Music
Erica-Cody, Sia Babez, Soulé, Celaviedmai, Tolu Makay and Shookrah are part of a growing movement of Irish artists defining their black femininity with the help of classic '90s and noughties R 'n' B.
The Poolbeg Stacks is not something you’d expect to see in an R 'n' B video. For years, the now-decommissioned power station has been synonymous with a romanticised (if slightly bleak) postcard vision of Ireland. Visible for miles around, its famous chimneys stretch high above Dublin Bay, their place in local lore solidified by a prominent appearance in U2’s Pride (In The Name Of Love) video 35 years ago. But now fast-rising singer Erica-Cody is using the iconic structures to create a new vision of Ireland.
It’s all there in the video for her 2017 single Addicted. As the Poolbeg Stacks loom in the background, Cody, who is garishly dressed in fabulous pink fur, struts over male bodies that, “bang-bang”, she's just shot down in defence of her own beau. The imagery is juxtaposed with shots of Cody bathed in red and blue light, like something out of an antique MTV Base video. Then there are the song's smooth grooves, which draw inspiration from ’90s US R 'n' B and encapsulate a new strand of musical imagination in Ireland – retro sounds that artists like Cody are using to tell modern stories.
Ireland is enjoying an urban music renaissance. Its rap scene has developed into one of Europe’s most scintillating. Side-by-side is a new trend influenced by an unlikely source: the raw, funky sounds of '90s to 2000s neo-soul and R 'n' B. It’s a style with little history in Ireland, but one that is currently being blazed by (primarily) black women. Artists such as Erica-Cody, Sia Babez, Soulé, Celaviedmai, Tolu Makay and the band Shookrah are riding those classic grooves into Ireland’s future.
Music scenes, regardless of how micro, rarely sprout up from nowhere. There are roots, local influences and stylistic forefathers. But this particular surge of ingenuity has few geographical predecessors. Ireland has, until very recently, been almost entirely monoethnic – hell, “Irish” and “white” are still regularly used as synonyms. So the visibility of these new artists reflects Ireland’s evolution into a more multicultural nation. Their backgrounds are varied – some were born in Ireland to immigrant parents; others migrated as kids; some are mixed-race; and some have been through the hardships of Direct Provision, a controversial system accommodation for asylum seekers that is regularly condemned for breaching the human rights of residents. Now, these rising stars are an expression of black Irish femininity.
“The unity that we have now as a collective, especially black women in music, is unreal,” says Galway rapper and singer Celaviedmai. “We’re black women, but from different cultures, bringing this Irish black culture together. I think in a couple of years we’ll become like the UK urban scene. Black females are paving the way for that to happen.”
In 2018, Celaviedmai dropped the song Tired, which samples Jamie Foxx’s piano stool version of the big-hearted Luther Vandross classic, If Only For One Night. Foxx performed the song at one of his comedy shows as a love letter to old slow jams, and Celaviedmai’s music often shows the same affinity to that genre's golden era. But why has throwback R 'n' B been such nectar to this generation of Irish artists?
“All of us grew up in hip-hop to some degree,” says Shookrah singer Senita Appiakorang. “On some level, I was trying to grasp on to something I could identify with or with stories that felt somewhat relevant to what was going on [in my life] – the plight of the black person, the rags-to-riches story, is so prevalent in America. That was something I was seeing in Ireland.”
Formed in Cork, Shookrah features Appiakorang fronting four white male musicians in guitarist Daniel Coughlan, drummer Emmet O’Riabhaigh, bassist Brian Dunlea and keyboard player Diarmait Mac Cárthaigh. The band blaze a sound that veers from the ’70s grooves of Patti LaBelle to the contemporary extraterrestrial explorations of Flying Lotus. And also very much in the mix is nostalgia for the R 'n' B that Appiakorang grew up on. Take Why Can’t You Stay from Shookrah’s recently released self-titled debut album – a percolating slow jam that grooves around Appiakorang’s fluttering falsetto.
Appiakorang was born in South Africa and lived there until she was seven, when politically motivated violence forced her to flee. Alongside her mother and younger sister, she lived in a Direct Provision centre for two years and a deportation order was later served. Appiakorang and her sibling were eventually adopted by a family in Kerry after their mother left the country. “Growing up in Ireland, I came to a largely white place where I was an exoticised thing and I was not used to that,” admits Appiakorang.
Appiakorang had grown up on Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, TLC and En Vogue. Early viewings of D’Angelo’s How Does It Feel video burned into her subconscious, and she remembers being 10 years old and heavily into Nelly and Kelly Rowland’s Dilemma. “I didn’t bring you here for you to be singing all these R 'n' B tunes,” her mother would yell. But the music was more than just something to enjoy. The image of black excellence and the narrative of empowerment were messages that resonated with Appiakorang.
