“Talk about the blood.” Aja Monet says it again and again on “for the Congo,” and by the end you can’t unhear it. The blood is coltan, the metal torn out of the Congo to feed the phone in your hand and the car in your drive, and the war that keeps it coming. The AI boom is hungry for more, and the body count climbs to match. She calls the phones “the death machines in our palms,” and yes, she means the one you’re reading this on.
The percussion is heavy and the ground keeps moving under her, and she rides it, picking up speed as the names stack up: Paul Kagame, cosy with the West, then the World Bank, the IMF, everyone with a hand in the till. She’s a surrealist blues poet by trade, but she’s said this one cuts too close to dress up, so she doesn’t. She lays it out and dares you to look away.
The poem started at a march in the UK in 2024, when a woman beside her shouted about the blood on the phone in her hand. That shout became this. It’s the sixth track on the color of rain, her second album after 2023’s when the poems do what they do, made with Meshell Ndegeocello and Justin Brown, out 22 May on drink sum wtr.
The video opens on Michel Kuka Mboladinga, the DR Congo supporter known as Lumumba Vea, and Monet has said his image brought her to tears. He spends entire matches standing frozen on a pedestal, one arm raised, dressed as Patrice Lumumba, the country’s first prime minister, murdered in 1961 by a firing squad with Belgian and CIA hands on it, then dismembered and dissolved in acid so there’d be no grave. Everyone around him sings and leaps; he holds still, a living statue keeping a dead man in the room.