For Valerie June and bell hooks before her, joy and care are vital forces for survival. As such, June’s album affirms love, care, and joy as radical, resistant acts.
Valerie June’s recent album Owls, Omens, and Oracles channels Black feminist theory through sound, spirit, and lyrics to create a vital musical experience. June offers a critical and artistic understanding of care and joy as essential forces for resistance. The album reveals a clear connection to writer and thinker bell hooks, specifically her works All About Love: New Visions (1999) and Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self Recovery (1994). A central link between June‘s music and hooks’ theory is their shared belief that love, care, and joy are more than feelings: they are radical acts.
In All About Love, hooks aligns love with action to build an ethic rooted in justice, care, and trust (1999). June channels this directly in “Trust the Path”, a meditative, minimalist track where she repeats, “trust the path, I’ll only point the way.” Similarly, in “Calling My Spirit”, June sings, “a guiding light will keep me strong / stumbling, I feel my way towards home.”
These lyrics invoke self-trust and commitment, qualities that hooks considers essential to a love ethic. June also recognizes self-trust and care as fallible and imperfect, a perspective hooks shares when she writes, “the wound is a blessing” (1999). Comparatively, June tells listeners, “take the long road, move forward blind / Life’s only purpose is to shine.” Together, their visions affirm that love, as a practice, demands both perseverance and vulnerability.
Joy, accordingly, is essential to this practice. Valerie June’s introspection echoes hooks’ belief that “as we grow, we can give and receive attention, affection, and joy. Whether we learn how to love ourselves and others will depend on the presence of a loving environment” (1999). In “Joy, Joy!” June sings, “a golden seed beneath dark soil / To seek the sun is often rough / And when you’ll flower, know not the hour.”
She cultivates joy to build a loving environment rooted in hooks’ love ethic. Musically, the song’s tempo changes mirror the shifting energy levels required to build commitment, trust, and responsibility. Likewise, the catchiness of repeating “joy, joy” as part of the chorus creates an incontestable earworm. Here, June imprints the same love ethic onto her listeners.
Beyond love, both artist and theorist position knowledge as vital to resistance and care. Yet in Sisters of the Yam, hooks reveals how accepted notions of knowledge are shaped by “racist and sexist thinking” (1994). When hooks calls for rejecting these harmful discourses, June answers. In “Inside Me”, June reclaims self-awareness as knowledge, singing, “No mistakes ’cause this Earth is a school,” framing life as an opportunity for learning and empowerment.
In “I Am in Love”, she deepens this framework: “What does [love] mean? Is it just words or something I do?” For June, love is not just a rhetorical or discursive concept; it’s a responsibility. She engages directly with hooks’ conviction that love must be grounded in action. Through her lyrics, June charts a path toward self-actualization, resisting a culture that silences and erases women of color.
While June’s album is deeply introspective, her vision of love is also expansive. Across Owls, Omens, and Oracles, she echoes hooks’ call for care to nurture both the self and the collective. In “Love Me Any Ole Way”, she affirms the self when she sings, “when I’m lost and seeing hope / In the darkness, hold my hand / tell me you understand.”
Yet hooks also reminds us that love and care are central not only to individual healing but to collective recovery as well (1994). In “Sweet Things Just for You”, June reaffirms this vision. In the single’s press release, she states, “wellness and mindfulness are actions. It is how we relate to one another, nature, and our environment.” The track’s gentle strings and June’s tender lyrics invite listeners into June’s ethic of relational care.
June’s music also affirms hooks’ argument that care empowers voice and identity. In “Superpower”, June boldly declares, “I hear voices singing / Oh, residing in my power.” These words reject the imposed silence and erasure of women of color. By layering her voice, June creates a chorus, a dialogue, to reaffirm what hooks calls a “powerful gesture of love” (1994). The repetition and simplicity of the lyrics form a mantra, inviting listeners to internalize and share this reclaimed language of affirmation.
Likewise, in “Changed”, June sings, “Got that grit, that grind, that hustle / You know they cannot break it every day.” That’s more than self-assertion; it’s a linguistic reclamation. Rather than allowing others to define her, June defines her transformation.
hooks warns of the backlash that can follow self-actualization: “intense attacks help create a context of burnout and despair” (1994). June echoes this sentiment in “Endless Tree“, singing, “watching the news every night / Telling the stories of all that ain’t right.” Yet hooks also insists on the urgency of renewal: “seize the day and renew our commitment… to resist white supremacy and sexist oppression” (1994). June imagines this possibility when she adds freedom to the conversation: “Are you ready to see / a world where we could all be free?” Her lyrics embody hooks’ shift from cultivating inner strength to generating outward power.
Owls, Omens, and Oracles is a musical testament to reclaiming space and resisting erasure. In honoring love ethics, June joins hooks in centering self-actualization and care as the foundation for individual and collective liberation. For Valerie June and bell hooks before her, joy and care are vital forces for survival. As such, June’s album affirms love, care, and joy as radical, resistant acts.