The Power of Women in Music: Jhené Aiko
By Antonella Badchkam
Jhené Aiko is easily recognized by her light soprano voice with a nuanced and velvety tone in conveying the most hidden and emotional feelings, ranging from pain to anguish, but also to happiness and bliss. Jhené Aiko appears to be an important force in refreshing the R&B music scene over the past 10 years, offering her silent sounds and very intimate lyrics both physically and emotionally.
Born and raised in Ladera Heights, a suburb of Los Angeles, Jhené Aiko (born Jhené Aiko Efuru Chilombo), comes from a musical family of a mixed heritage of Japanese, Spanish and Dominican mother and African American, Native American, German and Jewish father. Two of her sisters, Miyoko and Jamila (aka Mila J), were born in the 1990s as members of the musical group Gyrl, and had a major influence on her musical formation. Starting with small collaborations with a B2K music group, the Californian artist sets out on her solo path around the early 2000s while still a teenager, but will take a break to focus on completing her education and conceiving her daughter Namiko. Jhené will return after 2010, where she will release her Sailing Soul mixtape in 2011 with some important collaborations from the likes of Drake, Kendrick Lamar, Kanye West, and Miguel. In 2013 the Californian artist will release the EP Sail Out with few important singles such as the track The Worst and the collaborations with Kendrick Lamar Stay Ready (What a Life) and the one with Childish Gambino, Bed Peace, where the two artists have recreated the video harking back to John Lennon and Yoko Ono's famous 1969 protest against the Vietnam War, where they organized a two-week strike in bed "Bed Peace" in a hotel room.
In 2014 the album Souled Out will be released, a collection of very intense pieces where we find the artist reflecting on the end of relationships, with the tracks Spotless Mind and The Pressure, we find her making an evaluation of her life lived in case she suddenly passed away, with Eternal Sunshine, and then we listen to her, dedicating a very sweet song to her daughter, promising her to always be there despite the everyday problems in Promises. In this project of hers, we find a very reflective Jhené, but who also manages to get excited and make us excited.
In 2017 the album Trip was released, a collection that contains 22 singles, and from the title, you immediately understand that it tells the journey of Jhené in these years. After losing her brother to a long illness in 2012, Jhené retraces these years of strong emotional transformation for her, where she had to deal with the pain and grief she suffered from mourning. In this extended work, she tells us perfectly how she managed to metabolize everything in the best way possible. In this project, we find the artist most inclined to express her feelings and emotions.
Here, Jhené has completely opened up, crying bravely in public and exposing all the ways she has tried and failed to do it in private. Trip was conceived for herself and on her terms, it is more committed to the narration of discovering who Jhené is, rather than churning out a commercial success. The title reflects the hallucinogenic, geographical, and emotional journeys that inspired Aiko's writing. This project puts her in fifth place on the Billboard 200, the album also gets the prestigious Gold Album and the three most successful songs have also achieved gold or platinum: While We're Young, Sativa, and Never Call Me.
In March 2020 when the world was diving into full lockdown, Jhené released her third album Chilombo, a collection of twenty tracks inspired by the island of Hawaii, (the home country of some of Aiko's ancestors) and its natural landscapes. The title of the Chilombo album is a tribute to the artist's surname.
Chilombo translates "wild beast", which traditionally represents strength and self-confidence, the current position of the artist who finds herself in a safe and strong inner moment. Throughout the album, the goal is to offer the listener a contrasting experience of pain and beauty, associated with love and breakup. The focus of the album is said to be focused on the end of the relationship between Jhené and Big Sean, the two, who seemed to have the perfect relationship, (the artist had Sean's face tattooed on her arm, and also collaborated in one of his album, Twenty 88) separated in March 2018, although they are currently rumored to be back together. The extraordinary thing about this album is the sound, very refined and original. All the pieces are accompanied by traditional Tibetan quartz crystal bells, to create a meditative and relaxing effect, where every single musical key represents a vibration that is linked to the different chakras. While in the previous album Trip, the artist faces a psychedelic meditation on death and how to deal with it, in the new album Aiko takes a step forward trying to describe to the listener how someone is, at the end of a relationship, now healed and freed from pain. Jhené retraces the pain in a very detached way, and then re-emerges stronger and more self-confident, documenting the dissolution of a relationship step by step, describing in a less spiritual and more rational way, managing to balance the sacred with the profane even in the texts. from the Hawaiian volcanoes, Aiko describes the album as a big eruption that starts with Triggered, creating a flow that goes through all the tracks.
Jhené's malleability has always been her strength, whether when she whispers, hums or raps, in any case, she always manages to convey a natural grace and a playfulness that opens the songs up, her style always remains particular and singular, whether it is an outlet for a relationship ended badly, or a feeling of friendship or love for someone close to the artist, she always manages to express herself in the best possible ways by hypnotizing us with her enchanted and sinuous voice.
