H.E.R. ESTABLISHES A NEW DIRECTION WITH DJ KHALED'S 'WE GOING CRAZY' (FT. MIGOS)

 Dj Khaled dropped a new album almost two weeks ago (Khaled Khaled) , filled with famous collaborators (Justin Bieber, Lil Wayne, Jay-Z, Post Malone, Meghan Thee Stallion...). The third track on the project is We Going Crazy (ft. H.E.R. and Migos). It is the first release for the R&B singer since she received the Oscar for Best Original Song (Fight For You from Judas and the Black Messiah) and it consolidates the more urban direction H.E.R's career is taking. 

H.E.R. gained popularity in 2017, with her single Focus, with smooth , soothing vocals and shimmering production. In 2017 she featured on Daniel Caesar's Best Part, which won a Grammy for Best R&B Performance and made both artists the face of a new trend of r&b, that was cleaner than the common contemporary and urban R&B , gave importance to soulful vocals and relied on more classic instrumentation. 

In 2018, she received five nominations to the Grammys and ended up wining two (the one for Best Part and the award for Best R&B album for her self-titled EP). Since then, everything has gone pretty wild and fast. She kept on doing soulful and intrumental R&B, like it is shown on Carried Away and As I am, but the singles were more urban and contemporary, like Could've Been (ft. Bryson Tiller) and 21, where H.E.R. explores her rapper skills. Songs released in 2018 and 2019 were collected on different EPs by the title of I Used To Know H.E.R. (The Prelude and Part 2), following the same strategy of her previous EPs. By 2019 , she released Hard Place, nominated for Record and Song Of The Year at last year's Grammys . This was a single and to complete the circle, she released an album compilation, just like she did with her previous project. The EP was released on August the 30th 2019 , feeling late and only one day before the Grammys election period was closed (August 31st). Since she won the Grammys, it feels like everything is oriented towards it, with no plan for a debut album in two years. The point is that the Grammys have been awarding her for a long time, almost with every release and in the main categories, making her an album of the year contender without even dropping an album.

Last year, H. E. R started to have commercial success with Slide (ft YG). This song went popular on tik tok and it's the kind of track that Spotify selects for their are and be Playlist. She talks about money and sex, introducing hip hop culture topics, like celebrating the color of your car's upholstery ('Seats crème brûlée, what they gon' say?). She had such success that she released a remix (ft A Boogie With da Hoodie, Chris Brown and Pop Smoke) that contains one of the nastiest and most obscene sex sentences:'Said I'm 'bout to put this condom on right now'. What is necessary to include this line? Was there a need of being such explicit? There are a lot of ways to talk about sex but this way is raw and far from something artistic and from the feelings that H.E.R. usually sings about in her songs. 

Another side H.E.R has been lately exploring is reggae, like in her collaboration with Skip Marley (Slow Down) . We Going Crazy has that reggae touch, obtained by the Shawty Low's sample and Mandrill's Children Of The Sun (Shawty Low sampled in his hit this 70s track) and the hip/hop urban vibe. Let's analyse H.E.R. 's part on the track:

1. There's autotune in H.E.R's voice:Just in the first 30 seconds of the song you will notice that H.E.R.'s voice is autotuned. Was it necessary? The singer has got an amazing voice and she has a great vocal range even live so, why autotuning her voice when she could do it perfectly without it? 

This is one of my favourite live performances of h.e.r (Singing Carried Away for The Late Late Show)

2.Her verse: The song and the video are made to be a song of the summer candidate, shot in paradisiacal beaches. This makes us not to hope for depth in topics,but this is the most generic verse H.E.R has done. Actually, any other R&B/urban could have made this verse. It includes sentences about You Only Live Once, money and references OnlyFans. It's a really empty verse, it's like they wanted to get to the chorus again and showing off talking about money seems so far from h.e.r 's style.

H.E.R is experimenting and exploring new directions, which is a need for an artist and a sign of evolution , but , she is losing depth in feelings and lyrics and trust in instrumentation (the simple beat (snap track with 'acoustic guitar' on Come Through, ft Chris Brown), which made her stand out a few years ago.