“Music is the thing that saves them ultimately, or brings them to that next level,” Appiakorang says of some of the black American musicians she identified with. “So, from an aspirational level, I think I was very much like, ‘I’m here in this place, there’s nothing like this happening in Ireland, but yet there’s all this black-representing music and I want to be part of that and do something that’s local’.”
“There’s a lot of nuances to how someone becomes a second generation Irish-identifying person in Ireland today," she adds. "The music that I’ve written… doesn’t necessarily have a pointedly South African sound. I find it curious myself why I gravitated towards an Americanised version of music. I guess an element of that is seeing things on a public scale and identifying with what looks vaguely like yourself.”
Music is an act of catharsis for Appiakorang. Away from her work with Shookrah, writing songs as one-half of the duo Lakerama has seen Appiakorang explore the feelings her mother might have had about moving to Ireland and being the single mother of two children in Direct Provision. Using music to unpack these experiences and explore identity is consistent among this group of artists. While acknowledging their roots is key, many of them want to assert their Irish-ness, too.
“I’m an Irish girl – I was born and bred here,” says Sia Babez, an 18-year-old singer whose R 'n' B sound draws in elements of Latin pop and dancehall. “Most of my friends are Irish – I identify with them, I know the culture, I barely speak gaeilge but it's there. I feel like it’s important to me to identify with my people and push out the fact that I am acknowledging my Irish roots, even though I'm Zimbabwean.”
Born in 1996, Erica-Cody hails from the North Dublin suburb of Baldoyle. Her mother is a white Irish woman from the area, while her father is black and hails from North Carolina in the US. Cody describes her parents as having met “through hip-hop and R 'n' B” and remembers her dad sitting her down as a kid and schooling her on some of his favourite cuts. She grew up on the 1990s and 2000s hip-hop and R 'n' B canon, but pays special tribute to female MCs Queen Latifah, Lisa 'Left Eye' Lopes, Foxy Brown and Lil' Kim.
A one-time student at Ireland’s famous Billie Barry Stage School, Cody says she caught the “writing bug” when she was 15. After her parents bought her an iTouch for Christmas, she immediately started messing around on GarageBand. In fact, her earliest experiments with the app provided the vocal loop for her track, Over And Over.
Cody’s oeuvre is comprised of sharp recreations of the throwback Irish R 'n' B she loves. She announced herself this year with her debut EP Lioness and its flagship track, Where U Really From – a brilliant affirmation of racial identity in modern-day Ireland that Cody describes as taking “a massive weight off my shoulders”. The song answers the question Cody has been posed so many times over the years – what is it like being a black woman in Ireland? – and turns it into a deep depiction of her own experience.
“It was me accepting myself for who I am because I spent so many years not loving my hair and not loving who I was and my skin colour,” says Cody, explaining why she wrote the track. “It was more of a self-acceptance anthem for me and whoever else needed it. I wasn’t the only one going through it at the time."
The song even pays homage to Solange Knowles as Cody parrots the star’s words to assert her anger at people who invade her personal space by grabbing at her hair without permission. Cody remembers an occasion when a stranger reached out and touched her hair while riding past on a bike.
“I was just so dismissive of people touching my hair, I’d let them do it,” she says. “It got to a point where a light bulb just went off and I was like, ‘You know what, I’m not tolerating this anymore because it doesn't sit right with me’. As soon as I started not giving a f***, that’s literally when I started to become my true, authentic self.”
Cody is currently writing new music and is clear that whatever new sonic paths she takes, her work will always have that '90s R 'n' B appeal. But Cody and her Irish peers are claiming the sound for themselves. Celaviedmai envisions a day when the influences in their music won’t be as obvious as they establish a new, distinct strand of R 'n' B.
“I don’t know how long it’s going to take, but I think the generation after me will probably discover what the Irish sound is,” she says. “We still have a long way to go. We’ll be like the OG ‘90s [artists] – Missy Elliot, Aaliyah, Destiny’s Child. We’ll be like that. And the new era will be like Ariana Grande and Normani.”
For now, music has offered an outlet for these kids to tell their stories. They are stories of immigrant strength and of finding new identities that celebrate Irish pride while acknowledging distinct cultural roots. And Appiakorang believes they’re just getting started.
“I think those stories won’t start coming out in full truth for the next decade because it's so fresh and new. Some people are still emerging out of that era, trying to figure out their stories. The honesty and weirdness and the uniqueness of being second- or third-generation immigrants in Ireland will only reveal itself as time goes by. I’m so excited to see what that will look like.”