It may do the trick commercially but it undersells Koffee’s individuality. Run Away is basically homogeneous AutoTune pop with a Jamaican accent. The brief Defend veers close to trip-hop, and, with J-Hus collaborator Jae5 among the album’s producers, Koffee has a strong line in tracks influenced by Afrobeats: the title track melds a filtered sample of kids singing with a rhythm that shifts from sounding organic, as if it’s being banged out on congas and the body of an acoustic guitar, to fully electronic.Īt its least inspired, the desire to appeal to a broad audience causes the album to stumble. Gifted covers a lot of musical ground in less than half an hour, from the sweet, harmony-laden lovers rock of Lonely to Shine’s dabbling in the kind of easygoing acoustic reggae beloved of beach bars the world over, albeit underpinned by an immense electronic bass. If her brand of Rastafarianism and her politicking is noticeably gentler in its approach than that of her idol – you get a light sprinkling of references to Jah and a few snappy lines about gun violence on Gifted – she’s definitely taken on board the eclecticism of the reggae revival movement’s leading light. In the past, Koffee has talked about the influence of Protoje on her work.
#Honey by gifted lyrics torrent#
Rumours abound that she’s working with Rihanna on the latter’s forthcoming reggae album: certainly, the singer’s beauty brand Fenty gets a namecheck among the torrent of high-end labels mentioned in Gifted’s lyrics. She has been the recipient of a succession of high-profile co-signs: from Harry Styles, who asked her to support him on tour to John Legend, on whose 2020 album Bigger Love she appeared to Jay-Z, who tapped her to perform the theme song to the acclaimed western The Harder They Fall. Two years ago, she became the first female artist ever to win the Grammy for best reggae album, despite the fact that Rapture clearly wasn’t an album: whichever way you sliced it, it was a distinct improvement on the previous year, when the Grammys deemed the best reggae album a collaborative work by Sting and Shaggy. Her career has developed a striking momentum. Jamaica hasn’t produced a huge mainstream pop star since Sean Paul, whose peak was 20 years ago, but Koffee sounds determined: “Might get caught up in a new wave,” she suggests on the title track, before offering to “chop the track up in a new way if it helps me get a few plays”.
Perhaps evoking the biggest crossover reggae star of all says something about the commercial ambitions behind Gifted. While her teenage friends in Spanish Town tended to like whatever was big at the time, she told Rolling Stone magazine in 2021, she “ took to reggae and just made my own path”. Like the lyrical nods to Sister Nancy’s Bam Bam and Althea & Donna’s Uptown Top Ranking on her 2019 EP Rapture, it’s presumably intended to say something about Simpson’s deep connection to reggae’s history.
0 kommentar(er)
