Princess Nokia - A Girl Cried Red
Drowned In Sound 70
Destiny Frasqueri Aka Princess Nokia could be one of the most important figures in music at the moment. Her music is full of clever juxtapositions, blazing beats with positive lyrics, and her interviews are erudite, insightful and illuminating. So far she has released three mixtapes that range from fun sun drenched R&B-pop to full on raging footwork, while also finding time to perform and improv and freestyle set with jazz trio the Onyx Collective.
At the start of the year it was announced that Frasqueri was releasing A Girl Cried Red, an eight-track emo-inspired mixtape, but instead of crunching guitars and shouty choruses, Frasqueri has released something that taps into the alienation and introspection of the genre, but with none of the cliches.
If you have turned up expecting 1992 2.0 you are in for a shock as opening track ‘Flowers and Rope’ is full of acoustic guitars, understated snapping beats and Frasqueri’s graceful vocals. “It won't even hurt, I'm already dead (I'm already dead). Voices in my head, monsters under my bed” she sings liltingly. Normally this would be jarring, but thanks to the delicate delivery it doesn’t set off alarm bells regarding Princess Nokia’s mental state. The chorus is “Bring me your flowers, I'll bring you my rope. Play all the records that we love the most” almost sounds like a charming way to spend an afternoon, until its slightly darker connotations registers.
'For the Night' feels like an out take from last year's 1992. Laid-back juke-esque beats, lopsided melodies and some scattershot lyrics, but auto-tuned to an inch of their life, is all it takes to get the message across. It's as if she's saying 'Hey, I know this is different, but stay with me for the rest of this and you’ll see what I’m trying to do'. It works. It reassures us that this is the same artist that captivated us and retuned out faith in hip-hop.
'Look Up Kid' has a jaunty, clean sounding, punk guitar. There is a playful bounce to it and a pop sensibility that has been hinted at, but not delivered. Princess Nokia seems to be having a blast on 'Look Up Kid'. Frasqueri has an elegance to her vocal delivery, that in other hands would feel cliche or fake, but Princess Nokia feels genuine, and dare I say, authentic. She's relishing playing with a live band and channelling her teenage bratty, angst-ridden self.
The stand out track of the mixtape is 'At the Top'. This has more in common with the trappy 'For the Night' than the power-punk of 'Look Up Kid'. Musically its business as usual, but the lyrics are an attack on anyone who claims she's sold out. On 'At the Top' Frasqueri delivers the line of the mixtape ‘I don’t care about fame, I just care about bands’ is for all the haters who questioned why an urban artist was claiming to be firstly into rock and emo, and secondly releasing an emo tinged mixtape. A Girl Cried Red ends with 'Little Angel' a tender ballad about a departed friend. Its an emotional end to a mixtape that wears its heart on its sleeve.
On A Girl Cried Red Frasqueri showcases that she is more than just visceral beats and fierce rhymes. She has written some of her most confessional and personal lyrics to date. This is another side to her, and shows she is capable to writing thought provoking music as well as the savage electronic hip-hop of ‘Tomboy’ and ‘Kitana’. As none of the songs push the three-and-a-half-minute mark, they never outstay their welcome and scream out for repeat listens. However at times A Girl Cried Red feels half-formed, and more like sketches or works-in-progress than fully formed songs, but there is beauty to this. Frasqueri is lifting the veil of her songwriting process and divulging more than she probably realised at the time. And this is what makes A Girl Cried Red, and her Princess Nokia project so captivating. Her strength of conviction is such that she'll follow a project through to its conclusion because she feels passionate about it, rather than releasing something safer and ultimately easier.
Fri Apr 27 13:50:14 GMT 2018Pitchfork 59
The latest mixtape from Destiny Frasqueri pulls from her love of emo and alt-rock. It’s an underdeveloped but strangely addictive left-turn.
Wed Apr 18 05:00:00 GMT 2018Tiny Mix Tapes 40
Princess Nokia
A Girl Cried Red
[Rough Trade; 2018]
Rating: 2/5
It feels like a play. Not even: a play within a play. A simulacrum that is a yearning, a longing, a stretching, a reaching, a detour from her old-school hip-hop lean that drives straight into the emo of the 1990s and early 2000s, into a childhood now magically overcome and returned to her. All those tears shed on black shirts while pure evil moved somewhere underneath the visible surface of the world. Tense and quivering, outwardly lit, with a thick smell of parking lots and the sound of being dropped out of life, dreaming with a withoutness that she has learned to be with. A Girl Cried Red replaces Nokia’s NYC authenticity for her inauthentic take on a genre that struggles to maintain itself. I appreciate that gesture — it’s important to embrace what’s authentically ours while also enfolding our inauthentic parts into ourselves: all those dream scenarios that we live and that live among us, that point us toward an elsewhere that could be ours.
Being emo is a little bit about being paranoid that you might not be emo at all. That your identity is never totally yours. That quarreling with yourself into becoming someone else is almost impossible. That Princess Nokia isn’t the only Boricua emo out there. That a radical shift in the definition of the genre is happening, in real time, thanks in part to an unexpected battalion of warriors: SoundCloud rappers. A fusion between emo and trap — rock and rap’s demented little siblings — has been going on for a while now. Lil Uzi Vert, Lil Tracy, Lil Peep (R.I.P.), and all of those other sadboys know that to live is to be exposed as living under the gaze of the Other, that to experience life is to experience the illusion of identity, dignity, and morality. This fusion, by means of erasure, removal, subtraction, and abstraction, bears a chance to discover a hidden path, to a new musical realism: that not rapping about luxury cars could lead to rapping about trailer homes, and that not rapping about designer clothes could lead to rapping about your feelings, and that your feelings, though sometimes faraway and hushed, build toward a sort of mysticism, liberating you as much as they obfuscate.
Behind all of this, the shadow of the opioid crisis in America looms large. Because it is not enough to live; one must also demonstrate that one lives, that one performs being alive, that one can perform one’s emotions. An accent that recalls skyscrapers and open fire hydrants on the streets in the summer has turned into a flat cornfield. The sun hits weakly, like a sign of banished possibility, like an acknowledgement of otherness. The light gleams an instant, the Visa card chip inserted, a knife at a wrist with the potential for bleeding, and suddenly you’re in a metaphor for the bodily: that it might mimic or have a direct relationship with the ills and woes of the poetry of mere existence. Lo, it isn’t enough. Like a Big Bang emerging at the end of the universe to begin the next, a turbid volatility rife during adolescence — where experience becomes impossible without negativity — materializes. The Person that Never Appears appears. You. A supposed paradise. Paradise being a place of rest, beyond wealth and conspiracy theory. Where your eyes close and you access the holism of A Girl Cried Red.