Despite a busy schedule of still promoting last year’s On the Line (which made Culled Culture’s cut for one of the best albums of 2019), Jenny Lewis hasn’t stopped caring about her involvement with Artists For Peace and Justice, which recently took her to Haiti. Specifically on the eve of destruction, so to speak, back in that fateful month in November (for many terrible things seem to happen on a presidential front at that time, like when JFK got offed), when Herr Trump was to be elected. As Lewis explained it, “Under the Supermoon” is a “love song written in Jacmel floating in the Caribbean sea under the supermoon of November 2016 just days after the U.S. presidential election… a travelogue of sorts processed in real time.”
With proceeds for the album the song is on, called Let The Rhythm Lead: Haiti Song Summit Vol. 1, benefitting the Artists Institute of Jacmel, Haiti, Lewis also collaborated with fellow musician and Artists For Peace and Justice champion, Habib Koité. In a video that features a dream-like opening of Lewis descending the stairs in a blue-lit room, she stops in the middle of the staircase to lounge while she looks up, reflecting, “I never had such a fright/I gasped on election night/The whole world thinks we’re insane.” They haven’t really ceased that thought since 2016 (not that anyone outside of the U.S. ever actually thought a place that could wield “the Twinkie defense” was all that rational or reasonable), with old Orange One upping the ante every day on acts of insanity.
So no wonder it was that Lewis “didn’t sleep a wink that night/I met Jackson on an early flight/We both said, ‘Goodbye L.A.’” It is at the uttering of these two last words that the video cuts to a scene of said supermoon hovering above the city before a plane flies to Haiti, still in recovery since the devastating 2010 earthquake that took place there (hence, a need for continued involvement from programs like Artists For Peace and Justice and people like Lewis). With Lewis specifically mentioning the impoverished Cité Soleil in Port-au-Prince, images of children waiting in line with empty pots and bowls are almost slightly negated by Lewis somewhat white girl privilege-ly saying, “I was thinkin’ about my friends/Our sufferin’ that never ends”–like bia, doesn’t the sight of all this put things in perspective for you? And honestly, even if Trump is a pièce de merde, y’all American bitches still got running water and food so like comme des fuckdown. Maybe that’s why Lewis has to admit, “Today, I can’t complain” as she visits with the undernourished residents before riding a bus elsewhere with Koité on it, who joins in at this point to add his own vocals, followed by the insertion of a Haitian-flavored guitar. The motif of candles burning also persists at this point, with rows of them on a wall behind Lewis as she admits, “No one wants to be alone.” Least of all when existence already feels so lonely as it is.
Eventually, she’s led to a bonfire that serves as something of a culmination of all those candles, crackling into the sky as the camera pans up into that supermoon. A phenomenon that saw the moon get as close to the planet for the first time in what was then sixty-eight years. And, as we all know, the moon makes people do crazy things. Like vote for a fascist, sexist, racist pig. Yet as everyone dances gleefully around the fire, a sense of community and togetherness manifested, it seems almost as though Lewis–like the rest of us–can’t help but still have hope. What else is there, after all?
And so, she dances in it, the flames superimposed over her to look as though they are engulfing her entirely. Just as they are the rest of us (particularly Australia, at the moment). But like Lewis, we’re all in the same boat (granted, some have nicer ones to get them to hell in better comfort). The one that’s taking us to Hades regardless of who is in charge. Maybe that’s not the intent of Lewis’ message, but, at the very least, “Under the Supermoon” is one of the better “charity songs” to come out in this decade, and certainly serves as something of an addendum to the Hope For Haiti Now recording that was put out in, fittingly, January of 2010, right after the earthquake that decimated so many lives. Just the way Americans think Trump is decimating theirs when, in fact, Amérique le Freak is adept at making problems for itself during any reign.
