Since I’ve been asked recently to express again what runs through my ears and minds at the moment, let me share: Young M.A – shout out to CK Baltimore for pointing her out to me – just blew me. Well yeah, I know I wish she did. Anyways, her stylez are something, her presence is no less: Self affirmed, unpretentious, delivered on music that reflects the current state of feeling originally fueling her lyrics.
“I hold a lot of truth behind them lies.” With Young M.A it’s ‘what you see is what you get’. And what I see is a pretty young person showing maybe not so much of herself but a lot of her life, what it is to be her and how she realates her Self to that. This in itself implies a somewhat reflective vision on the factors that condition her being and the ways sub|cultural gesturing is built around that. While it is redundant to say that language holds a key role in this – looking at her vocal as well as at her physical wording however, this thought leads to a more complex insight. The route of this goes like: authenticity? No. Yes. As said above: it is about how she relates.
But before I let myself be carried away by thoughts like how her ‘who she is’ already transcends the place she’s in, while her ‘where she’s at’ again forces her to ciscend back; by thoughts on ‘what do you do’ with spirits and desires such as expressed by her in a place like that? And with ‘place’ I mean the locals and the socials she is navigating. Well, what she does about it, is saying: I feel like shit / I love all this. And this is not a quote. And there is no ‘but’ nor ‘fuck’ where I put that slash bar. It’s both along.
There’s much sminks and drokes, no pimps but ‘Hoes’ in her visuals and lyrics. Aggression is built on pain as much as it’s built on hedonistic reductionism of desires to their physical urge: responding to this alone will never satisfy. Not to mention the ambivalent ‘masculinity’ running through all this. But that is something beyond her and her environment. It is something her generation at all stratas will struggle to figure out. She’s not alone in this: #Zeitgeist.
On the personal level I sense some tough tension well stemming from norms questioning her Self and from experiences that are hard to be processed. Her brother was stabbed dead in his early twenties. What do you do with that? …music in parts. I don’t want to follow further up this thread about some psychological dynamics ’cause that would be shrink shit interpretation and I don’t do that. Because I don’t do that and also I don’t know her. She speaks for her Self anyways. Nevertheless the creative writing after only a short encounter with her output shows its potential of triggering thoughts that go beyond and come back.
M.A’s wording shows how much her abstractions stick to the concrete. That’s love. Yet the simplicity is knowing. I know I put a lot into my listening here, and that’s sympathy. Obviously a lot of what she does doesn’t reveal itself to me. Maybe I see things, maybe I hear them, maybe I don’t. I’ll try and listen through the cloth of styles and feel them. “This is just me / I ain’t trying to be be different / that’s the problem with the game / everybody is something they isn’t. // my goal is the business / fuck seven digits / I’m just trying to do while my brother didn’t //” she humbles.
In a nutshell? M.A runs with Brooklyn’s Redlyfe squat, is in her early twenties now, has two mixtapes out so far and is recently earning and gaining attention from radio DJs and networks. She caught fire and attention with her “Brooklyn” cypher version of the Chiraq tune (originally Minaj). And there is a lot more where this came from. Her album Herstory is due 2016.