WATCH: Yola, “Stand for Myself”

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: “My school years were during the 90s and 00s, and Missy Elliott’s 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 haven’t 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 I’m not. I’m just a person trying to be free.

“The song’s protagonist ‘token’ has been shrinking themselves to fit into the narrative of another’s 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.” — Yola

Directed by Allister Ann.
Photo credit: Seth Dunlap