond eyes from her violin to the invisible camera, for which she vamped.
At one point, the only person who seemed to exist for Sudan was Zxari. The musicians were practicing the flourish on “Homesick (Gorgeous and Arrogant),” from “Natural Brown Prom Queen.” The song is narrated by a lovesick Sudan; the echoing appellations for sex (“I just want the D-I-C-K”) are softened by the violin, which Sudan plays adagio, until she quickens, punctuating the riff with two bars that feel like tripping and skidding down a hill.
Sudan drew closer to Zxari. She circled around the other violinist, lowering her own violin, at times, to her pelvis. “Too orchestra,” she told Zxari, gently. Zxari played more expressively. But the players were not yet in synch.
Sudan, who has been playing the violin since she was nine or ten, is self-taught. She plays by ear. Through the years, she has sporadically worked with teachers, and has made and abandoned efforts to learn sight-reading. She played the bars for Zxari, slower. It went on like this, back and forth, until someone produced sheet music for Zxari.
With the notation learned, both players relaxed—and they moved on to the choreography. Sudan stood back-to-back with Zxari and reached her hand above her head, like a flamenco dancer. They turned to the imaginary audience, Janus-headed. “I want it to be like we’re twins,” Sudan said, grinning widely.
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