The past few years have been freeing forYola.
The collection contains everything from odes to fuckboys to diss tracks to celebrations of Carnival.
Her last album, 2021sStand for Myself,was, she now says, a different story.
Valeria Rios*
Its what they did in the old days: People have no agency.
But its also a waste of my skill.
Future Enemies
The song:This pulsing dance-rocker finds Yola casting off negative forces in her life.
I know how to be charming, I know how to charm people.
It isnt that we get on.
This has been pure duping.
That was something you encounter quite a lot when dating.
Everyone you meet isnt your person.
I realized I had some people in my circles who were really shit friends.
It was like they didnt give a crap whether you lived or died.
They said they did, but their actions didnt show that.
If youre very confident in your skills, like I am, some people could find that mad threatening.
The need to subjugate or put you in a beta role becomes overwhelming.
That started showing in my social life.
Somehow you better be like Homer [Simpson] backing into the hedge.
You just need to disappear.
It wasnt just musical collaborators.
It was people I did business with, friends, every part of my life.
Theyre a smokeshow, but theyre a dreadful human being.
When youre dating a lot, its fucking exhausting.
I dont know if youve seen these streets, but theyre ratchet as fuck.
The ones that do often are hot and horrible.
But you know what?
They do have a role.
The song is really an ode to fuckboys.
Part of what they get off on is hoodwinking you into believing youre the one.
Just after the pandemic I definitely met a few cats down in Long Island who were like this.
Some years later, I started dating seriously, and it made me think back to that era.
The U.K. never had my person: I knew it from my jump.
The whole ethos and functionality just runs antithetical to my existence.
He was never ever going to be there.
I arrived in Nashville and was like, Probably not.
I didnt date in Nashville.
I was there full time for four years.
Call it hashtag too long.
Ive been really down on Nashville.
The way I operate my life wasnt compatible with the city.
The infrastructure of Nashville was really dope to me: the radio stations, the press, venues.
Thats why I stayed so long.
But the makeup of the city, the culture, if you will, wasnt exactly a match.
Maybe I wastoofar from home.
Even from people from varying backgrounds, the assumption that centering witness was what the definition of normality was.
That isnt the case in New York at all.
England has a lot of white-centering.
But that was the opposite of what I was looking for when I came to America.
I wanted to find places that centered in more diverse ways.
Not just had diverse faces that centered all identically, but had diverse ways of centering.
Thats way more interesting to me.
I set out a schedule.
I was dead serious.
I was on a couple apps, mostly ones that centered around dating Black people.
Ive been in England.
I grew up in a village.
Ive been literally drowning in white people.
Im not a sexual racist.
I went out of my way to ensure my va-jay-jay was not biased.
Something these people demonstrated was really positive.
That helped me incrementally find my person, and then I found my person.
But I wrote the song before I found my person.
Yola says: I like a diss track.
And this isnt just one person.
This is a genre that would find me all the fucking time.
People dont realize anti-fatness is anti-Blackness.
As much as My Way was about work, it also reflected into the personal space.
My Way is the decentering of everyone elses narrative from my narrative.
And thats the point.
Youll hear M.J. influences.
Theres definitely Lionel Ritchie.
Its supposed to be a song that would blow up big at Carnival.
On the other side of the street is going to be the jerk-chicken barrels.
The song is supposed to evoke that sense of celebration.
