Review
Culture
Music
5 min read

Corinne Bailey Rae’s energised and anguished creative journey

Corinne Bailey Rae’s latest album, Black Rainbows, is an atlas of capacious faith. Jonathan Evens explores her inspirations in Detroit, Leeds and Ethiopia.

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A black and white portrait of a young woman's head against a dark textured background.
www.corinnebaileyrae.com.

Black Rainbows is the latest album from multi award-winning singer-songwriter Corinne Bailey Rae. Part of a project which also includes a book Reflections/Refractions at the Arts Bank photographed by Koto Bolofo, live performances, visuals, lectures, exhibitions and more, the album is inspired by the objects and artworks collected by artist, archivist and curator Theaster Gates at the Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago. Bailey Rae attended The Black Artists Retreat there in 2017 and performed in the space. Last year Bailey Rae performed in Black Chapel, the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion designed by Gates. A shared element of their collaborations, work and inspirations are their Baptist upbringings and experiences. 

Black Rainbows represents a significant development in Bailey Rae's music and career. By turns angry and reflective, noisy and still, celebratory and keening, original and grounded, the album broadens her musical palette considerably through a marvellous melange of electronica, jazz and punk meshed with soul and R&B. The album ranges from righteous railing against the casual erasure of Black lives and memories to a vision of a world in which we dig our gardens and live, find work and time to dance, in a new utopia. It also extends Bailey Rae’s exploration of and engagement with black history and culture beyond her own experience, through collaborations with Gates and also the Stony Island Arts Bank, which was her inspiration for the album. Her longing, shared in ‘A Spell, a Prayer’, is to arc an arm through history in order to unpick every thread.  

Bailey Rae has spoken of the way in which her visit in 2017 to the Stony Island Arts Bank at the invitation of Gates, its founder, transformed her.  

“I knew when I walked through those doors that my life had changed forever.”  

Two things changed. One was a deeper engagement with the Stony Island Arts Bank's basic premise that black people matter, black spaces matter and black objects matter. The other was developing the confidence, through the example of Gates as artist, lecturer, potter, choir director, business owner, to, as she has said in an interview for Wilful Publicity, just:  

"be myself and follow all of my interests and allow all my fascinations and obsessions to come through in my music in the belief that we are all people, and we all have those connections and questions and interests."  

Christian Viveros-Faune has written that Gates developed his practice as "an artist-curator-activist", serving "different kinds of communities as an artistic ‘bridge’," out of engagement with the Church, having been both Director of Chicago’s New Cedar Grove Missionary Baptist Church Choir and "an urbanist in Seattle for a Christian mission that ran a housing programme in poor neighbourhoods.” His artistic projects have included processing a 250-person gospel choir he assembled from local churches through the galleries of the Milwaukee Art Museum while singing hymns Gates had scored as a response to poems written by the slave-era potter Dave Drake. The musical offerings of Gates' house band, the Black Monks of Mississippi, also combine spirituals with Zen chants. The Black Monks of Mississippi performed in Black Chapel, as also did Bailey Rae.  

His entrepreneurial projects have included the Dorchester Art and Housing Collaborative which consists of 32 units made for those who receive affordable and low-income housing support with a space for theatre and dance, and a mission is to share culture first with the folk residing in the 32 units. Similarly, the bank at 68th and Stony Island was once a vibrant community savings and loan bank but today, through Gates’ intervention, provides the South Side of Chicago with 17,000 square feet of space for innovation in contemporary art and archival practice. 

Surprisingly, the kind of faith-informed arts-and-community-connecting entrepreneurship practised by Gates, is not unknown to Bailey Rae through her own background. As a member of Moortown Baptist Church, she was part of Revive, a fresh expression of Church begun by then Youth Pastor Simon Hall. Bailey Rae has said that Hall encouraged the young people in Revive to write their own songs, provided a first guitar for her, and encouraged her to develop a "capacious faith." Her first recordings were on the Revive albums Beautiful Day and Neither Work nor Leisure. Under Halls' leadership, Revive has become a church for people who like Jesus but aren't too sure about church. He has also developed Left Bank as a community arts venue (of which Bailey Rae is a patron) in a disused Anglican church, whilst also setting up The Wren Bakery, a social enterprise using baking and barista training as tools to help women build self-belief and gain transferable skills for employment, and Queer Church Leeds, a community which celebrates LGBTQ+ people and aims to create a safe and open space for both fellowship and discussion. 

Bailey Rae has shared her own exploration of faith in her music through songs such as 'I Would Like to Call It Beauty,' ‘Walk On’ and 'The Skies Will Break' and has done so in relation to both grief and celebration. Steve Stockman writes of one such song:  

“Love’s On Its Way is a prayer. It begins “Oh Father”, confesses misunderstanding at the great mysteries, looks at the state of the world and then after more confession asks that her response to this world would not be just the prayer but the action of her life." 

Black Rainbows ends with a stunningly beautiful track 'Before the Throne of the Invisible God' inspired by a book in the Stony Island Arts Bank about the rock churches of Lalibela in Ethiopia; ancient churches hewn from rock. In an interview with Forbes magazine, Bailey Rae said:  

"On one of the pages of this book, it said, it was a picture of a throne that had been made. So it was carved into the wall, solid stone wall. There was a throne and this is where God was meant to sit when God was in the temple. But I really loved that line, the Throne to the invisible God. I thought, before the throne of the invisible God, what else is there to do but kneel? What is the invisible God? What is the thing, the reason, the way we get here, the how, the why, the infinite, the eternal, the thing that makes us all connected?" 

