Brought up between Atlanta and Accra, Amaarae (born Ama Serwah Genfi) wanted to reflect both of these worlds in her second full-length release. The Angel You Don’t Know, her critically lauded 2020 debut, had established her as a rising star within the alté genre (a fusion of Afropop, hip hop and R&B), but with Fountain Baby she aimed to also encapsulate “the freedom of the vision that exists outside of this pocket”. Studying Britney, Janet and Stevie Nicks to create this boundary-pushing sophomore, Amaarae wanted “to shift the style of music that’s being played on the dance floor”. The results are musically and lyrically complex, talking about how the empowering effects of love often come at a cost, but that doesn’t mean Fountain Baby shouldn’t be lighting up every dance floor in the world.
It feels like the whole world can be found within Fountain Baby. Cinematic scene-setter All My Love introduces the swooping Riviera strings and dreamy harp that play a crucial part in its sonic palette, sure, but with each song countless diverse influences reveal themselves; each is distinct enough that you can appreciate the sophistication of the production choices, but consistent enough to fuse into an exhilarating symbiosis. Japanese koto melds with gunshot percussion; buoyant synth bass bobs about under peppy Afrobeat drums. Uniting this free-flowing fountain of influences is Amaarae’s dextrous vocal performance. Her voice shimmers and yearns, alternately cutesy and cutting, hopping friskily over the beats. Take the sensual push-pull drama of Angels in Tibet for example, in which Amaarae’s airy intonations “That Dior… take it off… pay homage… to the god” are met each time by an insistent “in the club!”
Delicate and dreamlike, Fountain Baby is one of the most thoughtfully produced albums of the year. The rich production is matched by lyrics which are not only creatively rich themselves, but also aware of how rich is the world. Amaarae exhibits a hedonist’s propensity to locate highs everywhere, to see the richness of what the world can provide. She revels in sex (“I want to fuck a puddle, give that kitty cuddle”), love (“feed my love like crack to this fiend”), and money (“I reminiscence and kiss the cash ‘cause really that’s my baby”), often blurring the boundaries as these pleasures mingle like waters in her fountain.
It would be easy simply to characterise Fountain Baby with this quasi-noughties attitude towards excess, and to leave it there. However, Amaarae’s lyrics remain hyper-aware that these pleasures don’t come for free. Because when we’re all chasing the same highs, we’ll step on each other if we have to. Best understanding this is Fountain Baby’s lead single Reckless & Sweet, whose lyric excoriates a gold-digging partner: “It’s cause my money’s just too long, the thought of me spending gives you goosebumps”.
Love, as is everything, is a constant negotiation of power, then – and Amaarae is no stranger to the negotiation. As the album unfolds, its lyrics both resist control (“I can’t fuck with you baby, ‘Cause you got me hypnotized”) and claim power: Wasted Eyes’ confrontational chorus “I can’t be your lover – too many things to lose. You love me with no honour” gives way to the deliciously assertive “I’ma film it all, make a best-of, edit it all, make it scene on scene – under it all, know you scheme on me”. By the breaking point of Sex, Violence, Suicide she can finally confess “What’s wrong with us is that I love you”.
Amaarae has acknowledged the album’s inspiration in a recent relationship, that “the bars are endless when it comes to love”. Yet the album equally excels when it intersects with wider contexts. Big Steppa expands the album’s remit to consider how women are inevitably objectified when love is treated as a game: “you wanna desert me like I been auctioned off… Big Steppa, make up the room come get her… gotta pay out the fee don’t waiver”. The instrumentation, a tentative interplay of bleached guitar and searching horns, even sounds like it’s negotiating too.
As the album reaches its final triad, the haze starts to clear, replaced by a purer, more meaningful love. Aquamarie Luvs Ecstasy carves out a space to reflect on the blissful high provided by (postcoital) love, its euphoric coda an Atlantis of soft piano and submerged synths in which Amaarae intones “Love’s free”. But even here, her thoughts wander beyond the bed; the album ends with a wry reference to the criminalisation of same-sex relations in Ghana, boasting “When I’m in that pussy, I’m above the law”. In Fountain Baby’s conceptualisation of the world, being yourself and being in love with the right person might be the most powerful thing of all.
Hewing closer to conventional rock instrumentation than the previous songs, this final track discards power play and sociopathy, allowing love to manifest itself without complication or judgment or obligation. Come Home to God’s chorus lyric—“Break it down, buss it on the pole, money on the floor, come on home to God – and she want it, want it! And she want it, want it!”—becomes a rallying cry, screamed rapturously by the end amidst a symphony of rising horns and screeching electric guitars. Because whether it’s romantic love or self-love (and the jury’s out), here is a love that doesn’t feel forced, or one-sided. Because “she want it want it!” And because that’s the love that should be shouted from the rooftops.
It’s tempting to intellectualise Fountain Baby, but truly it’s just FUN front to back, packed with hooks and impeccably produced. Take Counterfeit for example: a Britney-lite banger that smacks you in the face and drags you along for the ride, galvanized by a steel drum sample courtesy of Clipse. Or the bouncy Co-Star, whose playful lyrics breathlessly span star signs and classical elements: “Cancer must be nice, Scorpio at night, Fire’s what you like? Fuck till moon and rising”.
I WANT to list every nuanced textual flourish in the production. I WANT to analyse every lyrical twist and turn. I WANT to tell you why Sex, Violence, Suicide is the best song I’ve heard this year. But more than that, I want you to find out for yourself. Fountain Baby opens itself up song by song, always keeping a trick up its sleeve. So don’t spoil it for yourself. Just dive in. Open up and drink from the fountain, baby.
Golden Angel LLC / Interscope Records. Out now.
Comments
Post a Comment