FEATURE:
Revisiting…
Koffee - Gifted
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FOR the last few…
Revisited… features of 2022, I am going to look at albums from earlier this year that might have passed some people by. There have been some underrated or under-discussed ones for sure! One that I really love is the first full-length debut from Jamaican Reggae icon-in-the-making, Koffee. The alias of Mikayla Victoria Simpson, Gifted is a superb album that people need to acquaint themselves with. An artist who has been tipped for big things ever since her debt 2019 E.P., Rapture, arrived and went to the top of the U.S. Reggae chart. I don’t think Gifted got as many plaudits and reviews as it deserved. Some felt that, at twenty-eight minutes, there was not enough on the album to satisfy fans. I think it is a tight album, but one that delivers plenty and keeps you coming back! At ten tracks, there is no filler or fat to be trimmed. It is an accomplished and worthy album from an artist who has been getting a lot of hype the past few years. Blissful and full of energy and uplifting vibes, there were some positive reviews for one of the best debut albums of 2022. I want to source a couple of interviews with Koffee, where she discusses a long-awaited album. There is no denying (in my mind) that Gifted is true to its word. Its creator is gifted for sure, and it is a pity that many did not tune into the album or give it its just dues!
Earlier in the year (Gifted came out in March), Koffee was interviewed by ELLE. They rightly declared that Koffee’s optimism is what we all need right now. I have selected a few bits from the interview that give us more background to a truly incredible artist:
“Koffee had a lot of time on her hands, sheltered from the violence that afflicts the Jamaican community that would typically urge any idle kid to wander the streets—she picked up the guitar instead. Koffee (who received her nickname from her classmates after refusing to drink soda like the rest of them) unwittingly joined her school's talent contest in 2016 and won, steadily building a fan base that would explode the following year when her tribute song to famed Jamaican Olympic sprinter Usain Bolt went viral.
Upsetta Records happened to be watching and invited the rising star to hop on the 2017 Ouji Riddim compilation album—a common practice in Jamaican culture in which various artists create different songs using the same instrumental—along with reggae royalty like Jah Vinci, Busy Signal, and more. “Burning” was Koffee’s contribution and the debut single—a vibe-y, old school reggae-inflected track fueled by one-drop drums and a rootsy guitar. These embellishments became the hallmarks of Koffee's musical formula, packaged neatly on 2019’s Rapture, which references the religious event.
“I chose ‘rapture’ as the name to represent the impact my music had on the industry in such a short time,” she explained. “Picture the rapture, how everybody is going up in the sky; I came on the scene and the way the music comes in, it just lifts everybody up—that's what I want my music to do.” With all her youthful exuberance, on Rapture, Koffee tackled Jamaica's political strife and poverty with wisdom well beyond her years.
PHOTO CREDIT: Nwaka Okparaeke
It goes back to her influences, especially Chronixx, who she calls “a positive example of reggae music and somebody I look up to,” and who trades the typical dancehall braggadocio for uplifting consciousness and social commentary. “His lyrics and musicianship show his dedication to his craft. I learn something all the time from him; he’s a teacher to me.”
When she isn't calling out the Jamaican government's negligence, she's dancing—or at least making “world reggae” music that people can dance to (like “Toast”), since she admits she's not the best dancer.
On Gifted, Koffee flips between the two themes, melding her rootsy traditional reggae rhythm with a touch of Afrobeats. “This product is my gift to the world. I'm trying to inspire everyone who is gifted, because many people don’t realize it but you can’t take anything for granted,” she says. This album is her reminder to fans to step into their purpose.
“What are you doing with your talents? Everybody has a gift, and it’s up to you to tap into your gift,” she adds. Sticking to her formula, Gifted opens with a tribute to the late Bob Marley on “x10,” a two-minute bite about gratitude that feels like a more intimate extension of “Toast,” which samples Marley’s “Redemption Song.” In between Marley’s faint wails in the background, Koffee takes stock of her accomplishments before addressing the crime, poverty, and police corruption of her native Jamaica on “Defend” and“Shine.” By the time we hit the nub of the 10-track album, it’s dance time: “Lonely” is Koffee’s lovers rock submission that inspires a slow, easy sway while “Gifted,” “Run Away,” and “West Indies” can easily soundtrack slow whines at a late-night bashment party.
