Billie James Is Not Your Lover

The Billie James Project, the latest effort from Laduma Nguyuza a.k.a. Dudu Stinks, the wordier MC of Madison hip-hop collective Dumate, propels forward with as much density as cohesion. But even though the concept EP (clocking in at a little more than 25 minutes) snowballs into a mountain of allusions to author James Baldwin and choice samples of Billie Holiday, said mountain can be cruised up and down with ease. Stinks is the smooth to DLO’s (Dumate’s other MC) tough, sneaking plenty of polysyllabic wizardry into his—and to a slight extent into Baldwin’s—powerful storytelling so slickly that listeners almost forget that the tales are wrapped in rhymes.

Billie James Is Not Your Lover tells the tumultuous story of Billie James (a fictional character of Stinks’ creation) via two narrators: brother Elliott James and Billie himself, both voiced by Stinks. “Good Morning Heartache, Goodbye Billie” (told by Elliott James) kicks the door open wide with the lead character dying of a surgical mishap at the hands of a white doctor, and his mother and brother left furious. Stinks spits, “Of a mother in the waiting room / death at the entrance / She felt it walk past her and stopped mid-sentence / And then she mouthed slowly, “Billie’s not gonna make it” / And there for the first time, I saw my mother naked.” The Madison MC layers his bleak couplets over an infectiously head-nodding treatment of Billie Holiday’s “Good Morning Heartache” by producer DLO, who shared production duties with frequent collaborator and Dumate beatsmith Man Mantis. From there, each song tells its own story. For instance, “Burned” covers James’ first sexual experience, “William James Senior” and “Mama” describe the vastly different backgrounds of his parents, and “Strange Fruit 2.0” has Elliott James being accused of and lynched for the murder of a white woman.

While Billie James primarily tells of the struggles of its main character, below the surface it’s an exploration into and commentary on racism and homophobia. The listener doesn’t need to take a class on Baldwin to feel the lyrical jolt of “The one thing all whites in the U.S. can agree on is none of them would want to be black in any eon / The black man’s psychotic / His sister’s exotic / We mixed our Ebonics with the slave master’s phonics.” Stinks has crafted a thoughtful and dense collection of tunes that is sure to challenge its listeners—with or without CliffsNotes.