Fatima Al Qadiri's New Track Is About Cops Who Are "Drunk with Power"

New York-based artist, Fatima Al Qadiri, has shared "Power," the latest track from her overtly political new album Brute on Kode9's Hyperdub imprint. As the artist revealed in her recent THUMP profile, the track prominently features a sample of ex-LAPD sergeant Cheryl Dorsey—a writer, speaker, and community advocate who describes her work as "educating the public in the areas of police policy and procedures as well as understanding police culture."

Bringing back her beloved steel drums, the song begins in stone-faced agitation and builds into something highly expressive and enraged, revolving around a sample of Dorsey describing police "who are drunk with power." Later in the track, a longer excerpt of one of Dorsey's speeches takes center stage, where she explores the complex structural dynamics and institutional protections that allow police brutality and misconduct to persist.

Al Qadiri told THUMP that the idea for the album took root when she was stuck in her room for a month because of a knee injury, much of which time she spent on Twitter "stuck in a horrific news cycle." She explained: "I had already been so moved by what was happening in the States, with the events of Ferguson, Baltimore, etc. So I started to write really angry and despairing music, and just decided this is the subject that I want [the album] to be about. I also saw it as a challenge. Protest music is a real genre, and there have been a lot of seminal protest records. I just feel like this is a subject that's moving a lot of people right now."

Read the full THUMP interview, and check out "Power," premiered on Mixmag, below.

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