Rock 'n' Roll 'n' Blues Women!

Don’t underestimate her age – the 16-year-old musician flowerovlove is not only an emerging fashion icon, but a quickly evolving songwriter who champions self-love and womanhood. Portraying her own growth like the unstoppable and beautiful growth of a flower, the London-based singer and schoolgirl has captivated the hearts of Gen Z with her relatable lyricism and sunny personality.MORE

London-born, and from Côté d’Ivoire, the emerging artist is an Instagram item adored for her cutting-edge sense of style where she models nifty garms from baggy pullovers and oversized suits with eccentric ties, to cool cowboy boots. As a young, immigrant, and woman of colour with a clear-cut vision, Flowerovlove is dedicated to sustainability, having fun and uplifting women. Coeval caught up with Joyce Cisse AKA Flowerovlove for a conversation about her deep love for music, her groovy garbs and her debut EP, ‘Think Flower’, launching 14/05/21 .MORE

As Flowerovlove, 16-year-old South London born Joyce Cisse makes music driven by hazy nostalgia as much as an unwavering self-belief.

Joyce Cisse meets the lens with a sleepy, feline gaze and blinks slowly, like a cat laying in a chink of sunlight on a Sunday afternoon. It could be contentment she feels: wrapped in a white towelling robe, resting her feet on the table, swirling around a glass of wine; breathing in the scent of a flower that she twirls around her fingers – or it could be a little well-earned contempt. “Send these rappers back to school / Bruh, I’m 15 / You’ll challenge who? / Paris fashion week we do that too / Got the cheque and the boots”, she doesn’t so much sing, as speak with a cool indifference, on the visuals for her track “Malibu”.

And no, she doesn’t flinch once, because it’s all true.

Flowerovlove sees her life as a garden, and for an artist who has only just turned sixteen, its blooms are in colourful abundance. The South Londoner, besides releasing her debut EP Think Flower last year, has walked Paris Fashion Week for Malian/Senegalese heritage label XULY.Bët and been the face of campaigns for the likes of Gucci and Pangaia – oh, and she sold out her first London show too.

Her music, in many ways, is a pressing of these moments like petals in between the pages of a scrapbook. Drunk on pollen and sunshine, her groove-led tunes unravel like a lazy daydream - always light, lo-fi and brimming with a certain radiance that is all her own. “I see myself as a flower,” Cisse tells me. “And I think other people should see themselves that way, too. We’re all growing. In winter, flowers lose their petals and all that fun stuff – you can say it better,” she laughs, “but you will grow them back again.” MORE

Beatrice Kristi Laus (born 3 June 2000), also known as Bea Kristi or professionally as beabadoobee^[13] (/biːbəduːbiːˈ/),^[14] is a Filipino-British indie singer-songwriter. Since 2018, she has released 5 extended plays under Dirty Hit, and has supported The 1975 on both their Music for Cars Tour and their Notes on a Conditional Form Tour in 2020. As of March 2020, Beabadoobee has over 300 million accumulative streams on Spotify. She was nominated for the Rising Star Award at the 2020 Brit Awards, and was predicted as a breakthrough act for 2020 in an annual BBC poll of music critics, Sound of 2020.

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Laus was born in Iloilo City, Philippines on 3 June 2000 and moved to London with her parents at the age of 3.^[3][4] She grew up in West London listening to OPM (original Pinoy music) as well as pop and rock music from the 1980s. While she was a teenager, she listened to indie rock including Karen O, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Florist and Alex G.^[9] She attended Sacred Heart High School for her high school education and Hammersmith Academy for her sixth form education.^{[citation needed]} Kristi spent seven years learning to play the violin, before getting her first guitar second-hand at the age of 17.^[5] She taught herself how to play the instrument using YouTube tutorials.^[9] She was inspired by Kimya Dawson and the Juno soundtrack to start making music.^[4]

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Kristi has cited Elliott Smith, The Mouldy Peaches, Pavement, Mazzy Star, The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel and Daniel Johnston as her musical influences.^[12][4] Kristi has told Vice that she plans on making film soundtracks in the future, as they heavily inspired her to make music.^[4] On her background and using YouTube to find success, she said:^[35]

My very traditional Asian family had the classic way of thinking: ‘play an orchestra instrument’ or ‘be a doctor’. Today, people start off making beats on a laptop, but hopefully I encourage young people to pick up the guitar and rock out! YouTube tutorials are a great way to develop your own style, and go at your own pace

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For Bea Kristi, her whole 2019 has been a dreamlike story, ripped from the pages of a music nerd’s fan-fiction. But the difference? Bea doesn’t have to wake up, because this is her real life now. “It’s like, ‘What the fuck!’” The Philippines-born, west London-raised 19-year-old giggles over the phone from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Currently mid-way through a US tour with bedroom-pop artist Clairo, it’s clear that Bea - better known as Beabadoobee - is also aware of how ridiculous the past year has been.

