ARTIST RESEARCH

ABOUT JHENE AIKOJhené Aiko Efuru Chilombo, better known as Jhene

Aiko or simply Jhene is an 25 year old American signer-songwriter and recording artist from Los Angeles, California.

Jhene has two older sisters, Miyoko and Jamila who were in the R&B group ‘Gyrl’. This led Jhene to meet producer Chris Stokes when she was just five years old. Later on, he heard her sing and when B2K were signed to Epic Records so was Jhene. When she first began her career, she was known as Lil Fizz’s cousin (one of the members of B2K) however, this was just a marketing tool suggested by Sony and Epic to promote her through B2K.

On 16th December 2011, Jhene signed a recording contract with ‘Artium’ record label , distributed through Def Jam Recordings.

THEMES & LYRICSThe dominant theme of Jhene Aiko’s songs is Love. This is evident in her debut

mixtape ‘Sailing Souls’ with songs such as ‘My mine’ and ‘Higher’ which through the lyrical content we know are related and inspired by love. Aiko commented on her writing style expressing ‘I write something everyday regardless if it’s a one liner, a poem or a prolific thought that I though throughout the day. ‘

Aiko writes music everyday, often writing lines or a poem and begins to ad them to melodies. She describes her writing style as ‘freestyle’ simply because she is stating how she is feeling, this can take from a day to a month to complete. Interestingly Aiko admitted that whilst writing music she enjoys being high in order to use the feeling as inspiration and that throughout the entire writing and recording process of her debut mixtape ‘Sailing souls’ she was under the influence of cannabis. Whilst writing for her debut studio album, she did the same however; she recorded while she was sober. She places great importance on writing her own music as she believes it defines her as an artist. She said ‘After each song I’ve lost a piece of me, because I've put it in to the song.’

WEBSITE

www.jheneaiko.com

The previous slide shows the current layout and appearance of Jhene Aiko’s website.

HOME PAGE:The home page contains all of her recent songs and as well as her most recent music video ‘The worst’. The background image is the album cover of her EP ‘Sail Out’. An extended play (EP) is essentially a mini album because it contains more than a single, but not enough to qualify as a full studio album.

BLOG: The blog tab of the website directs us to Jhene Aiko’s tumblr page. Tumblr is a micro blogging platform and social networking website which allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog. This creates a personal relationship between Jhene and her fans because they are able to see what she’s doing on a day to day basis as she blogs quiet frequently.

EMAIL SIGNUP:This tab allows fans to signup to the website and leave a comment.

The other tabs on the page, MEDIA, STORE & EVENTS are all currently empty.

COMMON CAMERA SHOTS

‘Bed Peace’ Ft Childish Gambino

‘3:16am’ ‘The Worst’

Above are three screenshots from three different music videos by Jhene Aiko. We can see that medium close-ups are a consistent shot used. This could be because Jhene is attractive and R&B females tend to use their sexuality to sell their music. This is something I will take into consideration when creating my music video.

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