"Vibe (If I Back It Up)" Cookiee Kawaii

Monday 15th June 2020

Release date: Out now Label: The Cookiee Jar

With over 45 MILLION SPOTIFY STREAMS alone (to date), COOKIEE KAWAII's "VIBE" is a force of it's own reckoning & now EXCLUSIVE to 1ST STOP & the UK, this "VIBE (IF I BACK IT UP)" comes in an all new MAJESTIC REMIX !

Cookiee Kawaii didn’t have any of this planned. When the rapper set to work on her viral hit “Vibe,” it was the product of seeing her frequent producer TrillzAl post the instrumental to Instagram and swiftly asking him to take it down for her use. “I can listen to a thousand beats and most of them, I’ll probably say, ‘I don't like that,’” she explains. “But there's always something about the few that I can hear myself on. I instantly got inspired and could write to it, and it kind of went from there.”

Since becoming Kawaii’s breakthrough smash in Feb. 2020, “Vibe,” underscored by a mellifluous dreamscape accented by dance floor-commanding rhymes and a snapping beat, has become a TikTok sensation without a signature dance move or #challenge, being used nearly two million times and featured in clips that have generated tens of millions of views. With over 50 million cumulative streams, “Vibe” has quickly become the foremost social media sensation of the year, gracing videos from celebrities and influencers spanning Doja Cat and Perez Hilton to James Charles and gaining momentum as one of TikTok’s biggest success stories.

But that’s far from the beginning for Kawaii, an Irvington, New Jersey native who’s been a local ambassador for Jersey Club music since she started recording nearly a decade ago. “I’ve been listening to club music for as long as I can remember, so my interest in making a club song was definitely there from the moment I started making music,” she explains. “I just didn’t know how to go about it.”

From a young age, Kawaii cultivated her taste for music at home, born to parents who were both DJs. Between trips to Guitar Center to scope out equipment, she soaked up the sounds of everything spanning jazz to neo-soul playing around the house, getting her first taste of performing as part of a choir while attending Catholic school. That coincided with a spark for poetry in the fifth grade, but it wasn’t until 2011 that she began merging both interests and crafting music of her own.

She selected her name for her love of the baked good (Cookiee) and her infatuation with anime (Kawaii is Japanese for “cute”), and posted her first publicly released song, the aerobic “Move Ya Waist,” to Soundcloud in 2013. Her sound early on was in a traditional Jersey Club vein, fast-paced and bombastic, inspired by the energy she felt going to parties in her home state. But she soon explored softer textures and terrains as time went on—all without losing the foundation of her Jersey Club roots. “I incorporate other genres by experimenting with multiple different types of beats,” she says. “I’m never afraid to change my pitch or experiment with layering or melodies. I always try to do something funky or different when I write my music.”

After settling into a sonic groove with longtime producer jtbs., she released her debut mixtape ZEN in 2016, an early blueprint for the sound she gradually developed. But it wasn’t until last year that she hit her stride, branching out to streaming services to release “Vibe” and following with a string of singles that led to her debut EP Club Soda, Vol. 1. The six-song set, which features the second installment of “Vibe,” is a testament to her growth over the years, an assured and confident with its buttery tones, relaxed raps and cloudy, Jersey Club-indebted beats. Nearly all the songs on the EP clock in at less than two minutes, and flow in the same vein as “Vibe,” from the dulcet thwack of “Hit Me Onna Gram” to the guitar-powered “Ride on Top.”

“It's all about Jersey Club music,” she says. “That's the culture, that's the sound I'm trying to represent. When I was creating Club Soda, even the title, I wanted it to be about giving people a glassful of the Jersey Club sound and a taste of me.”

Today, with Jersey Club slowly making its way to the mainstream on singles from artists like Drake and Ciara, Kawaii is ready to be its torchbearer, bringing her local sound to the masses not just with “Vibe” but also with her ever-growing discography. “This is a time where we could get a little more spotlight on the culture,” she says. “We’ve had a lot of different moments where things have kind of been on the spotlight for us but no one was really there to full force carry the torch. So I feel like this could open a lot of doors for Jersey, and Jersey Club, in total.”

Posted by Craig Jones