It’s not the fall you fall, But the rise you rise…
This couplet, which opens the title track Climb, cuts right to the ethereal and powerful musical persona that is so prevalent in all of Queen Ifrica’s work: I’ma keep on shining, I’ma climb oh ooh.
A universal mantra of some sorts, but one acutely fixed to anyone going through varied hardships, Queen Ifrica has always personified the idea of being the change that one wants to see while embracing the practicality of everything happening in its own time. It’s easy to get caught up with the fast-paced generation of the here-and-now, but in most recent times Ifrica has left many critics with the lingering question of ‘why?’. Why did it take so long to release her third studio album? Why now?
“That’s the question I’ve been answering a lot lately,” she chuckled capturing humour in her signature smile. “It was not deliberate first of all. The Montego Bay album came out around 2009/2010 and this album was in the making shortly after but along the way I got pregnant, my son is five years of age now, so that helped to push it back a bit. The thing for me is that I didn’t want to put out an album in a space where no one is paying attention to what you’re doing, so that was one of the factors where my team and I wanted to ensure the time was right then we’d put the album out. Taking a gamble on that was good because it has been an eight year gap really.”
Having made its debut at number one on the Billboard Reggae Chart, Climb embodies the idea of uplifting one’s self through various hardships and finding a sense of inner most strength that you didn’t know existed before.
“The overall message of the album is a lot of reminding to climb in different ways and different ways of saying motivate yourself and different ways of saying climb to your better self,” quipped the Reggae crooner. “For instance I have a song on called I Can’t Breathe, which is talking about Eric Garner and what happened in the United States with numerous cases of police brutality but the special thing about that song is the fact that I was going through Facebook and saw Samuel L. Jackson crying on there singing that chorus and he was challenging everyone who was doing the ice bucket challenge at the time to sing that chorus that he was singing. And at the time I wasn’t really paying attention to the melody but more so the pain that he was expressing through his tears. Because even though he’s a well known star he was still fearful for his life,” she continued.
Grief supposedly takes place over five stages, but when one takes on to themselves the mantle of discussing it, performing and revisiting all of its correlated emotions and memories, that process is a little more complex. But for Ifrica, it wasn’t a difficult task but more so an opportunity to empower persons.
To Read More: Purchase your copy of Volume 9 #3– July-August 2017