The Bright Nostalgia of Kamaiyah’s “Before I Wake”
The artificial din of a revived Roland TR-808 cowbell runs through Kamaiyah’s excellent new mixtape, “Before I Wake.” You know this syncopation, if not by name then by sensation; it’s the tinny between-the-beat ur-rhythm that has imbued the entire canon of late-century modern R. & B. and hip-hop with an inevitable danceability—songs as disparate as the S.O.S. Band’s “Just Be Good to Me” and Juvenile’s “Back That Azz Up.” The twenty-five-year-old’s second mixtape is rich with other iconic simulated instrumentation—corroding horns, too-gauzy strings, viscous synths—that conspire to give the twenty-eight-minute project the texture of a particular time. Nostalgia is a risky business; listeners know when a style is being used to summon a cheap, automatic familiarity. But Kamaiyah’s music, apparently so hermetically sealed from the production and conceptual trends of the day, invokes tradition to create a pleasurable, almost manic, sonic cohesion. The songs melt into each other; the tape doesn’t tell a straight story so much as transmit her wobbling mood, albeit hidden in the jauntiest of bangers.
The tape is a puzzle of influences, some local and some more widespread: Bay Area Mobb inflections, G-Funk interpolations, New Jack Swing flourishes, and more than a couple of smooth-jazz sweeps. Samples of the Isley Brothers—“Playa in Me”—and TLC—“Leave Em”— crop up, unaltered. It is a science to make music that samples so much and that sounds so light; far from seeming technical, “Before I Wake” has, much like Kamaiyah’s début, the critically lauded “A Good Night in the Ghetto,” a definitively Oakland buoyancy. One is unlikely to go through it without at least giving in to a shoulder bop. “I’m more of a groovy, ’90s type of person, you know?” Kamaiyah has said, of her tastes. “ ’Cause from the Bay, you get a different type of music—it doesn’t make sense nationally, internationally, or globally.” That “groove,” the edict of soul, the notion that a rhythm had to do things to the listener that were not only cerebral but also physical, drives her work. Radio today is stocked with rappers, female and male, who harmonize aggressively with their beats, lagging behind or exceeding the tempo, packing in multiple vagaries, often to the point of dissonance. Kamaiyah, meanwhile, is smooth like a programmed instrument, metronomic—a rapper who thinks like a singer.
Kamaiyah was raised in East Oakland and has that unmistakable Bay Area gift for enunciation, and her vocal range is warm and low and slightly androgynous. (The opener, “Dope Bitch,” is a swaggering neighborhood boast.) She started writing when she was seven, and going to studio sessions when she was eleven. Hyper-locality is her style. She dresses like a throwback homegirl—roomy joggers and coördinating technicolor sweaters, door-knocker earrings, the box-braid bob, a ceremonial dental grill. Her videos show her delighting in modest fantasy—a bottle of champagne, maybe a gentleman to massage her feet. Sometimes she accessorizes with a comically large nineties brick phone. Her connection to the kitsch of black futurism is sincere, never breathless. (The artist she’s most often compared to is Missy Elliott.) As the doyenne of Big Money Gang, an Oakland collective, back in 2015, Kamaiyah dropped “How Does It Feel,” a rapid mash of horns and stuttering bass. The upbeat bombast of the song, and Kamaiyah’s silky epigrams—“I’ve been broke all my life / How does it feel to be rich?”—were idiosyncratic, and quite unlike the music of her contemporaries, which she has described as “hella dark.”
Recently, young rappers have been killing their idols with amusing frequency; it seems as if every other week an old head is lecturing a prodigy SoundCloud adolescent about his refusal to listen to Tupac. Kamaiyah, by contrast, fancies herself an apprentice. She likes to call Too Short her uncle; she features on “Petty,” one of forty-four songs on E-40’s 2016 album, “The D-Boy Diary.” Listening to her, no matter how caught up one becomes in the beat, can feel like an oblique history lesson. G-Funk, an invention of the nineties named for its interpolations and samplings of Parliament Funkadelic, attributed to Los Angeles but born of Oakland influence, mixed the cold and the gaudy, the violent and the sensual; it is, as Jon Pareles wrote, in 1999, “simultaneously relaxed and menacing.” The voluptuousness of the post-soul sound is all over “Before I Wake.” Rapping about her “lavender Glock” on the bedroom-smooth grind of “Dope Bitch,” Kamaiyah relishes the essential gap between sound and content. “Damn, I am who I am, I build myself up and they break me again,” she observes on “Me Against Myself,” a song that, a generation earlier, could have been buttressed by some warbling from the late Nate Dogg.
Classically, black music is a story of melancholy made dazzling, artificial; Kamaiyah’s unassuming, casual lyricism is how she sneaks malaise into her recapitulated funk. Anxiety about social mobility, how it will change the life she’s known in Oakland, becomes more fevered as she inches closer to the establishment. Her success is undeniable and growing—a beat she’d left on the cutting-room floor turned into “Why You Always Hatin?” with Drake and the fellow Bay Area hero YG; she was the lone woman on the cover of XXL’s Freshman Issue this year. But her début album, “Don’t Ever Get It Twisted,” has been delayed by Interscope for months. (Charmingly, Kamaiyah hardly curses in her music, but, while interviewed by GQ at Tyler, the Creator’s Flog Gnaw festival, she exclaimed. “Fuck my label!”) “Before I Wake” functions, then, as a transitional message. Its lavish, if occasionally hammy, R. & B. sway hides a muted paranoia that creeps up on you. “Slide (Bet)” is fizzy, made for the club; on it, Kamaiyah talks about fear of artistic failure. The most ambitious song is the velvet “Leave Em”: “Ain’t no love up in this world that’s ever worth your life,” she croons. The song is a callback to “Love Is Blind,” from Eve’s first album, about addressing a friend who’s being abused. It’s the sort of earnest, concept-forward track that’s been out of fashion for some time. Confidence in execution is what one needs to put out a missive like that, and Kamaiyah has that in spades.
