On "Spectacles," Shirlette Ammons Considers the Impact of Being on Display as a Queer Black Artist

Shirlette Ammons’s latest album, a fascinating dissection of what it feels like to see and be seen as a queer person of color, was sparked by an unexpected break from this attention. The bulk of Spectacles—the third full-length album and first since 2016 from the Durham poet and rapper—was written during COVID-19 isolation. Like many people during that interruption from the world as we know it, Ammons sought new challenges to occupy her time. One of those was a music production course that her wife had bought for her birthday,...