Chin Chilla Sings For All The Women – Especially Herself On – Nipples
Appraisals of popular output from Kingston, where convention holds sway in the shadow of the dancehall music industry, tend to interpret a performer’s stance either as conformist or rebellious. Chin Chilla is one Kingston contender who’s no more confined to those polarized possibilities than any other type of binary. She’s a Black, outspoken woman, and a child of Chinese immigrants. An ex-evangelical worship leader, she long since moved on to the realm of pro songwriting and major label affiliation.
On social media, she talks about “sometimes dressing like a Chinese and jokes about being called “Chin” in the grocery store. In years’ worth of selfie-style diaristic dispatches, she’s espoused therapeutically knowledgeable and enthusiastically stoned insight into mental health crises.
It’s not like Chin Chilla is trying to be rebellious, not in the least. She learned well the principles by which congregational praise choruses and arena-friendly pop compositions alike can summon a sense of shared common ground.
Sincere and Unapologetic
Sincerity is her strong inclination. She simply operates with awareness that the artists seen as speaking for the masses have historically been cishet, men, who’ve enjoyed cultural centrality without having to acknowledge or interrogate the particulars of their own identities.
Or, to put it another way, only those with the luxury of presuming the dominance of their viewpoint have gotten to be the “everyman.” And she just so happens to possess the ambition and ability to connect that broadly with her music. In Chin Chilla‘s new song, facets of who she is and what she’s lived, seen and imagined, matters politicized by other people’s prejudices, are what provide the evocative details that serve as normalizing entry points to her anthemic expression.
Freedom Of Expression
The theme of her single Nipples is an attempt to break with oppressive orthodoxies and, in the face of the systemic devaluing of her life and the lives of other women, to express themselves freely, to strain toward self-healing and put real trust in closeness and mutuality. “If men can talk about fucking and slapping ass as they like, why can’t I? Am so tired of these double standards. I am not trying to be a rebel, I am just saying what other women are thinking but afraid to say.”
The Link Up
Initially self-released, in 2016, “Nipples” was created in pandemic isolation; she doodled her way to emotional, relational and social verities, mainly using the instruments, microphones and software she had on hand. The re-release, she entered into a partnership with Asani Ali and Believe that didn’t break her of DIY recording habits so much as vastly expand her cast of collaborators and enable her to pursue a wider array of sonic ideas.
Connect With Chin Chilla
Written and co-produced with some of the more flexible minds that operate out of or occasionally visit Kingston (Asani Ali, Footie, Father B, Jhonny B) and featuring dancehall, alt-rock, folk-pop and hip-hop guests (Groove Galore, Taddy P, Chris Birch, Mikey Fletcher), Chin Chilla ultimately arrived at a very homey version of pop-reggae maximalism.
Chin Chilla began “Nipples” by strumming a chord pattern into her iPhone in her backyard. That became the woolen, almost lo-fi acoustic guitar loop beneath a plea of R&B proportions. Halfway through, Groove Galore join her with a thumping, in the chest bass drum response, underscoring the way Chin Chilla , while conveying anguish, also invites participation.
My nipples are my weak spot. If a man get a chance to play with my nipples, he can turn me into his sex slave. I will do whatever he wants because I won’t be able to resist.
Chin Chilla
Entertainer
The track opens with personalized vignettes early on in the song. During “Nipples,” a Chin Chilla production that gradually gathers emo intensity before taking on a seductress harmonic grandeur, she gets straight to the point inviting her sexual partner to play with her “Nipples” until her womanhood gets wet, admitting that her nipple is her weak spot.
“Nipples,” whose burbling combo of lite-funk drums, Afrobeats syncopation and folkie guitars she cooked up with Asani Ali and Groove Galore, begins by zooming in on the weight of her sexual desires. “Mi know exactly wha mi want. You fi make mi pussy get wet,” she testifies, her phrasing subtly sinking toward melancholy. “Come play with mi nipples, come play with mi nipples, you fi make mi pussy get wet.” She broadens and brightens the view considerably during the chorus, the push she gives each line conveying the capaciousness of determined hope.
During a recent interview with Asani Ali’s Buzz Magazine, Chin Chilla recounts freeing herself from the Christian culture and creeds that defined her early life with a tight couplet: “Jesus raised me / Good weed saved me.”
“I feel like nothing’s hotter right now than religious trauma and cannabis,” she jokes when we speak in the upstairs bedroom she converted into a home studio. “So I think that’s probably the most relatable lyric on there.” When she left the religious settings where she’d too often seen racism and anti sexuality receive a righteous varnish, she resolved to continue working out for herself what it means to live a good and spiritual life. Whether or not listeners identify with how she traded one salve for another, her insistence during the chorus that revelations don’t come easily, that she “Just saying the word Pussy was taboo, a strict no, no, they would say you have the devil in you,” she laughs..
Chin Chilla doesn’t mind imperfect takes and much prefers in-the-moment feeling to flawless precision, but she’s not at all opposed to refining her abilities; she’s been taking voice lessons, in fact. Now she’ll seize on occasions that call for singing more freely and demonstratively, but that’s still tempered by her ruminative inclinations. Even when she paints a picture of a world in chaotic flux during “Nipples,” the kind of stock inventory of news that might prompt another artist to perform as if from a soapbox, she slips down descending vocal lines with engrossed, and engrossing, worry. So present is she in her singer-songwriter pop, through those variations in inflection and tone, that her grandest gestures have powerfully modest magnetism.
Chin Chilla has her own standards for measuring the success of her efforts, as she lays out in our conversation: “As I continue to be a musician, the question I keep at the forefront is, ‘Is this helping build bridges or is it hurting?’ Like, ‘Am I becoming a weird corporate shill, or something like that?’ “
A greater and more heartening possibility is that this song and the tours and exposure to come will establish her with mainstream crowds as a trustworthy voice, and one that speaks for Women as much as any Jamaica export. “I try to contribute to the community for good,” she allows thoughtfully, “so I think it’s fair to say that I can represent the country on some front.”
“Nipples” Is distributed by Asani Ali Music through Believe Digital Worldwide and is available on all major Digital Platforms.
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