MUSIC is politics when deafness is power. Billie Holiday’s entire life, her childhood, her poverty, her husky voice, her musical phrasing, her drugs, her cancer, her memories of her mother who became a prostitute and the father she never knew (who is said to have died without treatment because he was a ‘negro’)—were formed from a state of oppression like a neck under a boot.

The neck of a black. The boot of a white. And n