FEATURE: Spotlight: Enny — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

ENNY

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I am a little slow off the mark…

PHOTO CREDIT: Udoma Janssen for CRACK

at the moment regarding some artists that should be in this Spotlight feature! To be fair, I have known about ENNY (Enitan Adepitan). I feel last year was a big year for her. In 2021, ENNY has taken even bigger steps - and she is being compared to some heavyweights of Rap and Hip-Hop (including Lauryn Hill). I am keen to bring in a few interviews where we learn more about the sensational London artist. First, this interview from The Line of Best Fit gives us some insight into her early musical memories and path into music:

“Growing up in Thamesmead, South-East London, Enny's first musical memories are of listening to gospel music in her mum’s car as she was driven around. “Anytime you’d go to church, anytime you’d go to do shopping, or anytime I was just in her car it would just be that gospel music, gospel music, gospel music,” she smiles. “So that was a very fond memory.”

Around the age of seven she joined a local street dance group. The youngest one there, she began dancing to American hip hop, Missy Elliot a particularly prominent feature. “I wanted to be a rapper since I was a kid in primary school. It was always something I wanted to do, it was always in my head,” she says. “I think I’ve always been exposed to music as well, just through family and everywhere. I think that’s one of the most key things I can remember, just listening to music.”

She recounts that a lot of her friendships always grew from a shared love of music. J. Cole was her favourite artist growing up. “I remember trying to tell my friends to listen and then slowly by slowly they all caught on,” she laughs. “It’s very precious that moment, especially as a teenager.”

With her friends at school she formed a group called A8, named after their music room. However, when she left to study film at Canterbury Christchurch, music fell to the wayside. “Musically during uni I wasn’t really like outside, because I’m an introvert so I really just kept to myself and my housemates,” she explains. “I had my production stuff in my room but I never really tried to make music. I think that’s the period in my life where I didn’t really make music or meet other artists or look at the music scene.”

Upon leaving uni she tried to get into the film industry, but found it difficult to catch a break. “I was just getting older and after graduating things weren’t picking up and I just got a normal job,” Enny says. “I’d been there for two years and I started to realise that I wasn’t happy, and then you just start realising that you only have one life and you have a desire to chase it.”

This was a pivotal moment quitting her job and throwing everything back into music. “I was just constantly writing music,” she smiles. “So I would always make music but I wouldn’t release it. So there was a lot of time of me just growing internally and artistically but not putting anything out.”

Now being mentioned amongst a rising tide of black, female, UK rappers, Enny is aware of her position but feels that with opportunity doesn’t necessarily come the responsibility to represent an often homogenised group of people. “I feel like black women always have to be the black woman in these spaces, they can just never be the woman,” she says”.

Although I don’t think Hip-Hop and Rap is truly accepting of women - and it has not amended all of its bad practices - there are so many great women coming through that one cannot ignore! They are helping to break down doors and open up conversations. ENNY is among our brightest young artists. Someone who, surely, is going to rank alongside some of the very best in years to come! Earlier this year, The Guardian caught up with ENNY. I have selected a few sections. It is interesting learning about how she got noticed – and how she has risen in popularity during the pandemic:

“Despite going to university and trying other careers, Adepitan kept making music – and got noticed by local radio stations for a freestyle version of her song He’s Not Into You. That is what put her on the radar of Root 73, an artist-development programme run by people born and raised in Hackney, east London.

“I met Root 73 in 2019 through my now-manager” – Adepitan turns the camera to Pascal, who’s sitting nonchalantly in the driver’s seat, and cackles. “He brought me into Root, which was the studio he was working out of, and they became family. They really took me in, putting me on stage and stuff like that early on, when I only had about three songs,” she says.

Considering her shyness, what were her first experiences on stage like? “Horrible!” she shouts. “I had to drink a lot of alcohol just to get the juices going.”

After the pandemic broke out and the gigs ended, Adepitan released Peng Black Girls, and by the end of the year it had blown up. The remix, which featured her label-mate Jorja Smith singing the hook rather than former collaborator Amia Brave, had been released via the streaming channel Colors. The video racked up millions of views in a number of days.

Online feedback seems to have been all the more significant for Adepitan given that she rose to fame during the pandemic. It has made for a strange introduction to the industry: the absence of live events means she is yet to meet many women in the business, other than Smith, whom she describes as a passionate perfectionist. “I think I’m still finding my footing,” she says.

When the industry resumes, there is a big world out there for Adepitan to explore. The last few years have seen a sudden boom for women in rap – from the success of Shygirl and Little Simz in the UK, to Megan Thee Stallion and Doja Cat across the pond. “It’s almost like a Renaissance moment for women who are taking a stand in what they want to do, and just being whoever they want to be when it comes to music. They’re not getting stuck in boxes, or focused on what they think that people might want to hear, or what labels are telling them to do. They’re just being themselves.

“Before Cardi [B] and Nicki [Minaj], it was Lil’ Kim and Missy Elliott, like you could pinpoint specific moments,” she says. “But now you’ve got hundreds of lady rappers.”

She admits that sometimes, as a Black woman, she feels the pressure of the industry looming over her. “I feel like that pressure was initially what kind of stalled me for a long time, because I always felt like there wasn’t a market for people that look like me ... for a dark-skinned Black rapper, especially one that was not going to rap about sex or stuff like that.

“But I’m going to die one day. I don’t want to have regrets and be like: ‘Oh, I didn’t do this because another human being thinks a certain way, or society is telling me that I can’t”.

I do wonder, as a Black woman in Rap, whether ENNY will get as many opportunities and platforms as some of her male peers. It is a shame that there are prejudices and discrimination that negatively impacts such strong and promising artists as ENNY. She is clearly fuelled and inspired by some icons of Rap. There is nothing to suggest that she will not be at their level before too long. On the evidence of what she has produced so far, she is going to be very special and adored.

