Black Magic

"Black Magic" is the second track on Backxwash's 2020 album, and it arrives less than two minutes into the record, right after the title piece has announced itself.^[2] That opening sets a scene of dread; this one starts the argument. It runs just over three and a half minutes, a stretch that feels generous on an album built from short, hard bursts. What it offers is a way into the record's central question: when the institutions that raised you decide you are damned, what do you do with the word they use against you?

Listeners tend to come to the song expecting a horror pose, and the sound does supply one. But the title is better read as a reclaiming than as a costume, and the song makes the most sense when it is heard as a chapter in a larger story about faith, shame, and the slow work of forgiveness.

Where the song comes from

Backxwash is the stage name of Ashanti Mutinta, born in Lusaka, Zambia, in 1991. She began making beats in FL Studio as a teenager and left for British Columbia at seventeen to study computer science, later settling in Montreal.^[7] Her older brother had installed the software that started it all, and church and Sunday school were part of her earliest musical memories.^[1]

That upbringing matters because the album is, in large part, a reckoning with it. She grew up watching televised sermons, and she has said the record stages a struggle between light and darkness that mirrors a religious childhood she has largely left behind.^[3] She no longer practices Christianity and instead follows the traditions of her Tumbuka ancestors.^[1]

The album itself came together in 2019 and 2020, after her breakthrough project Deviancy, and was released independently through Grimalkin Records on May 28, 2020.^[2] It was the first record where she produced most of the beats herself, a decision she had been nervous about until a piece of advice from Royce da 5'9 encouraged her to build sounds that fit her own voice.^[1] "Black Magic" is credited to her as producer, with Ada Rook (of the noise-pop duo Black Dresses) contributing electric guitar.^[2]

Witchcraft as an inherited insult

The phrase in the title carries history. Mutinta has argued that the word "witchcraft," when applied to African spiritual practice, was a label that colonists attached to it, a way of recasting indigenous belief as something sinister.^[1] Seen that way, a song called "Black Magic" on an album steeped in Christian guilt is doing two things at once. It borrows the vocabulary of the horror genre, and it quietly turns the accusation around.

The occult language across the record works like this throughout. Reviewers describe an album that affirms her rage and her search for identity as a Black trans woman through rap that collides with metal and occult imagery.^[5] The darkness is not a rejection of meaning. It is a place where she is allowed to speak without a pastor's approval.

This is also why the song sits so close to the title track that precedes it. That title comes from a line spoken in the Spanish supernatural film Verónica, which Mutinta watched while recovering from dental surgery, and she has framed the album as a document of forgiveness that begins in anger.^[1] If the opener refuses to let God be blamed, "Black Magic" is where the speaker starts to claim her own power instead.

Sound as argument

Part of the song's meaning is simply how it sounds. Backxwash builds her tracks from the wreckage of heavy music: televangelist sermons, African choir voices, and metal samples sit at the center of the album's palette.^[1] The genre labels critics reach for are horrorcore, trap metal, and industrial hip hop.^[2]

Rook's guitar gives "Black Magic" a mournful, wailing metal line, and the contrast between that melody and the programmed low end is the song's emotional engine. It sounds like grief and menace occupying the same room. A critic at Louder called the whole record one of the most important of 2020, praising its trap-metal dispatches from the battlegrounds of self-identity.^[5]

There is something deliberate in using a heavy guitar as the instrument of lament. Metal has long been a home for people pushed out of religious communities, and the album's samples of Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and a Jimi Hendrix demo show how deeply she has absorbed that lineage.^[3] By placing it under rap, she makes a statement about who gets to belong to which tradition.

Rage, self-examination, and the body

The record is not only about religion. In interviews she describes it as exploring what it means to be Black and transfeminine in a patriarchal society, alongside an unsparing look at herself.^[1] Other tracks deal with substance abuse and suicidal feelings, address her younger brother in an open letter, and end in a confession.^[1]

"Black Magic" lives inside that emotional range. Its tone is combative, but it is the combativeness of someone who has been cornered for a long time. She has said that she writes candidly and sometimes surprises herself with what comes out, and that putting these thoughts on the page is part of how she heals.^[3]

That framing is useful for anyone tempted to hear the song as pure bravado. The threat in it is real, but the threat is a form of protection, the armor of a person who learned early that tenderness was not safe.

Forgiveness is the destination

The deepest context for the song is where the album ends. Mutinta has said that across the record she documents what has been done to her, and that by the close she is asking whether forgiveness is possible, both for those who harmed her and for herself if she has harmed others.^[3] The final track samples one of the sermons she watched as a child and treats the whole project as a confession.^[1]

Read from that endpoint, "Black Magic" is an early station on a long road. It is the stage where the speaker has stopped apologizing for the thing she was told was evil. Forgiveness cannot come before that, because forgiving something you still believe is a sin is just another form of self-erasure.

Public radio coverage of the album at the time of its release summed up this arc as fury turning into forgiveness, a description that fits the song as a first, necessary turn of the wheel.^[6]

Other ways to hear it

Not everyone will hear the song this way. A straightforward reading treats it as horror theater, a genre exercise in which occult imagery is simply aesthetic. The album's horrorcore label supports that reading, and Mutinta herself has described her work as closer to found footage than a slasher film, which suggests the horror is meant to feel documentary rather than fantastical.^[1]

A second reading is political. The word "black" in the title is doing double duty, and a listener focused on race and colonial history can hear the song as a statement about African spirituality surviving centuries of demonization. These readings do not conflict with the personal one. On this album the personal and the political are the same material.

A third reading is about creative lineage. Mutinta has named Danny Brown's Atrocity Exhibition and JPEGMAFIA's Veteran as records that encouraged her toward unconventional structures and narrators wrestling with personal and political struggle.^[1] Heard against those models, "Black Magic" is also a statement of method: short, abrasive, and unwilling to resolve neatly, with the guitar and the beat pulling against each other instead of settling into a groove.

Because her lyrics are dense and deliberately raw, different listeners will pull different threads. That openness is part of why the album traveled so far beyond its niche.

Why it resonates

The record's reach became obvious in the autumn of 2020, when it won the Polaris Music Prize, making Backxwash the first Black trans woman to take the award in its fifteen-year history.^[4] A self-released album of under twenty-three minutes, made with a handful of far-flung collaborators (several of whom she had never met in person),^[1] had beaten nine other finalists to be named Canada's best album of the year.^[2][4]

For queer listeners raised in religious homes, Mutinta has said she hopes the album offers recognition.^[3] "Black Magic" is perhaps its sharpest expression of that hope: a song that does not ask the church for permission, and does not wait for an apology before it starts to build something of its own.

Conclusion

The easy way to listen to "Black Magic" is as a burst of menace, and it works fine that way. The better way is to hear it as a pivot. It takes a word that was used to condemn, wraps it in a guitar line that sounds like mourning, and uses it to mark the moment when the speaker stops defending herself to people who never listened.

Everything that follows on the record, the interludes of hell and heaven, the letter to a brother, the closing confession, depends on that moment of refusal. Without it there is nothing to forgive, and no one left to do the forgiving.