She suggests places they could go together but is met, the song implies, with stonewalling. Even though the lovers are just chilling, they know the neighbors are watching them. Her companion seems evasive, one minute “chatting up di place” about not wanting a relationship, the next preoccupied by marriage (to someone else?). Go beyond the chorus, and Koffee isn’t just fantasizing about where she and a certain someone will go when restrictions lift - she’s worrying whether a romance that has flourished undercover, the couple alone in an apartment, will survive exposure to the outside world. Before the pandemic shut down live performances, she was set to tour with Harry Styles and play at Coachella.īut “Lockdown” isn’t the simple flirtation it first appears to be. The Obamas are fans Rihanna reportedly tapped her to collaborate on a long-rumored reggae-inspired album. “But me know me an me mommy affi si di sunshine.” She’s the first international female reggae star in some time. “Life rough sometime,” she sang on “Burning,” from 2017. She’s a roots revivalist who borrows dancehall’s playful rhythms and focuses on positivity: gratitude, a love of language, her wish for a government with its people’s best interests at heart. The shyly charismatic, 21-year-old Koffee - born Mikayla Simpson, in Spanish Town, Jamaica - made her name on wholesome pleasures. “You know I’m feeling you/So now what we fi do?” For listeners suffering through heightened stress in already-difficult service jobs, or new back pain from working in bad chairs at home, the promise of a fresh, eye-to-eye flirtation served, for the length of a song, as an escape in itself. Her own hopes, though, were more intimate: “I know you’re feeling me,” she sang, with a sly nudge. The video was another window for listeners cooped up indoors: Koffee in a white mesh tank and denim overalls, dancing in the streets of Jamaica with the guys (including the superstar Popcaan - a casual flex at her growing profile) and breezing up a jewel-bright coastline in a convertible. “Where will we go/When di quarantine ting done and everybody touch road?” she sang in Jamaican patois on “Lockdown,” whose raucous chorus gave way to cool, spacious verses that showed off her pop instincts and let her lyrics shine. The same week, the roots-reggae star Koffee released a single that sparkled with the thought of better times ahead. Window Swap made headlines during the mid-July vacation season, in a year when, for most of us, there was only the fantasy of escape. One click let me ignore what was going on around my backyard - horny pigeons jostling on the fence, next door’s gnomes - and get lost instead in a view of a marshmallow Hawaiian sky or a sunlit apartment block in Russia or a child bouncing a gigantic ball under stout palms in Colombia. With real travel a distant prospect, the site showed views from other people’s windows, submitted by users around the world. Last summer, I discovered a delightful website called Window Swap, created by Sonali Ranjit and Vaishnav Balasubramaniam, a married couple living in Singapore.
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