“Jasmine Armani, known best by her stage name, BbyAfricka, is a modern inventor and artist.” This is what her Wikipedia should read. She is constantly in the process of reinvention and innovation. She is married to her craft.

On Above Average, BbyAfricka fires them out of the cannon. Heavy-hitter after heavy-hitter, the album traverses sonic worlds. It’s like being in a rocketship, watching the world go by, enveloped by resonant trap beats or sexy, sensual synths. She blurs the lines between genres, dripping syrupy-sweet, early 2000s pop nostalgia atop of Weezy-era beats to make magic, to encapsulate desire, drama, dancing in the club. Songs like Dumbo or Designer Boots feel as though they could take the place of Rick Ross’ 9 Piece as the characters in Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring drive around LA. A Cancer sun and a Virgo rising, her calm, dreamy aura exudes off of her through the screen when she rings me on a sunny afternoon in Los Angeles.

For loyal BbyAfricka listeners, they might be pleasantly surprised by the pivot. She hinges on the classic signifiers of the classic BbyAfricka sound with melodic, trancelike pop elements. When I ask her about her process for approaching an album, she puts the shift into context. “Working with new producers or meeting new people gives me fresh inspiration. It opens my world up to other possibilities and shifts my perspective. If you asked me five years ago what I thought I’d be, or that I’d have a song with artists like Ayesha Erotica and Brokencyde, making electronic music, I probably never would have imagined myself doing that. I think getting bored or meeting new people is important to that. I’ve been doing this for a while, and I’m definitely more experienced now. Because of that, in a lot of ways I’ve impressed myself and proven to myself what I can do. It’s led me to challenge myself, like “okay, let’s try a new genre,” do something that is completely different from what I usually do and see how I can do that or see how well I can do that, or try to take it to the next level. That’s always my theme when it comes to keeping the process engaging.”

The music industry often confines artists to ‘eras’ or visual presentations to do the legwork for music that hasn’t been fleshed out completely. She’s less worried about setting the parameters for the album before she ever gets to explore what might come out in the studio. She’s busy making, making, making. She quips, “I never really have a concept in mind before the album’s already done. I’m always recording so I’ll end up not even having the specific type of style or genre I want to do when I go to the studio. I’ll figure it out or go with the vibes, or whatever me, the engineers, and the producers are feeling in that moment. Then, I make different varieties of songs and pick out the ones I think would fit on a tape together and coexist well.” It’s rare to find artists not so easily swayed by industry pressures, or who possess the aesthetic sensibilities to translate into a popular cultural language for the masses to understand. Perhaps that’s the joy in it for the listener; she’s always been the if you know, you know kind of artist, the deep cut you drop with a friend who’ll become obsessed with her too, soon enough. You feel it in every word. She’s a bastion of the progenitorial generation, defined by her ability to make something that pushes the culture forward. It sticks. Funnily enough, I explain to her that I was put onto her music by an ex. “Shit, at least they were good for something.” We laugh.

Much of her music possesses a theatricality about it; an awareness of the audience, her lyrics flowing naturally from the source, engaging a deep-rooted soulfulness and truthfulness in the dramaturgy. If all the world’s a stage, BbyAfricka stands at the helm, delivering lines of poetry to all those who gather to listen to her in perfect rhythm. This time though, her soliloquies narrate the complexities of womanhood; beyond the reactionary ‘girl boss,’ instead an autonomous, fuckless, radical, sapphic domination to liberate the world. “There’s a mix of fantasy and writing from personal experience in my music. Sometimes I’ve had a problem expressing myself verbally, so I’d write. I’d write about my reality, stuff I was going through and feeling, which translated into my music. Now, I would say I write more in a mode of fantasy because it can be hard to write about the same things without making the same kind of music I’ve already made. Living more and traveling more helps my writing process when I’m not writing from a place of fantasy, but fantasy is a space for me to manifest and create something new.” The empowerment of what she does from the outset lives in this tension between fantasy and reality. There’s somehow space for both realms to converge, and maybe a metaphor for the ongoing contradictions that make up what it means to be a woman.

As a fan of BbyAfricka’s, I know she’s multitalented. She’s inclined to music, fashion, images, anything that takes her. She embodies a relentless and unapologetic commitment to beauty and brains while figuring out how to innovate genre. There isn’t a single skip on Above Average. In many ways, the album feels responsive to the mass influx of electronic music from artists across genres, but not because she’s trying to make something comparable. Above Average puts itself in conversation with the present culture and still possesses a timelessness about it. There are many moments across the album that suspend you in a different time while reconfiguring what nostalgia means; something new comes about for us as the listeners. 

The album materialized that way, too. She explains, “I don’t think I’ve ever made completely left-field music in relation to things that are currently in. Maybe I’ve done things probably earlier than they start to happen, but I think it just makes sense, and I definitely see the 2000s influences in this album. I don’t always intentionally go into sessions doing that or with a specific thing that I’m trying to  make happen, but I feel that on this tape, there have definitely been sessions where I’ve worked with producers and been like oh my God, this has that 2000s kind of feel. Then I get inspired and start listening to, like, Danity Kane and a bunch of it-girl, girlgroup music from back in the day. Those vibes were hard–hard, but sexy. That definitely had some pull on this album. I started seeing it as doing the songs, and then doing each song, I was like okay, this is just the vibe of the album. It’s giving 2000s with a little bit of old BbyAfricka.”

The thread that connects the past to the present in Jasmine’s music is a running balance of old and new, death and rebirth.  “BbyAfricka is what she is to everyone, not just to me. She feels like a persona or extension of me or who I might have been in the past. When I was in the hospital and then after I came out, I kind of had to remind myself of who I was and what I could do. It made me want to jump back into it. I don’t think I see BbyAfricka as just a musical person…she’s also like my younger self, and maybe why I sometimes feel detached from her. I feel like BbyAfricka’s like young me, or a me that was kind of just lost, trying to figure things out, and not understanding things but trying things. At this current moment, I know myself so much better. Sometimes there are parts of her from my younger self that I don’t want to follow me in terms of what I’m doing now. But on the other hand, I see that we shouldn’t cut off the childlike parts of ourselves, or our innocence.” As her sound matures and undergoes metamorphosis, so does she. In that way, BbyAfricka, the artist is a project of experimentation and change. As she continues to funnel her ideas into clear cohesive projects, she will continue to be BbyAfricka, the radical innovator who existentially challenges convention.

On what’s next, the world awaits excitedly. “I’m ready to take it to the next level. With my music, I want to develop newer sounds that impress me or even focus more on mixing. With mixing, one of my favorite things to do is incorporate all of my favorite sounds into one. I feel like people try to stick to one genre, but you can make new genres and incorporate new sounds. We don’t always have to do shit that we’ve already heard before…People are getting too comfortable trying to do something that’s already been done, and I feel like you lose yourself doing that. I’m excited to learn more, explore more, live more, and see the things that I create and the people that I meet and create things with. Whether that’s modeling or music or anything else, there’s always fun things that come from that mindset.” Jasmine, the modern woman, and BbyAfricka continue to unify. All of the things from the past make up the whole; the present justifies the past. There’s no one without the other.

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Photographer: Kevin Sikorski.
Art Director: Tsiann Alexa.
‍Makeup Artist: Selena Ruiz.
‍Hairstylist: Keller Armani.
‍Artist Manager: Kim Hu.
‍Producers: Kim Hu & Tsiann Alexa