DawgGoneDavis’ first single, Middle Age Woman – Hip Hop Style, announced her arrival on the indie music scene with a smirk and hearty laugh as she upended modern hip hop for her own comedic devices. Her latest two singles, Forever Music and Butt on Fiya, continues establishing her reputation as one of the foremost parodists working in music today. The person behind the persona, Rebecca Rogers Davis, has a lifelong love affair with music that she’s finally exploring as a sideline to her day job working in IT management. It’s obvious that she has a tremendous amount of musical creativity to go along with her sense of humor and it makes these two new singles some of the most entertaining fare you’ll hear in 2018.
Forever Music may sound, based on title alone, like some paean to the glories of musical art, but it’s instead a serio-comic reflection on the role music serves in modern life and how a lot of musicians struggle to get by and be heard. The emphasis on the comic elements are much greater and manifest themselves through more than just her lyrical content – like any good humor, a lot of DawgGoneDavis’ success depends on her delivery. She has a knack for giving her vocals a theatrical quality without ever running off the rails into inaccessible self indulgence. DawgGoneDavis is clearly a performer intent on entertaining audiences rather than herself, but there’s no question that the level of commitment she brings towards realizing a song like this demands she satisfy her own standards as well.
It’s a relatively brief song at three and a half minutes in length and never wastes any motion. The second single Butt on Fiya is significantly longer, but the same focus on functionality rather than useless ornamentation dominates her songwriting approach. The second single is much more in the mold of Middle Age Woman – Hip Hop Style than Forever Music is, but it’s still leaps and bounds ahead of her earlier single thanks to the level of care obviously taken to get each of its components over with listeners. The percussion remains the foundation of everything she does and the drum track for Butt on Fiya has the same fun swagger we heard with Forever Music but, overall, this is a much more synthesizer dependent number. The drum track is, undoubtedly, pre-programmed as well, but it’s produced in such a way that casual listeners will never notice the lack of live drumming.
Her continued collaboration with producer Hellmut Wolf will likely result in even greater achievements to come. She’s currently assembling and working on material for a full length release and, when that album drops, we’re sure to be treated to one of the more unique hip hop influenced albums in recent memory. Rebecca Rogers Davis may slave away for The Man during her days, but we hear her real vocation here – she’s a songwriter and born entertainer who will hopefully continue writing and recording new music for some time to come.
Check out the project on Google Play or KKBOX.