She soars across each track solo, without features, a decision she says wasn’t deliberate but authentic to the tone of the album. “The project came together pretty naturally. I found whenever it comes to me doing a collaboration, I would write the song, and then afterward I would listen to the song and see if this person would be fitting for this song. But the way I put it together, it just worked. We're great already,” she explains. Collaborations are a great way to expand into other genres—take for instance her linking up with Atlanta rapper Gunna on “W” in 2019—but Koffee wants to choose her team-ups wisely. She has a wishlist of dream collaborators that includes Young Thug and of course, Burna Boy.
She and the self-proclaimed “African Giant” convened in the studio the night before the 2020 Grammy Awards Ceremony to record a yet-unreleased collaboration that fans have been clamoring for. Following Koffee's blistering interpretation of Burna's smash “Ye,” she has remained tight-lipped with details of their joint song, but a previous Twitter video of the two stars singing over a flute-and-bass-heavy groove hinted to a strong contender for song of the summer—whenever it materializes.
“I can't give you updates just yet, because I think something is brewing, and I don't want to spill the beans, you know?” she assures me”.
I want to move onto an interview with THE FACE. I also love the photos taken for the shoot, as you get this radiance and joy from Koffee. That is reflected in her magnificent music. Gifted is full of songs that bring a smile to your face:
“She wrote her first song, Legend, at 17. Inspired by Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, Koffee’s words, sung in her poetic patois, glowed with admiration: “In Beijing when you got that gold/Mih seh di stadium stand up when yuh run/When di times get quicker and it start unfold/You seh ‘The sky is no limit, go beyond’/You’re a legend”.
When she released the acoustic guitar-based song under her birth name in 2017, Bolt reposted it. The result: instant virality in the year she left high school. Soon after, she adopted her childhood nickname, Coffee (because she brought coffee to school on a hot day), switching the “C” to a “K” to better mirror her given name. Her first hit came almost immediately. Burning, released on island label Upsetta Records, was an international success, making serious inroads at American radio. In 2018 she signed with Columbia Records and in December that year released Raggamuffin, on which she directed lyrical fire at gun violence and the Jamaican government’s treatment of the country’s youth.
PHOTO CREDIT: Jackie Nickerson
A little over a year later, on 26th January 2020, she was onstage at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, picking up that Grammy.
“It felt unreal because just a few years ago I was sitting in a classroom,” she remembers. “It was a very proud moment, especially for such a small country like Jamaica to bring home a trophy like that for my people, it was an amazing feeling.”
Almost two years on from that win, and a few days before our Zoom chat, I’m at the London headquarters of Koffee’s label to hear a preview of Gifted. When she walks in, the five-foot star lights up the room with her infectious, braces-covered smile. She’s dressed comfortably in another tracksuit and white Nike Air Force Ones, perching herself on the sofa to address the room. Saltfish fritters and chicken skewers are on offer, and Wray and Nephew rum punch is, obviously, the liquor of choice. I tell her that only the Magnum was missing.
“Toniccccc wiiiiiine!” she erupts, laughing. “You’re funny!”
As the tracks boom from the speakers, she breaks down Gifted for me, beginning with X10, which incorporates the opening guitar line of Bob Marley’s Redemption Song.
“This is where you wake up and you’re very grateful, you’re about to start your day and saying your prayers, then you tap into the likkle love song, then the party vibe, so it’s a journey. Gifted, for me, speaks to this life, the cycle of it, the wholeness of it. Once you have life, you have everything.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Jackie Nickerson
Then comes Pull Up, a track steeped in Afrobeat influence (“I love the genre so much”). Then, Runaway, a melodic, upbeat track, and Lonely, an homage to British reggae don John McLean and lovers rock, the rocksteady and soul genre which grew out of London in the late 1960s.
“London was one of the first places I came when I started doing music. It’s like my second home. It’s such a cold place but I receive so much warmth when I’m here,” Koffee says, adding that she’s a big fan of drill, Notting Hill Carnival (“I’ve never been because I’ve always missed it but it always looks so fun!”) and how Black culture in the UK is celebrated.
Koffee is already deep into the writing of her second album. “Yeah, hopefully you guys won’t have to wait too long,” she says, teasing. If the rumours are true, she’s also a writer on Rihanna’s forthcoming reggae album, R9. “You guys are crazy with the sources!” she laughs. “It’s been ages and I still can’t talk about that… but I’m very proud of you for asking.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Jackie Nickerson
Even if she’s keeping mum on the RiRi connect, there are other star collabs she’s happy to discuss. In the talent-stuffed The Harder They Fall, the recent revisionist Western directed by British-Nigerian filmmaker Jeymes Samuel and co-produced by Jay‑Z, Koffee had the honour of performing the title track written by the pair.
