Artist: Yola
Hometown: Brighton, England
Song: “Stand for Myself”
Album: Stand for Myself
Release Date: July 30, 2021
Label: Easy Eye Sound
In Their Words: âMy school years were during the 90s and 00s, and Missy Elliottâs videos were always aesthetically superior to me. I feel that the video is set in the antechamber to freedom. The feeling of escaping something truly oppressive and heading towards an unknown with a sense of hope and choice you havenât felt in a long time. We all have the capacity to go through this process in our own minds, I kinda look like a superhero at times, but Iâm not. Iâm just a person trying to be free.
“The songâs protagonist âtokenâ has been shrinking themselves to fit into the narrative of anotherâs making, but it becomes clear that shrinking is pointless. This song is about a celebration of being awake from the nightmare supremacist paradigm. Truly alive, awake and eyes finally wide open and trained on your path to self actualisation. You are thinking freely and working on undoing the mental programming that has made you live in fear. It is about standing for ourselves throughout our lives and real change coming when we challenge our thinking. This is who I’ve always been in music and in life. There was a little hiatus where I got brainwashed out of my own majesty, but a bitch is back.â — Yola
Directed by Allister Ann.
Photo credit: Seth Dunlap
