Broken Politics on Sale

Broken Politics
Following the release of her first earth-quaking single in 4 years at the beginning of August, counter-culture pop icon Neneh Cherry shares a new song Shot Gun Shack, produced by Four Tet. Neneh also reveals the name and track list of her fifth solo album Broken Politics, which was produced in its entirety by Four Tet.
 
Continuing her blurring and conflation of the personal and the political, new single Shot Gun Shack tackles the link between violence and deprivation using poetic logic. A ‘shot gun shack’ or ‘shot gun house’ was the most popular type of house in the Southern United States from the end of the Civil War to the 1920s, originating in New Orleans.
 
The track deals with the ever-present and always-global issue of gun violence in society. The track’s name was the result of inspiration that sprung from a half-remembered conversation Cherry had at the funeral of late jazz great Ornette Coleman. “I don’t even remember who said it, but I was like, ‘Shotgun shack! That’s a cool term,” she says with a laugh—but the themes dealt with in the song are far from funny. “It’s about gun culture—the notion of war zones and the tragedies that guns bring there,” Cherry explains matter-of-factly. “The dealing of arms. Street culture. The gun is a powerful thing—dangerous, but powerful.”
 
All artwork for Broken Politics is by the Turner Prize winning Wolfgang Tillmans. Wolfgang is the most important documentarian of his generation of London and Berlin’s club and gay scenes who recently created the photo art for Frank Ocean’s 2016 album Blonde and the physical magazine that accompanied it Boys Don’t Cry.