The New York artists who shaped the sound of Little Simz
There’s a fine line between influence and copycats. Over the years, there have been many lightning rods of industry who have changed the course of genres, tastes and styles to a point where a generation of artists follow in dangerously familiar footsteps. Little Simz is that artist in the contemporary sphere, forging her own lane of artistic identity that will undoubtedly inspire a future generation of breakneck rappers.
But that fine line I previously mentioned, the one that becomes so blurred for many artists, is one that Simz has danced on with ease. Like a gymnast traversing a narrow beam, she’s made navigating the tricky space of influence and pastiche seem easy, funnelling her own sense of artistic integrity into a platform laid out by her predecessors.
Particularly on her last three records, Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, No Thankyou and Lotus, Simz has utilised live instrumentation to such a point, that her multi-layered approach to genre referencing is poured all over her songs, creating a mutt of historic influences, from soul to reggae and hip-hop, informing a deeply contemporary and fresh sound.
The most obvious of all of those is undoubtedly Lauryn Hill. The sort of narrative honesty she shared in The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill was a blueprint Simz adopted wholeheartedly, portraying the feminine experience in a brutally misogynistic industry and genre to be a beacon of honesty. And the north London rapper has long credited Hill as her North Star, but it’s her song ‘Lost Ones’ that struck a particular chord.
Simz said, “Lauryn Hill is a black woman just fully rapping her heart out. It really just shows that your voice is enough. She taught me that a good artist could drop gems with minimum instrumentation and be clear and bold.”
It was a firm foundation that Simz admired and subsequently poured into her early work. By the time she found herself inside the walls of Abbey Road with a full orchestra laying down tracks for Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, she understood the crucial importance of her own artistry: to be an authentic, black female voice.
Because Simz’s story is one music needs to hear. Despite what hip-hop history says, she has proved that it is cool to be vulnerable, to wear your flaws on your sleeve and to dichotomise performative confidence with human sensitivity. Which, combined with Hill, she allowed Notorious BIG to inform her on. She cites the New York rappers’ seminal album Ready To Die as a formative body of work for her, saying, “The first time I heard that album, I started to understand storytelling and painting a picture through your words. That album really inspired me to commit to making the listener feel like they’re having a visual experience.”
It seemed that the narrow streets of New York hosted some of Simz’s most treasured storytellers. Undoubtedly, there are parallels to be drawn between the communities of the Big Apple and our capital, and so Hill and Biggie weren’t the only East Coast legends to make their way into Simz’s canon of influence. She spoke of Erykah Badu’s record Mama’s Gun being a gateway to unlocking her vulnerability as an artist.
“She just says things like, ‘remember when I felt the day I first got my period?’ Who even says shit like that? It’s so relatable as a woman, especially a black woman. She’s great at going to those lengths”.
While Simz continues to reference Fela Kuti and JME as equally important artists, who gave her music and art a sense of locational identity, linked to her own life, it’s clear how these three New York titans have informed the work of our finest current-day rapper.
That heyday of New York R&B and hip-hop, where soulful instrumentation was blended with an edgier and combative vocal style, generated some of the genre’s most iconic music. And while the way of alternative hip-hop may have lost its way somewhere in the bland, auto-tune-laden 2010s, Simz has taken the weight of the genre on her shoulders, picking up what those three iconic artists laid down and carrying music into an exciting future.
