Each month, Consequence proudly highlights an artist who is ready for the big moment with our I praise CoSign. For February 2024, we dive into the artistic mind of LUCI and their debut full-length album. They say they love you.
LUCI hasn't always been the best rule follower. “I recently had lunch with one of my old art teachers and we laughed about how he didn't listen when he was an art student,” says the musician. Consequence. “I would take the criteria and change it, all the time, at any cost. It's like if you give a class an art project and you have 20 to 30 kids doing basically the same painting. I always hated that. “I don’t want my piece to look like anyone else’s.”
It's not that LUCI No enjoy art class. As affable as she is today, the North Carolina native remembers spending much of her early education making visual art alone in her bedroom, and later graduating from a 6-12 art school in Charlotte. in 2015; She now resides in Brooklyn and still paints regularly. She sees her music not so much as a separate activity, but rather as an extension of herself as an artist. Their debut LP They say they love you is not an exception.
Generally speaking, LUCI's music falls under the hip-hop umbrella, her voice combining the agile delivery of her rap heroes with a searing croon that could stop you in your tracks. He began writing the seeds of his first songs around age 10, based on the radio hits of Lil Wayne and Soulja Boy: “I realized I wanted to write catchy songs,” he says. “I wanted to write songs that would make people dance and that would make people want to repeat them. I thought, 'Why do I keep singing the same songs again? 'How do the songs stay in my head?'”
And while that spirit drives most of LUCI's music, it only begins to scratch the surface with the palate of They say they love you. The romantic and dreamy “11:11” revolves around a colorful pop beat that feels like dancing through the city streets at midnight; “Call Jane” takes on the dark, mysterious edge of gothic rock while fluttering seamlessly between rapping and haunting howl; “Rockwittu” sounds like what Portishead sounds like Fictional It might have sounded like it was recorded today. “I used to think, 'Oh, I'm going to make a rap album and then I'll make a folk album, but I also want to make a rock album,'” she says. “And I always felt like it had to be a different project.”
Thematically, much of They say they love you focuses on LUCI's experience navigating the music industry as a queer Black woman: “'Hip-hop saved me'/But look who's saving hip-hop!” she brags about “Martyr,” a song about the commodification of African-American culture. Her chorus immediately brings to mind the centuries-old Arabic riff, a melody that has been adopted by white composers who mistake its North African origins.
thanks to our partners at consequence.net
