The music industry is rarely generous with fairytale successes, but the closest thing to one was bequeathed last year upon 22-year-old German-Haitian songwriter Bibi Bourelly. Discovered on Instagram, Bourelly was introduced to Kanye West and, more broadly, to the songwriting industry in perpetual need of young creatives to lend the stars some trickle-up swag. After some abortive writing for Usher, Bourelly found a taker in Rihanna, whose albums are a pretty reliable microcosm of songwriting trends; of her prolific output, Rih cut the brash pre-Anti single “Bitch Better Have My Money” and the sloshed torch song “Higher.” The songs could scarcely be different in production—the former set to grinding trap by Travis Scott, the latter to relatively tranquil soul—but Bourelly’s influence is stark and clear.
Where former Rih surrogates like Ester Dean assembled songs explicitly around hooks, retrofitting words and meaning later, Bourelly’s approach is more that of an open-mic songwriter: sprawling, unfiltered, every lyric sung to the breaking point. The Rihanna stint turned into a deal with Def Jam and several solo singles, compiled on an EP this May: the on-the-nose Free the Real (Pt. 1). Unfiltered was certainly the aim, or at least a version of authenticity filtered through folk and acoustic rock. Single “Sally” is a bluesy ruckus of handclaps and scuzzed-up guitar, “Ego” twangy and stalking, “What If” almost grunge. Though the EP perhaps demonstrated more promise than mastery, it was certainly her own.
Pt. 2 is much of the same: more notebook sketches of titles (“Poet,” “Untitled”) and more acoustic cuts that bear little resemblance to pop, R&B, or—refreshingly—the vast swath of alt-pop artists tipped as her peers. Bourelly’s age and pop gigs have saddled her with comparisons to precocious pop quirkers like Alessia Cara and Lorde, but they’re a poor fit. Her actual predecessors are closer to PJ Harvey or Janis Joplin, and—for better and worse—she comes off less as a pre-branded star and more as a writer finding her voice in real time. Her literal voice is unsurprisingly strong and versatile: sometimes zero-fucks blasé, sometimes scratchy and vulnerable, and sometimes—as on her Rihanna ballads—a confrontational belt.
But her writing voice is the main draw: the voice of a girl who grew up on hip-hop and saw no reason why it couldn’t coexist with folk-rock or country. There’s perennial talk, of course, about young artists growing up in the streaming era being unbound by genres; in particular, 2016 has found almost every pop star dabbling in acoustic genres (cynically, perhaps driven by Top 40’s playlists shrinking and the increasing dominance of country and AC formats). Bourelly sounds like it was her idea all along.
The downside to being unformed is there’s still a lot you’ve got to get out of your system. On this EP, that’s “Poet.” It’s got the slickest production on the album: rock-radio sheen, with precisely timed strings and backing-singer interjections. But it’s also got the hook “you’re my Kurt Cobain,” and its other metaphors—cocaine, rock’n’roll—aren’t much better. Bourelly’s other material, thankfully, is far more compelling: the prickly guitar intro and plainspoken disses of “Flowers” (“I may smoke a lot of marijuana/But I’m not your little whore”); the assured stomp of “Fool,” and especially the single “Ballin.”
It’s the best song written to date about the precarious quasi-fame one can fall into as a rising artist, where you can write multiple Rihanna hits, make the magazine rounds and 25 Under 25 roundups, sing on Colbert, be highly Googleable, and yet still be broke as fuck. Bourelly begins the track by announcing, as casually as you’d mention a papercut, getting fired from Old Navy; then, with this-too-will-pass assurance, she continues through the details: dodging landlords, jumping subway turnstiles, living off ramen and hot sauce, feeling ambivalent about the paparazzi who are one degree of separation away. As a montage of the music-industry fairytale as it looks to those living it, it’s striking. But as a snapshot of Bibi Bourelly’s career, judging by her material it may soon prove itself quite modest.
