For the YATTA, music is mutable. The New York-based, Sierra Leonean-American artist, educator, and musician—who also publishes and exhibits as ricky sallay zoker—has slid between forms: they’ve created paintings linked to an AI research project, given multimedia performances for The Shed and MoMA, performed improvised noise shows across the globe, and even once took to Times Square for a punk concert, put on by the New Museum. For their third album, Palm Wine, which was released by collective and label PTP in late October, YATTA turned to pop as a form to communicate differently than they have with other genres. As they explain, “Experimentation and free-flowing music feels really safe to me. I was asking myself, How do I make myself be seen and be comfortable with being seen?”

Palm Wine takes inspiration for its title from the popular drink that is also the namesake of the West African music genre characterized by cheerful, guitar-driven melodies. The title began from a kind of personal pun: “Iron and Palm Wine,” they repeated to themselves as they investigated what they term “Earth Music”—or music from bands like Vampire Weekend and Fleet Foxes, who, as they describe it in essays and performances, “score The White Wander.” These white musicians evangelize some variety of “outdoorsiness” while often riffing on African sonic cultures. Following this “Iron and Palm Wine” thread, they began watching videos of the palm-wine musician S.E. Rogie, whom they later learned was their great uncle. This blend of research, humor, and a serious-yet-playful attention to the substructure of popular culture characterizes YATTA’s work, whether musical, visual, or literary.

With the first video off the album for the single “MTV”—co-directed by YATTA with Dauda Jusu—they give a pop-punk take on African-diasporic suburbia, winding and unwinding threads of creation, romance, faith, and family.

For “MTV”’s debut, YATTA joined Document to talk about dialectical thinking, Jesus Christ, and giving up on being cool.

Photo by Funto Omojola.

Drew Zeiba: The term studio musician usually means somebody who is in the foam-covered room with the glass partition. But we’re here in your art studio. What is a ‘studio practice’ like for you? How is it to make pop music as a part of this greater practice you have across not only music but also performance and image-making?

YATTA: Palm Wine is totally different. I used to make songs by loading up samples and having some words written and then improvising. Once I played enough shows—because I used to play two or three times a week—and once the songs felt lived in enough after improvising, I would go in and record in one day. But with covid, I had to figure out how to make music without performing. I was like, I’m gonna make a pop album, because that’ll help me understand how you record. [Laughs]

I started reaching out to people that I know who play or record pop and who I like spending time with. Some things came from voice memos, and I use my loop pedal a lot to play, so some things came from that, some things I produced, and then some things I brought into the studio with these people. I did the whole Ariana Grande-in-the-studio thing. It felt like cosplaying until the end. No, it felt like cosplaying by the end.

Drew: So much pop music is about romance, even if it’s not really. Like romance is the language it frames itself within. One of the things that happens a couple times in this album, I feel, is picking up one of these emotional truisms we all experience and then negating it. I think it’s in ‘Circle,’ where you sing, ‘The way I see us baby, I know our love is true,’ which is kind of a ridiculous thing to say, but it ends up being strange because it comes in as an almost non-sequitur. It feels free floating, rather than tethered by some foreclosed narrative structure. And in ‘MTV,’ you sing, ‘I hate you, come home.’ The line is speaking in two different ways, or it’s holding conflicting emotions and desires—which I guess is the nature of being in a relationship… All to say, I’m curious what your process is for developing the lyrics. How has that grown out of your improvisatory practice for this album?

YATTA: There’s something in me that doesn’t want to be pinned down. I think that’s why I’m hard to date. That lyrical tension is me having a face off within myself to make sure that I’m… Wait. Wow. You know what word popped in my head? ‘Dialectic.’ I think that’s how I feel about it. I think that’s how I feel about making art and being a person. That’s pretty decolonial. It’s very Western to just be like, Okay, there’s one thing.

On my last album, Wahala—which I call a poetry album, because to me they’re not songs—there’s a track called ‘Underwater, Now’ where I say, ‘There is a commonly held belief that there is only one reality. This is not true, there are multiple realities operating at any given moment. Think of a moment as a sphere, within each sphere exists an infinite number of points—each point a possible reality. It is not one, or the other, it is all, simultaneously. ’

The writing that I’ve been doing is trying to—with stupidity and humor—hold that. And also trying to negotiate with collaboration. It’s really hard to be in a relationship when there are moments that are so emotionally heightened that there’s no ability for there to be multiple truths.

Drew: How do you engage with that compositionally?

YATTA: For ‘Circle,’ I sat down with Myles [Avery], who I’ve known for 10 years and who helps me figure out how to record coming from that improvisational space, and he brought structural intelligence. I wrote those lyrics, ‘The circle has no end. Why did we have to begin?,’ but the other parts came way later in playing it and improvising. So I guess it did come from improv, but then taking all of that performance data and putting it into the computer and figuring out… [Laughing] What the hell’s ‘performance data’? What does ‘performance data’ mean to you?

Drew: I mean, I guess it’s probably like a WAV file…

YATTA: Yeah. [Laughs] Performance data. I’ve been using all this AI stuff so much that now I’m starting to talk like that. So putting the performance data into the computer, or they would say, putting the tracks into the computer, and then finding what pockets could be repeatable. I learned so much. I knew that I wouldn’t learn much if I kept doing what I was doing. I want to move from expression to communication, and I asked myself, How do I do that? And I was like, Okay, pop.