“I saw that film being promoted a while ago before they actually hit me up for the song. I was thinking: this is huge! Jeymes really captured the Jamaican essence so well. I’m so proud to see that the culture is appreciated.”
Visuals, clearly, mean a lot to Koffee – as does the UK. Her video for Pull Up was shot during a rainy day in Manchester but she managed a tangential nod to Caribbean culture by riding in a Lada, the Soviet-era Russian car that can be found all over Jamaica’s busy streets.
So: does she drive herself?
“Listen, I’m grown,” she replies, beaming. “I be driving. I have a licence and everything. I love to hit the road. You should drive with me. You should experience driving with me.”
Judging by the road Koffee is taking, we’ll gladly hitch a ride”.
I am going to round up with a couple of the positive reviews for the sensational Gifted. If there were a couple of reviews a little bit unsure or mixed, there was more than enough love for the album. One of the best of 2022, Pitchfork had some very nice things to say about an album that is impossible to ignore and dislike. If you have not heard this amazing album, then you need to get on top of it now:
“Midway through summer 2020, the young Jamaican reggae artist Koffee released her single “Lockdown” and dreamed of life after the pandemic. “Where will we go/When di quarantine ting done and everybody touch road?” she sang over an Afrobeats-tinged riddim, imagining a relationship’s future once she and her boo could finally progress past FaceTime. Its video 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. “Me ah go put you pon lockdown/Put yuh body pon lockdown,” she crooned—pandemic 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: Gifted, her first album and the follow-up to her Grammy-winning Rapture EP, is by definition a pandemic album, imbuing the ennui and uncertainty of this epoch with a positivity it could surely use.
The relatively short career of Mikayla “Koffee” 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, “Legend”; collaborating with millennial reggae heroes like Chronixx and Protoje and signing to a major label 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’s also the kind of uplifting trajectory the music industry loves, and the narrative tends to flatten Koffee’s message. Her joy is rightly celebrated, but she also tells real stories about her life, including critiques of the Jamaican government’s complicity in structural poverty and gun violence (most explicitly on 2019’s crunchy dub “Raggamuffin”). And so Koffee’s COVID-era album, upbeat as it sounds on its face, is not a spiritual turnaround—in March she told Zane Lowe that her writing process was in part a way of encouraging herself out of her low points—and belies that she’s 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’t seem much in her nature.
Gifted veers 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 once sang, “Inna mi zone/Alto to baritone.” The last two years focused her thoughts inward—as they have for many of us—and Koffee, now a sage 22, is surer in both her talent and what matters most to her. As the title track, “Gifted,” suggests, she’s 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. (“I just try to make [my mom] feel the impact of what she’s done for me,” Koffee told The Gleaner in March.)
In combining traditional influences like acoustic guitars in major keys with the contemporary diaspora—the Afroswing experimentation of the British musician J-Hus, with whom Koffee has collaborated, comes to mind, and they share a producer in Jae5—Koffee bridges history with her Zoomer present. She references Jah and her mom, ’Raris 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’s genial alto, is a meditation on where her life has taken her so far. Several tracks take on the intimate patina of prayer. On “Gifted,” for instance, she invokes an oft-decontextualized Black American spiritual: “Pray to di Father, seh, ‘Kumbaye’/Full up mi plate and bruk my tray, yeah.”
Koffee’s humble wisdom underpins her songwriting, with songs like “Defend” and “Shine” 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. “Koffee defend them case,” she sings on “Defend,” and on “Shine,” she beseeches the youth to “just stay alive… I’ve got to shine, you’ve got to shine.” The relaxed pace of “West Indies,” 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 “Lonely.” There’s a proud and pure undertone to her music, not least because of her inviting vocal timbre, which gives the impression that she’s 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’s simply inviting us into her world. It’s sunny there, and I, for one, could use it”.
