{"id":87,"date":"2022-04-04T12:37:23","date_gmt":"2022-04-04T16:37:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/benalbright.net\/nmc\/production\/project-three\/news\/?p=87"},"modified":"2022-04-04T12:37:23","modified_gmt":"2022-04-04T16:37:23","slug":"gifted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benalbright.net\/nmc\/production\/project-three\/news\/gifted\/","title":{"rendered":"Gifted"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Gifted<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Koffee<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2022<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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\"Gifted<\/figure><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Reviewed by Julianne Escobedo Shepherd<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Genre: Pop\/R&B | Label: Sony UK \/ RCA | Reviewed: March 29, 2022<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Midway through summer 2020, the young Jamaican reggae artist Koffee<\/a> released her single \u201cLockdown<\/a>\u201d and dreamed of life after the pandemic. \u201cWhere will we go\/When di quarantine ting done and everybody touch road?\u201d she sang over an Afrobeats-tinged riddim, imagining a relationship\u2019s future once she and her boo could finally progress past FaceTime. Its video<\/a> was similarly optimistic: Koffee at home, relatably, in sweatpants; then Koffee hitting the beach with a crew of friends, blessedly communing out in the world. \u201cMe ah go put you pon lockdown\/Put yuh body pon lockdown,\u201d she crooned\u2014pandemic stasis begging to become summer spontaneity. As the Delta variant spread, though, the anticipated end of isolation deflated like a party balloon. Rather than languish in her jammies, Koffee got to work<\/a>: Gifted<\/em>, her first album and the follow-up to her Grammy-winning Rapture<\/em><\/a> EP, is by definition a pandemic album, imbuing the ennui and uncertainty of this epoch with a positivity it could surely use.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The relatively short career of Mikayla \u201cKoffee\u201d Simpson is a feel-good story about a rising star: A YouTuber from Spanish Town, Jamaica, discovered at 17 after Usain Bolt posted her tribute to him, \u201cLegend\u201d; collaborating with millennial reggae heroes like Chronixx<\/a> and Protoje and signing to a major label<\/a> at 18; winning the Grammy for Best Reggae Album at 19, for a five-song dancehall EP, her first, making her the youngest person and only woman to earn such a distinction. Her accomplishments and accolades are well deserved, but it\u2019s also the kind of uplifting trajectory the music industry loves, and the narrative tends to flatten Koffee\u2019s message. Her joy is rightly celebrated, but she also tells real stories about her life, including critiques of the Jamaican government\u2019s complicity in structural poverty and gun violence (most explicitly on 2019\u2019s crunchy dub \u201cRaggamuffin\u201d). And so Koffee\u2019s COVID-era album, upbeat as it sounds on its face, is not a spiritual turnaround\u2014in March she told Zane Lowe<\/a> that her writing process was in part a way of encouraging herself out of her low points\u2014and belies that she\u2019s had any cheerier of a pandemic than many of us. She ultimately lands on a gratefulness that reads as hope, simply because to do otherwise doesn\u2019t seem much in her nature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gifted<\/em>\u00a0veers from the contemporary dancehall of her prior acclaim and into the breezier realm of roots reggae: Low-end edges are burnished in favor of a trebly midtempo that centers guitars and the surety of her voice, a clarion tone about which she\u00a0once sang<\/a>, \u201cInna mi zone\/Alto to baritone.\u201d The last two years focused her thoughts inward\u2014as they have for many of us\u2014and Koffee, now a sage 22, is surer in both her talent and what matters most to her. As the title track, \u201cGifted,\u201d suggests, she\u2019s contemplative about her upbringing in Spanish Town, and the album is full of paeans to her single mother, a Seventh Day Adventist who raised her daughter in the church choir. (\u201cI just try to make [my mom] feel the impact of what she\u2019s done for me,\u201d Koffee\u00a0told\u00a0The Gleaner<\/em><\/a>\u00a0in March.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In combining traditional influences like acoustic guitars in major keys with the contemporary diaspora\u2014the Afroswing experimentation of the British musician J-Hus<\/a>, with whom Koffee has collaborated<\/a>, comes to mind, and they share a producer in Jae5<\/a>\u2014Koffee bridges history with her Zoomer present. She references Jah and her mom, \u2019Raris and Rovers, Babylon and Benzes, sometimes in the same stanza. (If there is a person who can describe wearing Prada and Balenciaga without sounding ostentatious, Koffee is it.) The juxtaposition, meted out easily in Koffee\u2019s genial alto, is a meditation on where her life has taken her so far. Several tracks take on the intimate patina of prayer. On \u201cGifted,\u201d for instance, she invokes an oft-decontextualized<\/a> Black American spiritual: \u201cPray to di Father, seh, \u2018Kumbaye<\/a>\u2019\/Full up mi plate and bruk my tray, yeah.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Koffee\u2019s humble wisdom underpins her songwriting, with songs like \u201cDefend\u201d and \u201cShine\u201d contemplating gun violence and poverty with that same peaceful aspiration, her voice strong and true as she recounts sociopolitical realities and offers herself as a bulwark against them. \u201cKoffee defend them case,\u201d she sings on \u201cDefend,\u201d and on \u201cShine,\u201d she beseeches the youth to \u201cjust stay alive\u2026 I\u2019ve got to shine, you\u2019ve got to shine.\u201d The relaxed pace of \u201cWest Indies,\u201d with its screwed-down outro, feels like the joyous memory of a party replayed in slow motion, a romantic counterpoint to the slow-grind lovers rock of \u201cLonely.\u201d There\u2019s a proud and pure undertone to her music, not least because of her inviting vocal timbre, which gives the impression that she\u2019s open-hearted and open-minded too. For the churlish among us, uplifting music can tend to grate rather than inspire, but Koffee hits a satisfying midpoint, free of didacticism and never forced; she\u2019s simply inviting us into her world. It\u2019s sunny there, and I, for one, could use it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gifted Koffee 2022 Reviewed by Julianne Escobedo Shepherd Genre: Pop\/R&B | Label: Sony UK \/ RCA | Reviewed: March 29, 2022 Midway through summer 2020, the young Jamaican reggae artist Koffee released her single \u201cLockdown\u201d and dreamed of life after the pandemic. \u201cWhere will we go\/When di quarantine ting done and everybody touch road?\u201d she sang over…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benalbright.net\/nmc\/production\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benalbright.net\/nmc\/production\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benalbright.net\/nmc\/production\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benalbright.net\/nmc\/production\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benalbright.net\/nmc\/production\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/benalbright.net\/nmc\/production\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":89,"href":"https:\/\/benalbright.net\/nmc\/production\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87\/revisions\/89"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benalbright.net\/nmc\/production\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benalbright.net\/nmc\/production\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benalbright.net\/nmc\/production\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}