Four years since the debut of Uffie’s successful single “Pop The Glock,” the near-forgotten princess of the underground electronic scene has released her first album, Sex Dreams and Denim Jeans. Coming out this week, it’s a testament to the development of the 22-year old’s musical sensibilities, and its delay the consequence of laziness, pregnancy, and a one-year marriage.
Known for her talk-rap style, Uffie has created an album full of surprising melodies and soft-sweet harmonies, the disparate tracks establishing ample stylistic range and appeal, as especially evidenced in “ADD SUV” and “Difficult.” The use of Auto-Tune isn’t the stuff of hackneyed contemporaries, accentuating a honeyed robo-electronic dance sound.
The album, though years in the making, doesn’t speak to experience, but rather to a new-but-not-quite-wunderkind feel: Uffie, it’s clear, is still figuring out what can pass as bankable music and what cannot, with either truly bad or mocking lyrics that verge on – and reach – the laughable. The album is rife with on-the-offense disclaimers: “Let me clarify a few things/I never claimed to be an artist/I can’t even sing.” This and constant references to her popularity, as well as in-jokes as choruses, speak to a certain smugness.
To meditate on Sex Dreams is to meditate on Uffie’s legitimacy as an artist, though it’s difficult to parse through the layers of self-consciousness, bad lyrics and fake British accents to discern the sincerity of her music. Her ill-prepared, chance foray into music initiated her into a new brand of white, female rappers along with Ke$ha, though one might more appropriately liken her to Thierry Guetta – of “Exit Through the Gift Shop” fame – who she joins in the realm of part phenom, part fake. The sense that you get with Uffie is that a lot of her art consists of being in the scene. She identifies as an “entertainer, not a lyricist,” and one might suspect, part comedienne – because the album plays as half an ironic joke, seeing who’s scene enough to get tricked into buying in.