Welcome to In Tune with WBMB, a weekly column where a member of the station covers a new track from the underground. This week’s article is written by Mishel Dutan.
Strong visuals of an ideal girlfriend in complete control manifest into a sickly sweet love song on “She’s a Director” by friends Emir Tokdemir, known as Mechatok and Isabella Rivera, who is also known as Isabella Lovestory. It is the ninth track on Tokdemir’s debut album “Wide Awake,” which was released this August.
Tokdemir is a Munich-born DJ and producer that has been making electronic beats in his bedroom ever since he was a teenager. During that time, he forged online friendships with other musicians. When he moved to Berlin, his online community expanded to real life. Before releasing “Wide Awake,” Tokdemir worked alongside Swedish artist Bladee on “Good Luck” in 2020.
Rivera is one of those friends Tokdemir made online. They met through her YouTube comment section. A shared love for K-pop and its insatiable conquest for perfection drove them close.
A detail that makes this track stand out is how Rivera seldom sings in Spanish. All she sings is, “Yo te conecte/ Yo te colecté.”
On her second album, “Vanity,” the Honduran-born neoperreo artist channeled her inner popstar. She sang about hedonistic habits, embraces raunchiness, explores heartbreak in Spanish and uses colloquial Central American terms like “puchica.”
Explosive drums overpower the spacey and at times is ambient instrumentals, while the track sustains a healthy dose of sweetness. High-pitched, euphoric synths that peek throughout the song are reminiscent of the Y2K Mexican pop trio Belanova. Rivera sings in an ethereal tone, which adds another dash of sugar in the mix. However, there are breaks in the sweetness: the song quickly glitches out, breaking the listener out of the trance the singer has cast.
It’s a sonic metaphor to express that she’s directing her own love story and not to whoever she’s doting on. We’re thrown right back into the loop by Rivera’s soft ad-libs.
Rivera’s decision to cast herself as the director and the actress is what makes her ideal. In the beginning of the song, she professes that “he doesn’t know another like her” and then asks him to show her the things only he sees.
It’s not enough to just be unique; she wants to merge worlds with him so she can better direct him. Even if she poses a threat, as she is “sharp at the edges,” she reassures him that his heart is because she is a “winner in love.”
It’s worth mentioning that Tokdemir is a classical guitarist, as the song ends on a distorted guitar riff that whirls out into the end. It’s a cumulative point that contrasts heavily with the singer’s tender delivery.
This love song is cloying to a comfortable extent and encompasses the passionate highs of an all-consuming, obsessive and idealistic love.
