Lollise’s Afrofuturistic Pop Utopia
The Botswana-raised, New York-based artist talks about her dazzling pan-African paeans to family, fables, and home.
Lollise’s “eDube” video opens with a photo of the artist as a baby, dressed in a sweet blue pinafore and staring inquisitively at the camera from atop a yellow couch. Behind the photo, the current Lollise fades in, wearing a ruffled gown and standing regally with her arm aloft—the promise of the child manifested in the possibility of adulthood.
On the bright pop song, which is inspired by Congolese soukous and Nigerian highlife, Lollise sings in English and Kalanga, linking her current life in Queens, New York to her upbringing in Francistown, Botswana, where her family still lives. It unfurls into a powerful meditation on the melancholy of displacement, and she grapples with a dissonance that can accompany immigration—a sense of yearning in the background, even if the new place is instrumental to your self-actualization. “I mold myself to be the way that I be,” she sings, in the low voice of benediction. “I come, I go, my land remember me.”
The song is a highlight from Lollise’s debut full-length, I Hit the Water, a profound pop album that experiments with the genres she grew up hearing—kwaito, Xitsonga, Zimbabwean sungura, South African bubblegum—atop a foundation of forward-thinking synth melodies. Her throaty alto is warm and striking, with a range that vibrates in the low notes, and she layers herself into pyramidal harmonies as she explores topics of family, freedom and, occasionally, stunting. I Hit the Water is not memoir, Lollise tells me one summer day in Brooklyn, but it is an homage.
“My family is really beautiful, and I wanted to document that,” she says, whether in songs about her parents or simply when singing in Kalanga, the Bantu language of her birth, which is only spoken by about 200,000 people in the world. “It was just writing about my family and trying to communicate with them, both dead and alive, to be like: You did a great thing. And even if you don’t recognize me, it is because of your tenderness in raising me that I am this way.”
Sitting in a corner booth at her favorite Yemeni cafe in Williamsburg, Lollise commands undivided attention: expressive and intelligent, with a wickedly dark sense of humor and an unfettered laugh that is lovely in its loudness. Alongside her musical partner Morgan Greenstreet, a percussionist, co-producer, and DJ, we share a pot of the strong Adeni chai she warns me about—two espresso-sized cups soon drive me to a near-hallucinogenic caffeine high.
Her kind, open demeanor is disarming. When we discuss, for instance, “Iron Woman,” her drum’n’bassy track that addresses medical racism and sexism with the vehemence of someone who’s experienced it, she is direct about her uterine fibroids and the way certain doctors have mistreated her, whether dismissing her concerns or stabbing her carelessly. “I have really, really small veins, and there were times I’d get poked 10 times, and they’re blaming me like I did something. Or I’m telling them I can’t walk, and they don’t believe me,” she recalls, adding that, because fibroids disproportionately affect Black women, there has been relatively little research done on the condition. The song opens with an ominous synth chord and Lollise snarling, “I still have my period/Does that keep me valid?” addressing the absurdity of how society regards women in middle age. In the video, Lollise finds herself connected to forest trees with red yarn resembling a circulatory system; later, she sneers from a corner as a cook grinds up sausage in a meat grinder.
She and Greenstreet filmed “Iron Woman” and several other videos during her first trip back to Botswana since the pandemic. The most touching, for the sweet melody “Mme Mma Ndi,” features Lollise’s friend portraying her mother. On the song, which is inspired by Kalanga folk music, she addresses her mother directly in lines that translate to: “You taught me to be polite/You taught me ubuntu/You taught me about family/I thank you.” As a chorus of Lollises coos on that hook, the tenderest of generational legacies are made audible.
Lollise is 43, an uncommon age for someone to begin their pop career. But sometimes it takes a little longer for a person to find their center, and the work can be better for it. On I Hit the Water, Lollise’s peripatetic life manifests in truly wise music that is unbound in its vision. “I should be a respectable woman with kids, and here I am doing what young people do, parading myself on stage, and I feel really bad about it,” she laughs, in a manner that indicates she does feel bad but also, she doesn’t. “I feel really encouraged by friends who have messaged me from Botswana, even my grandma. Some of them haven’t pursued the things that they wanted to, but they are so proud of me and don’t find it frivolous in the way that I sometimes do. They think it’s important work. And I agree with them sometimes, too.”
She pauses for a second, considering a fellow musician who revitalized her pop career in her mid-40s. “I grew up on Tina Turner, I learned English on Tina Turner,” she enthuses. “And had she not had that second wind?” She sings a little of “What’s Love Got to Do With It?,” which dominated the pop charts when Tina was 45. “I don’t think women should be discarded, or that the only way to be is sexy or a mother or all these tropes. I want a space where all those things can exist together.”
Lollise Mbi first moved to the United States as a teenager on a prep-school scholarship, working at Drexel College of Medicine’s spinal cord injury lab once she graduated with a Chemistry degree from Bryn Mawr. Later, her creative impulses beckoned, and she embarked upon a second career as a fashion designer for brands like Botkier, Tory Burch, and Kate Spade. As a side gig, she spent the last decade singing and playing shekere, the West African percussion instrument, with Chop and Quench—aka the Fela! Band—and the Afrobeat collective Underground System, though she never really thought of herself as a musician. Playing in those groups had simply been “a way to extend my creativity,” she says, and “for therapy,” as she continued her day job designing handbags.
But when the pandemic hit, and Lollise found herself isolating in her apartment in Queens, she discovered she could finally write music without creeping self-judgment. “There was a little bit of guilt I felt as an immigrant, like it was my responsibility to use my mind if I had an aptitude in science, because that would help the masses,” she explains. “It felt like [fashion and music] were very selfish careers that are about aesthetics and a kind of ‘look at me’ thing—which, culturally, is very frowned upon. I still feel a little guilty when I’m on stage.”
Without the pressure of expectation, she felt free to experiment with “everything from protest songs to fantastical music,” she says, with an “alien theme” and a concept around her idea of what she calls “Planet Africa.” She began working with Greenstreet, and by the end of 2022, she had released two EPS: 2020’s Looking at You, which deals with the precipice the pandemic wrought, and 2022’s Unborn, which melds syncopated pop with the aftermath of isolation. While the idea of making music was liberating, she was still wary about gaining an audience. “I was hoping that no one would pay attention,” she says with a grin and a gallows-humor laugh. “We were all gonna die anyway.”
One problem with that plan: Lollise is impossible to ignore. She’s a powerhouse, and her radiantly hued stage looks reflect the stereoscopic variance in her music. “I am a pop girlie—South African pop was what I grew up on, and mostly it was bubblegum. I felt what was special about my region is the diverse pop music that we have, and I wanted to bring elements of that,” she says. “But I’ve also expanded. My mind has synthesized so many different kinds of music in weird ways, then translated it into what you hear now.”
Lollise thinks of her trilingual, pan-African palette as her own version of Afrofuturism. “A lot of the new genres that have gained popularity are from Black people moving forward, so for me, in 2024, Afrofuturism just means imagining a better future for us all,” she says. “If things are better for Black people, for queer people, for minorities, then they’ll be better for everyone.”
