BENEE – Hey u x (2020)
The COVID-19 pandemic has exacted an incalculable cost to just about everything and everyone, everywhere.
First are the lives that have been extinguished, especially among the aged, the ill and the elsewise-vulnerable who never stood a chance against its ravages, as well as their attending frontline healthcare professionals who died trying to save them.
Next are those who have survived the illness proper, but have not fully recovered and now face an uncertain future for their health and well-being. The unknown for those victims must be terrifying.
Then there are those who have lost their jobs and livelihoods, or have found themselves un- or under-employed to such an extent that providing for their families and themselves has become a desperate exercise. Pay-the-rent-or-feed-the-kids is a soul-shattering predicament. This is especially heartbreaking in those under-evolved countries that are quite well-heeled (read ‘filthystinkingrich’) and still opt out of universal healthcare, wealth distribution and robust social programs, heightening the threat of misery for, again, only its most vulnerable.
[ed. Don’t like the soapbox? Read another blog.]
Throat-choking too, the straits of those who have dedicated their lives to building businesses that employed people and enriched communities by their excellence, their innovation, their sense of collective culture and their passion. Doing something else or starting over is not only cruel, it impoverishes their locale simply by having less of them in it.
Way down the list are those who simply missed out on milestones, good fortune or the spoils of best-laid plans. Of course, those costs are nowhere near the above scenarios, but they’re no small beer either. You will only have one highschool graduation (and its consequent, the pickley stupor of Frosh Week). A lifecycle event like a wedding, achievement ceremony, or other point-in-time celebration that was either delayed, downgraded or scrubbed altogether still represents someone’s wasted dream. There are millions of these, big and small, and although it’s hard to shed tears for those things in light of greater tragedies and impoverishments, their realness and aggregate cost is still fuel for the pyre. There has been precious little to keep our spirits up through this shared misery.
Our feature act fits into that last bucket. And, based on her sense of self-awareness and breezy gratitude, she seems to be doing just fine thanks.
Stella Bennett is a twenty-year-old Kiwi. That’s the same country that produced Prime Ministerial Goddess of Sanity Jacinda Ardern and a resolute, effective response to a novel coronavirus pandemic. Stella goes by the handle BENEE, which she used to spell BENE, but everyone pronounced it variously ‘bean’ or ‘beanie’ or ‘buh-NEE’ or ‘buh-NAY’ or ‘BEH-NAY’ or ‘Benny’. Now everyone pronounces it variously ‘buh-NEE’ or ‘buh-NAY’ or ‘BEH-NAY’ or ‘Benny’. So, job done.
Stella’s commitment to her musical career has had detours, but she’s been actively writing, recording and performing since 2017 across social as well as more traditional channels. EP’s in the past two years have featured songs released as singles, videos and other online artifacts. And while her following grew steadily, it was on TikTok that her breakout song, Supalonely, exploded all over the ecosystem. Now she was on a rocketship.
That is, until the pandemic shut her down like a dirty restaurant. Just as she was about to hit global stadium status, the megaconcerts, transcontinental flights, talkshow appearances and bottomless-drink parties seized abruptly. It was a breakout, stillborn. And though she was always accessible through the online media that launched her, it’s been a relatively unclimactic debut.
Her first full-length album, Hey u x, was released earlier this month by remote control. And although she’s availed herself of the talkshow circuit (featured musical guestings on Colbert, Fallon, and other local and international spots), she is unfortunately missing the experiential boost that massive concerts lend, engagements she was otherwise sure to land. It’s coming, but, alas, in her flavour-of-the-month workplace, it’s not coming now or even soon.
The album’s thirteen cuts include Supalonely and other previously exposed pieces. Impressively, the remaining songs that fill out the menu are some of the best work on it. More impressively, she is her own songwriter, and not just for the lyrics. All the compositions are collaborations, but the stylistic thread that runs through all of them is squarely hers.
Her canvas is small: nothing over 3-4 minutes, everything in a fairly rigid pop-song template, and lightweight instrumentation. But her creative power within that little space is inspiring. Her melodic sense is both tuneful and daring and leaps way beyond her unapologetically young and underdeveloped voice. She’s not tonally adventurous, but her chordal harmonies are richer than most alt-pop singers will offer up. And her rhythmic dynamism is both sophisticated and infectious. Her voice lines are as much a part of the percussion battery as they are of the melodic story. No singing allegros here, she’s talking to her listeners in clear, declarative text and still manages to be colourful about it.
The superior track on this album is Plain, co-written and performed with one of Stella’s idols, Lily Allen, and featuring US rapper Tamia Carter (aka Flo Milli) for an electrifying bridge. The song is a bitter, childish, vindictive slag at an ex-lover’s new gf (Stella herself has tried to walk back the nastiness a bit with some additional context; it’s unconvincing). The meanness is – consciously or not – lain lie by the lonely, hollow brood of both the verse and the chorus, and the breathtaking changes in metre from full to cut time, from duplets to triplets (in the rap section). Her musicality utterly betrays her awfulness and regret. And so her music is doing to her exactly what music is supposed to do to every genuine musician: it’s showing us who she really is, whether she wants it to or not. And it’s not always pleasant.
There is some downside. As broad as her range of content is, there’s an over-reliance on some devices like treacly major-seventh chords and Britney-ish vocal ‘fry’. Her song forms, noted above, are simply unadventurous to the point of tiresome. And her instrumental acumen is a bit of an x-factor, which won’t necessarily limit her as a performer, but it will eventually hamper her development as a songwriter, particularly as she seems to favour collaboration there.
But jeez laweez, the kid’s only 140 in dog-years, and she’s only been at this for one COVID season and two non-COVID ones. She’ll bloom. And it’ll be very interesting to see how she develops both as a musician and as a person over the coming years.
Who knows, next year at this time you might have fun discussing it with 50,000 of your daughter’s nearest, dearest friends at a megastadium near you.