There are a couple more interviews that are worth including before wrapping things up. One of the defining and crowning moments in ENNY’s career so far was the release of her song, Peng Black Girls. It is, as this CRACK interview explains, a huge moment:

“It’s precisely this reason that she put people like her at the centre of the video for her breakthrough track Peng Black Girls. Landing in November 2020, the visuals celebrated Black women of all hues, ages, hair and body types, as Enny takes centre stage looking extremely south London with pretty acrylic nails, a black puffer jacket and fiery red braids. Other scenes paid homage to her Nigerian heritage, with a regal pink gele and ankara dress, and showed her in a black slip evening dress. No matter how often people try to make Blackness monolithic, videos like this showcase its versatility. The song’s memorable opening lines, delivered in a laid-back, bouncy flow, are an ode to this: “There’s peng Black girls in my area code/ Dark skin, light skin, medium tone.”

Upon its release, Peng Black Girls quickly started to gain traction online as other peng Black girls found themselves, their lives and their experiences within the celebratory bars. At the time of writing the original song has more than one million views, while the remix featuring Jorja Smith has almost 5.5 million. “That’s gassy!” she says when I break the news. Enny has been uploading her freestyles onto YouTube since 2018, but it was when she self-released the soulful He’s Not Into You that she was signed to Smith’s label FAMM, setting the wheels in motion for their wildly successful collab on the Peng Black Girls remix. Nowadays, she’s taking a break from looking at the original’s streaming figures as she finds it all “a bit much”.

For now though, it’s Peng Black Girls that has resonated the most with her fans, and cemented her status as a rising star. The song’s success is such that she even had to stop using Hinge after a match recognised her. “Someone said Peng Black Girls yeah?’” she tells me. “And I was like, ‘Nah.’” The song sits among the canon of UK rap that builds and affirms our community in a country that often makes it clear our presence is unwanted at worst and conditional at best. Like Dave’s recent hit Black, or Bashy’s brilliant Black Boys before that, the track holds particular resonance with young Black people who, like Enny, don’t see themselves uplifted often enough. And if both Bashy and Dave’s Afrocentric rap songs hold a special place in UK music history as a reminder not to underestimate yourself, then both have also courted controversy. Peng Black Girls is no different, but rather than the backlash coming from angry white people, the addition of Jorja Smith on the remix served to infuriate some Black commentators. Indeed, the remix eclipsed the original, leading some to question why there was more appetite for a light-skinned pop star reworking a hook that was originally performed by the lesser known, and darker-skinned, Amia Brave”.

Even though she’s not entirely comfortable in her new surroundings yet, Enny finds herself a part of a golden generation of UK rappers. “Looking at the whole scene from soul to R&B there’s real quality,” she reflects, shouting out the new wave from Ragz Originale to Tiana Major9. She’s sanguine when I ask her about the future, revealing she doesn’t have a plan for where she will be in five years. She explains that if she has no expectations then she will be even more “gassed” for whatever lies in store. “I’m just a Black girl from south London and everything that has happened in the last year is mad, the people I’ve met, the interest,” she smiles. “I already feel mad proud”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Udoma Janssen for CRACK

I want to end up with a great and deep interview from NME. There is a lot to enjoy about the interview. We go back to Peng Black Girls - and we discover how Queen Latifah is a source of inspiration:

“‘Peng Black Girls’, in particular, gives off the same vibes as rapping polymath Queen Latifah and her 1993 single ‘U.N.I.T.Y’. “There was a period of time where I fell in love with Queen Latifah, and just like the messaging of her music. I remember being 16 and hearing that song for the first time, I was like, ‘Oh, my God’. I think it’s great that she’s been recognised for her contributions to hip-hop. I feel like there’s a different energy from women when they rap. Men are more masculine with gangster rap, so when women came out and expressed themselves, it was cool.” Enny loves that the greats like Latifah and Lauryn Hill have paved the way for what we have now; when NME makes the suggestion that she could be the UK’s next Lauryn Hill, she’s smitten – this is the ultimate compliment, after all.

‘Under 25’ is yet more proof of UK rap’s strengths right now; perhaps many are not seeing it, but Enny may well be one to cut through. There are stars like Knucks, Che Lingo, BenjiFlow, who all have cult followings just like Enny’s, but they are getting overlooked by the current mainstream need for quick party songs and intense introspection. Enny feels that this “sick renaissance moment the UK is having” is falling short because there needs to be a place to recognise and a platform for this style of music. But then again, Enny wants you to remember that she “doesn’t want to blow up”, she “just wants to make music”. Her sound blowing up is just a bonus.

But, surely, there’s got to be some deeper mission in the work? Mainly, she wants to “take the music thing worldwide” to keep showing off the real London. The capital is forever changing, clamouring to keep up with worldwide hype and most of the time, it’s at the expense of the rich culture in its most populous areas including south London. And in doing so, she wants to show the world a true depiction of what it means to be a black woman in the UK”.

Go and follow ENNY. She has recruited a lot of fans during the pandemic. I reckon she is eager to get out and perform live. I think that is when we will see her pack her the biggest punch. Looking ahead, there are likely to be E.P.s and more singles released. With every new release, we hear a different side to an amazing and hugely inspiring artist. I shall leave things there. I am already a fan of ENNY. But, having read more about her, I am growing in passion and intrigue. As ENNY has said, there are numerous multi-talented women emerging in Rap right now. Let’s hope that this quality and quantity results in greater parity regarding festival bookings and focus. I know that ENNY herself will be a worldwide success before you know it. She is a sensation that you will want…