NME also gave Gifted a really strong review. I want to finish with The Guardian’s opinions of Koffee’s debut. I wonder where she will go next and what we will get. It is likely to follow Gifted in terms of its tones and overall sound. Its positivity is a big selling point:
“The first voice you hear on Mikayla Simpson, AKA Koffee’s debut album belongs not to the 22-year-old singer, but to the late Bob Marley. Echoing samples from 1980’s Redemption Song weave around the sparse instrumentation on opener X10. His appearance shouldn’t be taken as some kind of benediction: the Marley estate has never been terribly selective when it comes to promoting the late Tuff Gong’s legacy, slapping his name on everything from skincare products to socks to Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream, and his oeuvre has been sampled and interpolated by everyone from the Beastie Boys to Bad Bunny, but nevertheless, a Jamaican reggae artist opening their album with the sound of Jamaica’s most famous and revered musical figure is quite a ballsy move.
Like the lyrical nods to Sister Nancy’s Bam Bam and Althea & Donna’s Uptown Top Ranking on her 2019 EP Rapture, it’s presumably intended to say something about Simpson’s deep connection to reggae’s history. While her teenage friends in Spanish Town tended to like whatever was big at the time, she told Rolling Stone magazine in 2021, she “took to reggae and just made my own path”. Perhaps evoking the biggest crossover reggae star of all says something about the commercial ambitions behind Gifted. Jamaica hasn’t produced a huge mainstream pop star since Sean Paul, whose peak was 20 years ago, but Koffee sounds determined: “Might get caught up in a new wave,” she suggests on the title track, before offering to “chop the track up in a new way if it helps me get a few plays”.
Her career has developed a striking momentum. Two years ago, she became the first female artist ever to win the Grammy for best reggae album, despite the fact that Rapture clearly wasn’t an album: whichever way you sliced it, it was a distinct improvement on the previous year, when the Grammys deemed the best reggae album a collaborative work by Sting and Shaggy. She has been the recipient of a succession of high-profile co-signs: from Harry Styles, who asked her to support him on tour; to John Legend, on whose 2020 album Bigger Love she appeared; to Jay-Z, who tapped her to perform the theme song to the acclaimed western The Harder They Fall. Rumours abound that she’s working with Rihanna on the latter’s forthcoming reggae album: certainly, the singer’s beauty brand Fenty gets a namecheck among the torrent of high-end labels mentioned in Gifted’s lyrics.
In the past, Koffee has talked about the influence of Protoje on her work. If her brand of Rastafarianism and her politicking is noticeably gentler in its approach than that of her idol – you get a light sprinkling of references to Jah and a few snappy lines about gun violence on Gifted – she’s definitely taken on board the eclecticism of the reggae revival movement’s leading light. Gifted covers a lot of musical ground in less than half an hour, from the sweet, harmony-laden lovers rock of Lonely to Shine’s dabbling in the kind of easygoing acoustic reggae beloved of beach bars the world over, albeit underpinned by an immense electronic bass. The brief Defend veers close to trip-hop, and, with J-Hus collaborator Jae5 among the album’s producers, Koffee has a strong line in tracks influenced by Afrobeats: the title track melds a filtered sample of kids singing with a rhythm that shifts from sounding organic, as if it’s being banged out on congas and the body of an acoustic guitar, to fully electronic.
At its least inspired, the desire to appeal to a broad audience causes the album to stumble. Run Away is basically homogeneous AutoTune pop with a Jamaican accent. It may do the trick commercially but it undersells Koffee’s individuality. She’s better suited to the brand of laid-back party music that consumes the album’s final tracks. On Pull Up, Jae5’s production occupies a hugely appealing space somewhere between Afrobeats, dancehall and pop: it comes complete with a 1980s soul sax and a hook that’s impossible to dislodge from your brain. As her voice flips from toasting to smooth singing, the lyrics of West Indies evoke Lionel Richie’s All Night Long, with which it shares a certain dusk-settling, party-slowly-starting atmosphere, albeit via entirely different musical means.
Lockdown, meanwhile adopts an intriguingly ambiguous attitude to the end of Covid restrictions, Koffee’s desire for freedom tempered by the fear that a romance that’s bloomed over FaceTime may not work out “when di quarantine ting done and everybody touch road”. “Where will we go?” she asks, a line that seems simultaneously goggle-eyed at the thought of getting out and troubled by the prospect of where the relationship is heading. It’s smart and inventive, its sound commercial without doggedly following current trends: everything you might want in a crossover pop star, which Gifted may well make of Koffee”.
If you can afford the vinyl copy of Gifted, then I would suggest that. You can buy it on CD or stream it. A magnificent album that should be mentioned alongside the finest of this year by critics, I do think that it deserved more reviews and even bigger attention than it got. Spend some time now immersing yourself in…
SUPERB debut album.