The whirlwind the singer now finds herself in began around two years ago when, aged 17, she got kicked out of school. Feeling lost and not really knowing what she wanted to do, her dad decided to buy her a guitar because she seemed “really bored” all the time. Teaching herself how to play, she first learnt Sixpence None the Richer’s ‘90s classic ‘Kiss Me’, and subsequently wrote her first original track ‘Coffee’ - a hushed, emotional bedroom-pop bop that ended up going low-key viral.

“At first, I just thought that songwriting was cool and then, when we released it, we had a lot of people saying that they liked it. People were recognising me on Instagram and were like ‘Hey, you’re that ‘Coffee’ girl?’ And I was like, ‘What the fuck, I’ve never worked as a waitress?!’” she laughs. “Then I was like, ‘Oh fuck, they’re talking about my song!’ That was really cool and motivated me more to do it because people were interested and enjoyed it. You know how everyone has a ‘thing’? Well, I didn’t have have a thing and then I realised that this is my thing!”MORE

Big Joanie is the sort of band you get to a show early for. In the past three years, the London-based group has self-released three rough-hewn EPs on their own imprint, Sistah Punk, each one featuring songs that blend tangling post-punk guitar lines, spit-shined hooks, and a “sprinkling,” Chardine says, of black liberation politics. Their most recent EP’s knotty title track, “Crooked Room,” took inspiration from a lecture by Seattle-born writer Melissa Harris-Perry, who compared life as a black woman in a white patriarchy to trying to find a true vertical in a room where all the angles are out of whack. “That’s exactly what it is,” Steph Phillips, Big Joanie’s lead vocalist and guitarist, says when we meet in a cozy cafe near South London’s Caribbean Brixton Market. “[Society] distorts the world around us to try and make us see things not as they are, or to try and make us fail.”

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On stage, Steph has a serene focus and a deep, assured singing voice. But she admits to a natural reserve, explaining that she lived vicariously through the riot grrrl music she devoured as a teenager in the middle England town of Wolverhampton. “As a very shy person, I loved hearing someone else stand up for themselves,” she says. A couple of hours away across the Midlands, the outgoing, quick-to-laugh Chardine grew up nurturing a love for Nirvana in Kettering, the town “where all the fucking government parties do their research for middle England.” In London, bassist Estella Adeyeri was listening to British alternative radio station XFM — “back when it wasn’t just blokey music,” she says. MORE

An incomplete list of why that argument is flawed:

Art can be racist. We wouldn’t have a western canon, or any art canon for that matter, if we hadn’t already acknowledged that years ago. Racism doesn’t negate something from being art and art doesn’t negate something from being racist. This is not a platform worth arguing on.
Art has the power and scope to affect society in a way that nothing else does. Nothing is ever ‘just a book’ or ‘just a music video’ or ‘just a song.’ If it’s not important enough to think about, then it wasn’t important enough to be made.
Art is a decent enough gauge of what some members of society were thinking at any given time. We study art to study culture and history. Visual art in particular is not simply a presentation of one’s inner-most feelings and beliefs but a reproduction of the culture the artist lived in and, often, a reproduction of that culture’s historical viewpoints; shorthand that the artist may not have even realize they internalized.
Also, a bonus tip! This one’s on symbolism but tune in next week for the next dumb racist thing fandom does for the next installment:

Having darkness represent evil is lazy and trite, but generally acceptable. Having a dark person represent evil is lazy and trite but also racist. Having a non-black person dress up in blackface to represent evil is not only lazy, trite, and racist but also a direct continuation of the same destructive shorthand that cost people their lives and livelihood. The time in-between has not allowed for it to be less offensive or more ironic.

In fact, let’s take this opportunity to segue into a preemptive offense of my least favorite literary device: Irony. In order for irony to work, there must be two layers involved: the implied, often traditional, meaning and the literal one. MORE

The problem? Mainstream media reinforce negativity and reinforce that people think racism is a thing of the past and “over.”
Mainstream media misrepresents voudou/voodoo often. This is why most people don’t know much about it.
And now comes the new Florence and the Machine music video. This video has a person in blackface. Seriously, strike one FatM.
Next, it utilizes voudou to get its message of the video across.
Yep, the guy in blackface is practicing voudou. By poking a doll with pins surrounded by candles.
STRIKE TWO, FatM.
What is this oh-so meaningful message which it needs to get across by misrepresenting a legitimate religion?
The “lights went out” of her relationship. And all I can gather is that the man in blackface is sticking pins in a voudou doll of the ex.
YES FLORENCE, PLEASE misrepresent religion because your relationship ended. Because that makes it more deep and meaningful so now I want to take you seriously.MORE