Review
Genre and Mood
Y’akoto opens her debut album with Diamonds, a soul song with an R&B swing and a pop sense of economy. OkayAfrica, introducing its video in February 2012, called it a smooth excursion into golden R&B and heard a voice that couples Macy Gray’s raspiness with staccato pop choruses. Soulful and confident is how that combination lands: a grainy, lived-in voice and a chorus clipped short enough to stick.
Song Summary
Diamonds is the first track of Babyblues, released by Warner in Germany on 30 March 2012, but it is older than the album: the same recording, with the same ISRC, had already appeared on her Tamba EP in August 2011. Shazam credits the words and music to Y’akoto with Amo Jr. and the production to KAHEDI. Babyblues also carries a radio edit of about three minutes as its closing bonus track, and according to MusicBrainz the song was issued as a single in March 2012, with a remix by Lokito.
Musical Breakdown
No published review maps Diamonds section by section. What the sources do describe are its two poles: a raspy, soul-weathered voice, and choruses that OkayAfrica calls staccato pop, short and clipped rather than long and held. Listen for how the song moves between them, and for how much of its character rests on the grain of the voice rather than on the arrangement around it.
Concepts in Focus
A hook does not have to be long. The staccato choruses OkayAfrica describes are the opposite of a soaring soul refrain: short, separated phrases that land and repeat, which is exactly what makes a chorus easy to remember after one hearing.
Diamonds also exists in more than one length. The album recording runs 3:44, while the radio edit that closes Babyblues and leads the single runs about three minutes. A radio edit usually trims an intro, a repeat or an instrumental passage so a song fits a broadcast slot; comparing the two is a good way to hear which parts its makers thought were essential.
The music video, which OkayAfrica describes as styled like a vintage photo shoot, runs 3:17 on YouTube, shorter than the album version, so it too carries a cut of the song.
Artistic Context
Y’akoto is the stage name of Jennifer Yaa Akoto Kieck, born in Hamburg in 1988 to a German mother and a Ghanaian highlife musician father. She spent much of her childhood in West Africa, in Ghana, Cameroon, Chad and Togo, returned to Hamburg at eleven, formed her first band at thirteen and qualified as a dance teacher before signing with Warner Music. Wikipedia describes her music as a blend of neo-soul, blues, ambient pop and Afrobeats. Babyblues followed the Tamba EP, whose title song, also on the album, is about a child soldier.
Impact and Reception
Babyblues reached the German top 20, as did its 2014 successor Moody Blues, and Y’akoto was nominated for the Echo award for best national female rock/pop artist in 2013 and 2015. Diamonds opened both her first EP and her first album, and it is still the place to start: put it on and listen to the voice first.
