What’s amazing about South Korean rapper Tymee is her ability to go from super cute and sweet, to super dark and deep, to super badass and fierce, and then back to super super cute, but always sounding genuine and plausible in all these styles.
Less attentive people might think she’s too mutable and inconsistent; but if you really take the time to know her story, you’ll see how her music reflects her true self in a way that everyone can relate.
Human nature has lots of colours, and Tymee embraces all of them. Her music is a reflection of this: she has all types of songs, from melancholic to romantic, from aggressive to club anthems.
As for the lyrics, her passion for music is the most recurrent theme, like in “To heart”.
“To heart” was first released circa 2006, when Tymee went by the name of Napper, as a beginner rapper in the underground scene of Hongdae (a neighbourhood in Seoul, South Korea). The instrumental, then, was a mix of the strength of hip hop with the softness of the piano, like a perfect metaphor for her dual yet harmonic relationship with music: it’s a fire that keeps her alive, but it also calms her heart. It’s intense but sweet at the same time.
Years later, Tymee added more pieces of lyrics to the song and changed the instrumentals to a "bossa nova" (a Brazilian rhythm that is pretty much a combination of jazz and Brazilian Samba) inspired beat.
Tymee is a superb lyricist with the rare gift of not wasting one single line, always spitting amazing metaphors and wise quotes, while keeping an incredible rhyme scheme and a high level flow delivering pattern, all the time.
Her obsession with well written lyrics in a style that is completely unique, along with her ease with not being afraid to transit between different moods (dark, sad, happy, sweet), shows nothing but her commitment to stay true to herself through all seasons, no matter how life presents itself.
The outcome is overall very optimistic, like we get from songs like “To heart”.
The new lyrics of the 2014 version metalinguistically address her relationship with the song itself, and everything she has been through in the meantime: “Dust collecting in heavily between the lyrics I wrote / Hidden and eagerly calling out for me, my heart's siren / In reality, I get beaten up for life and death, fight / Even when the sun rises, I can’t fall asleep, I go all night”.
The fact that almost a decade separates the two versions of the song, but most of the lyrics were kept, means that she still relates to the feelings of when she first wrote them. However, the 2014 version ends in a more positive way (and even the beat feels a little more upbeat and laid-back than the 2006 beat), as she says “I will survive with nothing but music / This is an never-ending game my heart started / My name is Tymee / Yeah, check it, I'm back”, and as the the chorus endorses her generally positive behaviour by saying: “It’s gonna be alright / Keep it real and keep your life”. It seems like a very beautiful lesson learned through years of struggles: to trust her faith in life and the love for music that she has always had deep inside herself.
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About the curator: Ana Clara Ribeiro
Music, art and entertainment have always played a big role in the life of Ana Clara Ribeiro. She grew up in Gurupi (an inland city in Tocantins, the youngest State of Brazil), listening to all kinds of music, reading, writing, watching stuff and connecting them to her personal beliefs and other ideas she read about.
As she became a lawyer and a writer, all the topics to which she is constantly exposed continued to give her insights about life, people and the universe, through the lenses of art.
Nowadays, when she isn’t analyzing lawsuits or producing content about Law, Marketing, Business or Music, she is certainly doing something related to her various personal and professional projects, always to the sound of a playlist as eclectic as her life.
