If she sounds black and white, hard and soft, rich and poor, it is because her world is full of those competing factions too. The sounds she heard on the streets of Notting Hill, the brassy calypso and raga of Carnival mingling with the ringtone pop emanating from fast food joints the splash and funk of the locale’s black music history engaging with the elegant noise of gentrification. Her music is the contents of her young brain spilling out into song. Rita has a natural propensity toward mixing street-beats with pop. She managed to keep one step ahead of the stop-starts and false alarms of anyone treading tentatively into the shark pond of the London creative elite, enjoying notable highs. Guided by her innate performance instinct, as well as her developing and hugely impressive powerhouse vocal range, she began dipping her toes into the local music industry in West London as an early teen. "I wasn’t made to feel aware of what we had come from," she says, "but obviously when you grow up you get to learn something of what your parents went through to get you where you are today. Her mother, father and elder sister decamped to London before her first birthday. Rita was born the second of two girls in war-torn Kosovo at the start of the 90s. I understood the power of it straight away." It was a new, exciting way of expressing myself.
I made a noise, the reaction was positive. It was about self-esteem, even back then, at a young age. It was just about doing something that inspired a reaction. This is where the magic started: "What drew me most to singing was the fact that I could make a noise that made me feel good about myself. If "Hot Right Now" has temporarily rocked the British pop chart, her solo material is about to blow its mind. Regardless, the breakout smash success of her first number one looks very much like the dress rehearsal, the overture or prelude to the main act: Rita Ora solo. "He started a tiny drum and bass record label back in the day, now here he is with its first number one? That’s incredible for him. "That was Fresh’s triumph," she gifts the producer, though it's clear her soaring vocals lend the propulsive tune a hefty portion of its personality. The fact that she has already made British chart history as the vocalist on one of the first ever drum and bass number one singles here, DJ Fresh’s "Hot Right Now", is almost brushed aside. But I am still really, really nervous about it all." It might even be all I’m ever any good at. So why is she so palpably shy of celebrating herself? "Because, you know what? I might seem confident about all this. Rita is one of the few British female singers that has emerged singing the opening bars of her career ready for world star status. A composite of street-smarts of the metropolitan life she was schooled in and pure, urgent, otherworldly star quality, she makes for a brilliantly contradictory mix. She might not have been born this way, but she was recognizably named it.īuzz acts come and go, but the pertinent feeling amongst those that have heard the results of her knockout first round in the recording studio as a bona fide solo star, accompanied by a blue chip roster of production hands, is that the effect Rita Ora has locally is about to translate to the upper terrains of the global pop market. There is no mistaking the fact that Saturday night in Notting Hill is brightened by a touch of Rita’s special aura. Strangers look on with a discernible, barely contained ‘wow’. She bumps knuckles with the coat check chicks and management with the same egalitarian smile. She greets the bar staff dotted in the hostelries of her neighborhood like old friends, mostly because they are. If there is a sense when Rita Ora walks into a room that a star has already been ordained from above then nobody appears to have told the young Londoner and future pop princess herself.
0 kommentar(er)
