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Given this wild set of identifiers, the thought of being someone else’s “spectacle” is not some theoretical consideration for Shirlette; she has been “othered” her entire life. Her new album Spectacles, co-produced with Phil Cook, is a captivating and electric 11-track examination of the duality between being objectified by the proverbial, patriarchal, white gaze and cultivating attention when rocking stages. The record is a poignant expression of her own multitudes (here as songwriter, MC, bassist, producer & poet) rendered by a modern wellspring of Black Southern brilliance and her wider creative community featuring contributions from musicians, filmmakers and writers including genre-and-gender-defying performance artist Mykki Blanco, MacArthur-winning poet Fred Moten, Nigerian writer and chef Tunde Wey, Amelia Meath of Sylvan Esso, and radical feminist writer Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “the Beyoncé of yoga” Jessamyn Stanley, as well as her twin sister Shorlette Ammons and niece, Anansi Stephens. Ammons has always been a highly collaborative musician, whether making a record with the likes of soul-rock band The Dynamite Brothers or pairing The Indigo Girls, Hiss Golden Messenger and Meshell Ndegocello on the same LP, 2016’s Language Barrier.