Vagabon - The Embers

Imagine you are a petite black girl from Cameroon that moves to New York City in your teens. I can't imagine many other scenarios of somebody feeling such an outsider to everything, and that's pretty much the case of Laetitia Tamko, who besides of all that, wanted to do music. Knowing that she was very far from being a Taylor Swift or a Katy Perry, she found some refugee on the alternative scene, but found out that even there she couldn't find that many black girls like her, so she decided to transform all those sentiments into art, and in The Embers, the first single of her debut LP, she is telling us that feels like a small fish swimming in the middle of sharks.

Even when NYC is one of the most multicultural cities, you pretty much have a hard time being a girl, or black, or a foreigner; even worse if you are all of the above together; so for Vagabon, feeling invisible was the best case scenario; she felt threatened on a constant basis, and she is using her massive voice to expose her fragility.

The Embers is honest, has this raw DIY production elements that suit her personal story and statement, and it goes from softly showing us her insecurities to loudly, accompanied by a dirty electric guitar, expose a society that is not gentle against their minorities. Vagabon is an outcast, but she knows that, like herself, there are thousand of people out there that can't even find representation in the Beyoncés or the Jennifer Lopez, but if we turn our heads to the "more open" indie rock scene, there's a lack of black women, there's M.I.A., Santigold and Britany Howard from Alabama Shakes, but they have to rely on mixing rock with rap or soul (genres that are stereotypical for black people). So here is Laetitia, a small fish with a strong voice ready to tell everybody that black girls can do pure rock and they will have a few new things to offer, so we can probably learn a few things if we look and listen to her.