Wé Ani’s Uncanny Sonic Diversity Revisited

I can never confidently predict the vocal texture that Wé Ani, my favorite singer, will bring to a performance. Please indulge me as I take a break from politics, history, philosophy, and theology (all right, except for one footnote).

Over the past two years, I’ve audited all her music videos, almost a hundred of them, long and short. Some were made in her humble home studio, some professionally scripted and videographed, still others televised for competitions where the magic that only million-dollar budgets can buy enhances her image in a dozen different Wés, I mean, ways.

My oft-muttered rhetorical question is: what resemblance does the artist in Video A bear to the one in Video B (A and B standing for any randomly chosen two items in that collection)?

I documented this in detail over a year ago in “Wé Ani: a protean multiplex of vocal performance.” I won’t reproduce all the links, for only a few of you are motivated to verify my assertions. I conceded that this post’s appeal is probably not much more than that of a stranger’s diary entry.

Since posting that essay, there has been even more corroborating evidence.

My topic is her singing, but she also has a wide diversity of “looks,” each a function of her age, diet, wardrobe, hairstyling, lighting, and so forth.

The problem, as I see it, is one of aesthetic reconciliation: I find it hard to reconcile Wé’s many divergent (and, to me, deeply pleasing) vocal textures as embodiments of a single artist.

I’m not referring to her childlike speaking pitch, which may interest you only after you’ve heard her sing. Even when asked for what seems like theWe Ani promotional image hundredth time, she never rolls her eyes. She answers as if hearing that question for the first time.

“Persona” means “mask,” yet her performance persona is not an insincerely wrought affect or artifice, something she dons. She’s performing, not impersonating or mimicking someone else.

Whatever aesthetic ideal governs her choices when she steps up to the mic, however, she does put one in mind of other singers. The textures of the first twenty seconds or so of any two of her songs never quite match. (Again, full documentation is in the previous post, linked above.)

My difficulty is psychological, not intellectual, but no less fascinating for that reason. As you know, YouTube “remembers” what one watches, so it impersonally displays on one’s television an array of images of one’s recent searches. So, when I stare at the array and ask—Is the woman depicted in this one the same as the lady in that one—I know the answer is in the affirmative.

I’ll offset this abstractness with a few illustrations, realizing that if you’ve never heard her before, then whichever one you choose first will bias, if only slightly, your reception of the second, third, and the rest. So, try to focus on the varying vocal textures:

Then there are her volcanic auditions, which I urge you to watch if you watch nothing else:

Now, in her search for a career “lane,” she’s written songs I’m not crazy about. Not offensively so, but far beneath what she’s capable of. I remind myself that she doesn’t exist to perform only the songs I like.

The dramatic toughness of two braggadocious offerings, for example, The Standard (early 2024) and Jurisdiction (late 2025), clash with the winsome personality on display in interviews. (See previous post for links.) Obscuring what makes her special, they’re not representative of what drew me to her music. But I cannot pretend they don’t exist. They are among the “many layers” she referred to in the lead-up to the Ain’t No Way performance mentioned above.[1]

But when she belted Stevie Wonder’s Overjoyed at the Apollo last year (as she did For Once in My Life at the Library of Congress in 2017, honoring Tony Bennett), suddenly all was right with my musical world again.

Seven months ago, she gave a mini-concert of songs I love to hear her sing (especially Beyoncé’s Desperately in Love) and then, around the same time, a playful duet, Forget about You, with Ajii—which still, in my opinion, doesn’t hold a candle to Hit ‘em Up Style, with a Twist, her explosive jazz cabaret number with Pjae on Idol.

If she goes in a direction I don’t care for and makes a fortune doing it, I’ll still be happy, for I can still access the many gems I love. Her music is a salve for my soul[2], seared daily by awareness of the world’s many horrors. If she becomes such a balm for even just one of you, then my writing labor here has been rewarded.

I wish I could convey my appreciation to her, but I’m not on her social media platforms.

Please check out my longer post and the jam-packed one on her before that.

Thanks for indulging me.

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 Notes

[1] “I mean, there’s a lot of layers.” Wé Ani before her American Idol performance of Ain’t No Way (@0.38), aired April 9, 2023.

[2] That is, for me insofar as I enjoy and suffer, not on me as a supposedly incorporeal substance that can exist apart from my body after I die. In this matter, I follow Moses, not Plato. Unlike The Phaedo, Genesis is theopnuestos (God-breathed; 2 Timothy 3:16) and therefore inerrant in all that it affirms or implies.