She also literally road tests her works in progress. Her ability to float above the beats but ground her songs in pure melody with provocative themes has drawn comparisons to Frank Ocean and Drake. “I love to write in my mind as I’m driving - I put on a track, an instrumental, and just ride around and see what I come up with.”Īiko sings in ethereal, Japanese-inflected phrasing reminiscent of Sade that can pivot, in the space of a single song - as on “The Worst,” from her acclaimed 2013 EP Sail Out, into impassioned streetwise rap: “Everybody’s like, he’s no item, please don’t like him/ He don’t wife them, he one-nights them…” On “Comfort Inn Ending (Freestyle),” a bonus track from the EP, she embroiders large swaths of the song with introspective lyrics that teeter between rap and jazz-style scat. It’s that time behind the wheel that nurtures her creative process. “I still like to take really long drives,” she says. I was the only one injured - busted my chin open, chipped a tooth, broke my wrist.” Scary as the accident was, it didn’t change her view of driving. Someone made an illegal U-turn in front of us. All of my brothers and sisters wanted to drive - I was always OK with not driving.” Her first car was the doomed Prius. (She’s 26 now.) “I’m the youngest of five. “I like SUVs because I’m small and this is my time to have an advantage,” says Aiko, who grew up in Los Angeles’ Baldwin Hills but didn’t get her license until she was 22. Triple-sealed doors, double-paned glass and active noise cancellation lend the impression of driving a leather-lined bank vault. It features stacked LED headlights, a 6.2 liter V-8 engine with 20 more horses than its predecessor and a refurbished interior bristling with technology, including a heads-up display, five USB ports, 4G LTE wireless connectivity and automatic braking when the car perceives an imminent collision. The 2015 Escalade that Aiko steers with her slender hands represents a stem-to-stern reboot that boasts an even more aggressive fascia. Hip-hop’s embrace of the Escalade and its effect on sales (in 2006 alone, more than 62,000 of the high-margin brutes were sold) worked like a pair of defibrillator paddles on Cadillac’s wheezing corporate corpus. Starting with the Escalade’s second generation in 2002, which introduced the SUV’s distinctive slanted prow, the many rappers who have featured the Escalade in videos or name-checked it in lyrics include Big Tymers, Lil’ Kim, Nelly, Kanye West, OutKast, Ludacris, Jay Z, The Game, 50 Cent, Usher and Ja Rule. The Escalade has a long - and for Cadillac, extremely profitable - relationship with urban artists.
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