Drew: What was important to you about communication? Whom did you want to communicate to or what was the impetus to communicate differently?

YATTA: To prove to myself that I could do it. Experimentation and free-flowing music feels really safe to me. I was asking myself, How do I make myself be seen and be comfortable with being seen? I know several of the songs are embarrassing, and I really wanted that. Like, ‘MTV’ is so embarrassing—to me. I wanted to free myself from the constraints of feeling cool, because I need to let that go. It was like, How do I really show myself in a way that freaks me out and feels cheesy, so that I have agency?

Drew: I also wanted to ask about circularity and repetition. Not only because the first song is called ‘Circle,’ but there’s something circular about the pop musical structure. You have a chorus that causes a return. There are also few art forms besides music, especially popular music, that people re-engage with in the same way. You listen to the same song thousands of times. Most people don’t do that with movies or books.

But in Palm Wine, amid this circularity and repetition there’s also this tendency toward negation we discussed. It’s a dialectic, like you said. The songs make us have to reconcile complexity and contradiction and re-focus on things. How did you shape this as an album that holds these different pieces together across songs?

YATTA: There was a time when the album was such a clear narrative and then I went in and fucked it up. I wanted to trust my intuition, even if I didn’t understand why. I’ve been in this mode of working from my head as much as I can and then letting that go. Before Palm Wine was laid out really logically, and maybe that would’ve been the best move in a pop album. Oops. Fuck. Well. I thought instead about when I wanted restful moments and when I wanted to wake up the listener.

Drew: One dimension I want to ask about with the video for ‘MTV’—and maybe this ties back to holding many different realities and ways of seeing the world at once—is the role of Christianity, or the signs of Christianity, in it. In your essay ‘Earth Music’ for Pioneer Works’ Broadcast you wrote, ‘My family believed in God. This meant everything was okay. A few years ago, I would have said it was delusion, spiritual bypassing, or something like that, but now I see that believing in God helps one survive.’ What is religion doing for you in this video?

YATTA: I think it’s leading me. I grew up with a grandmother who would wake up at 3 am, wearing all white, and pray at the foot of the bed. And I loved my grandma so much, so I would sleep on the floor just to be with her. It’s there so deeply. I also really love the way that my family relates to Christianity. The best parts of it have created deep forgiveness and almost abolitionist thought. There is a history of those two things being intertwined.

In the music video, there is this televangelist that I grew up listening to. What is it? I mean, I wanted my family to be able to listen to it—not in a way where they’re approving, but where they can hear it. With my previous music, I don’t think they could hear it. And for me, part of the truth of an African suburban experience [in the US] is having god present, whether it’s like in Christianity or Islam, and present in a way that’s subconscious even. No matter what I do, it’s gonna be there unless I try not to do that. [Laughs] I love Jesus. I think he’s amazing. I think some of his followers are so fucking evil, but I love him.

A lot of the video came from writing about what it means to have a family that doesn’t go outside particularly because of the context of the neighborhood where they’ve decided to move to from outside of the country. This came from my writing about the relationship between living with the earth and having a sound mind. It made me think about African suburbia and how difficult it is for diasporic children to have a grounded sense of selves because there’s a divorce from nature. For ‘MTV’ the main concept was of an African suburbia where there’s no longer this closeness to nature, so god is what the spiritual becomes.

Drew: In the video, there’s this character who yells your name out a window and we mostly see inside watching this religious television. Who is she?

YATTA: I was looking for someone who could play the hyper-god-loving elder. I was like, How am I gonna do this? Where am I gonna find this person? I was in Queens, and this person got off the subway and was sitting down and was talking to herself and was mad. I was like, ‘What happened?’ And she was like, ‘Oh, those stupid doctors, they were treating me like I was stupid.’ I said, ‘Fuck that.’ I looked at her, and she was wearing all white, and I was like, ‘Hey, have you ever acted before?’ She was like, ‘No, but, but god has given me many gifts.’

I thought, This. Is. It. You. Are. Her. So I said, ‘I’m a child of god, and I’m making a music video. Can we talk more? I’m headed somewhere, but…’ And she said, ‘I’ll come with you.’

We started talking on the phone, and she texts me things all the time. She was exactly who I was looking for.

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“MTV as told by cul-de-sac Africans who are trying their best to be either about that life or like more so into god or maybe there is a middle ground regardless we have to be quiet because aunty is inside watching televangelist TV.”—YATTA

Song produced by YATTA, So Drove, Carlos Hernandez, and Maxime Morin. Co-directors YATTA and Dauda Jusu. Director of photography Kris Khunachak. Editor Derek Schultz. Co-producers YATTA and Destinee Aaliyah. Casting YATTA. Aunty Prunella. Band members RaFia Santana, Lambkin, Pap Souleye Fall, and Habib Fall. Set design and props Ma Bedross. Set and props assistant Devanté Melton. Props courtesy of Ma’s Furniture Garden. Lead stylist Ayqa Khan. Costume design Mosie River. Hair Skye Melena. Make-up Nina Carelli. Food Laith Ayogu. Movement director Monica Mirabile. On-set photographer Funto Omojola and Christian Cody. Title design Rissa Hochberger.

Special thanks to Viva Hauser and Stella Wren Ramos.