Preview: Miss Big Creature’s Autobiography is a Tale for the Ages

The outspoken musical mystic gives our critic at large a sneak preview of her forthcoming debut record

“You already know you’re listenin’ to Miss Big C/And if you’re messin’ with Jesus, you’re messin’ with she!” warns Margery Kempe on “$tyle,” the fiery opening track on her forthcoming debut album, Autobiography. It’s a brash track, with pulsating percussion and a rapid-fire beat paired with the sort of lyrics one would expect from a woman who’s made her name for saying exactly what she thinks, when she thinks it. Although she’s always professed to travel around for the sole reason of proselytizing, winning converts, and keeping the religious faithful, she’s also seemed to relish the attention in her own right, and that holds true here.

Earlier this year, she put the finishing touches on her own autobiography, the first ever written, so it only makes sense that she should put it all to music to spread her message even farther. The album stays more or less true to her written work, tracing her life chronologically, with a couple of detours. One such detour is the aforementioned “$tyle,” in which Kempe brags about her past and present aesthetics: sartorial, religious, and verbal. The track starts off with an invective hurled at Kempe by an elderly monk. “I wish you were shut up in a house of stone where nobody should talk to you,” she repeats mockingly, before turning it around: “Everyone tries to shut This Creature up, but TC always finds a way out/Because her love and her faith are too strong: what choice has she but to scream and shout?” For the remainder of the track — just as on the rest of the album, and in her autobiography — Kempe straddles the line between self-congratulatory and self-deprecating, and whether she’s describing her dress sense (“Gold pipes on her head, and daggings all about/They said ‘That’s no way for a lady to dress!’ – They threatened to throw This Creature out!”) or her big mouth (“This Creature said the wrong thing — should’ve stayed quiet a while/But by now you should know that’s hardly her style!”), her rhymes are engaging and very clearly her own.

After that opus, which is a quite apt thesis for the songs that follow, she walks listeners through her life: the near-death experience that forever changed her (on “Die Tonight (Visionz)”); her fight to get her lustful husband to leave her alone (on “Outta This Bed (Pay U Off),” she strikes a deal with him; on “Hunger,” she threatens to starve herself until he lays off); her impulsivity and the fixes it gets her into (“Talk Too Much” and the skit “Testing Miss Big C,” in which a man offers to take her to bed — only to scoff and reveal that it was a test of her piety after she consents); and her encounter with Julian of Norwich, a pious woman with a decidedly different view on what it means to do God’s work (on “U ’N’ Me,” the two duet as they lightheartedly spar over whose approach to faith is more becoming).

Closing out the record is a trio of tracks that again strays from the chronology of her life. On “Virtual Lover,” she addresses her critics who accuse her of using Jesus as an excuse to do whatever she pleases. “They say This Creature is making it up, that she and Jesus aren’t even really in love/That she lies and says Jesus approves whatever she does!” she paraphrases in a mocking tone. But, she counters, “This Creature isn’t perfect, but it’s the trying that counts/And try, she always does, every day her trying mounts.” Then there’s “Come 2 This Creature,” the bizzarest cut here by a mile, in which she narrates a steamy bedroom encounter with Jesus. She keeps her language more family-friendly than many of her peers, but that does little to reduce the listening experience’s strangeness: “He says he wants This Creature to treat him like her husband, to lay beside him in bed, give him a little lovin’,” she purrs, before switching roleplaying exercises: “Love Him like a son, He’s the one, He’s the one for This Creature/When she’s lying here with Him, she’s the world’s truest believer.” Mercifully, she makes up for that misstep with “This Creature Is.,” a reprise of “$tyle” in which she looks back on her life and owns up to her shortcomings: ”This Creature is strange, and This Creature is sometimes wrong/And This Creature’s not always pious, and maybe she doesn’t write the best songs.” But at the end, she makes peace with herself, and for a single time switches from the third person to the first: “But there’s only one of This Creature, and This Creature is Me.” In that moment, all the album comes together. For better or worse, this is Margery Kempe, the one and only.

The back cover — intriguingly, Kempe features an image of Christine de Pizan here, perhaps as a nod to a fellow strong female writer. (Or perhaps the printer made a mistake.)