This is where Black Rainbows ends. Through its tracks, Bailey Rae takes us on a journey from the rock hewn churches of Ethiopia, to the journeys of Black Pioneers Westward, from Miss New York Transit 1957, to how the sunset appears from Harriet Jacobs' loophole, in order to explore Black femininity, Spell Work, Inner Space/Outer Space, time collapse and ancestors, the erasure of Black childhood and music as a vessel for transcendence. Yet, 'Before the Throne of the Invisible God' is where her energised and empathetic, wracked and anguished, celebratory and creative journey through Black history and the continuing legacy of racism finds its resolution. In a place not of simple submission, but of living the questions raised by a capacious faith where responses to prayer are both the actions of life and also the explorations found on this album. 

Article
Comment
Ethics
Fashion
Race
5 min read

Anna Wintour is not a moral compass

The Vogue editor’s championing of diversity is all very well, but it’s based on what sells
Anna  Wintour stands holding a small mic.
Anna Wintour.
UKinUSA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Last month, the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York launched a new exhibition. “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” highlights the history of Black people resisting white supremacy through their sartorial choices. A few weeks after it opened, the 2025 Met Gala, which serves to raise funds for the Costume Institute, was chaired by Black voices across the creative industries, including A$AP Rocky, Pharrell Williams, Lewis Hamilton, Coleman Domingo and Lebron James. The exhibition has already received rave reviews from Black writers and academics, likely in part due to its co-curation by Monica Miller, who literally wrote the book on the subject Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity

Concurrently, a few hours south of New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in Washington DC, Donald Trump was calling Diversity and Inclusion initiatives “dangerous, demeaning and immoral.” A series of policies rolled out across the US federal government has led to the shutdown of not only diversity programmes, but a quiet disappearance of wording and other initiatives that might be interpreted as promoting similar themes. 

But the Costume Institute, which does not receive any federal funding, is uniquely free to follow Anna Wintour’s steer. And Wintour, Conde Nast’s Chief Content Officer and Editor in Chief of Vogue, is fighting back. “I feel we need to be courageous”, she told the Washington Post last month. Now, she added, is “a challenging time”.

Until now, Wintour has been an unlikely activist. Vogue has long been criticised for a range of ethical issues that include,  including lack of diversity, promotion of unhealthy body standards, and the sexualisation of young women. But are the magazine and Wintour now our bastion for future hopes of racial justice and equality?

In 2020, many of my friends and family ordered books and listened frantically to podcasts about race in America because of the events surrounding George Floyd’s death. In May 2020, a video circulated of officer Derek Chauvin suffocating George Floyd as he called out for his mother, leading to a flurry of protests and debates about the racial bias present in institutions. 

In those days, learning about the systematic injustice faced by Black Americans and calling for change felt popular. Everyone was doing it. Books like The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge, The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein, and How to be an Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi filled our Amazon carts and library holds. 

These days, many of those books have quietly disappeared from the shelves. For sure, there are those who continue to fight for racial equality. But the winds have changed, with some companies - like Conde Nast - landing on one side, while Google, Meta and Amazon disappear from the horizon. 

It’s easier to flip through beautiful images and call it a day, than to be a part of real, diverse communities.

It might seem obvious that brands are not the best source for our moral formation. But the fact is that many of them see themselves as culture-forming and mission-driven. If you don’t have something else to help form your idea of what the world should look like, why not Vogue, with its picture-perfect editorials, or Google, with its future-facing innovations? 

For me, my beliefs in diversity and racial justice come from something stronger: my Christian faith and the many Black men and women globally who share this faith with me. It was my reading of Black Liberation theologian James Cone that first showed me the depths of beauty I could gain by understanding my faith through someone else’s perspective. Cone was famous for his book which drew parallels between Jesus’s death on the cross by Roman crucifixion, and the deaths of many Black men by lynching in the American South. Cone stopped me in my tracks, making me rethink a key symbol of my faith. He said this: 

“The cross has been transformed into a harmless, non-offensive ornament that Christians wear around their necks. Rather than reminding us of the “cost of discipleship,” it has become a form of “cheap grace,” an easy way to salvation that doesn’t force us to confront the power of Christ’s message and mission. Until we can see the cross and the lynching tree together, until we can identify Christ with a “recrucified” black body hanging from a lynching tree, there can be no genuine understanding of Christian identity in America, and no deliverance from the brutal legacy of slavery and white supremacy.”

It won’t make it into a Vogue editorial anytime soon– but maybe that’s the point. 

A faith-based belief in justice comes with challenges. It can feel tiring to face a troubled history of racism in a religious institution. Existing in diverse, faith-based communities brings everything from awkward cultural differences to true and genuine disagreements. The global Anglican communion faces tension between white, liberal progressives in the UK who want to celebrate gay marriage in the Church of England, and an assemblage of Christians of colour in the Global South who maintain strong convictions about traditional views of marriage and gender. Our faith in Christ is the anchor that holds us together. But these are real disagreements; they’re not trivial, and there’s no easy way forward. 

It’s easier to flip through beautiful images and call it a day, than to be a part of real, diverse communities. And this is why we can’t rely on people like Anna Wintour to form our vision for the future. As nice and important as it is to promote diversity in models, photographers, and designers, ultimately Vogue will be shaped by what its editors and publishers think will sell on the newsstand.  

This is my plea for us all. Let’s not let the shifting tides of any company– Meta or Vogue– decide our ethical convictions towards justice. Let’s rely on something stronger.

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