When Queen Drie was 4, her parents split, leaving her mother with the sole, backbreaking job of raising her and her elder brother. Such were the financial straits they endured that the children sometimes went hungry. Somewhere in young Queen Drie’s mind, an insight was forming: for a woman, it was foolhardy to place all bets, financial and otherwise, on a man. Seeing her mother bear the strains of single parenthood with equipoise, she would inherit strong ideas about feminine autonomy. Mama, a single released in 2020, pays homage to her mother’s willpower. Woman, her latest single, pays homage to all women.
“I wanted to make something that independent women can relate to,” Queen Drie, born Adrien Amponsah, told me. “It is also for women who aspire to be self-sufficient.”
The song, as sparingly percussive as the songs in the artist’s lean discography, starts with a roll call of physical descriptions:
Slick back weave with the Fazos on,
Fulani braids with the Afro tongue.
Before settling on the subject of female agency, Queen Drie gets a word in about her Africanness—her “Fulani braids” and “Afro tongue.” “In my music, I always want to connect with my African identity,” she said. The song’s cover art, with a lip-glossed Queen Drie sporting the white and black of a zebra, is perhaps also a nod to her African ancestry. The striped equine is endemic to the continent.
Maybe she is eager to signpost her heritage because she has, for a long time, been geographically removed from it. Perhaps it is a form of ‘compensation,’ a psychological term which the artist may be familiar with—she is a psychology major, in her final year, at the University of Chicago. At 14 years old, in 2012, she left Ghana for Chicago, and hasn’t visited her homeland since 2021. Her songs, macaronic confections of Western and African cadences, betray her dual identities.
Feminine autonomy, for Queen Drie, is first and foremost afforded by financial security. She works “9 to 5” so she can afford her “own diamonds” and her “own drinks.” Hoping to buy a pricey gemstone as a nine-to-fiver may be a pipe dream, but that is hardly the song’s only fantasy:
We try not to let it show,
We try not to let them know,
But girls make the world go round,
Girls run the whole damn town
The first two lines shimmer with truth, as they describe how women are socialized into becoming shrinking violets so that the masculine ego goes unaffronted. The last line, however, with its vision of gender inequality in reverse, is far from true. In Ghana, for example, only a handful of women are in government, and way more men than women are landowners—men don’t just run the whole damn town, they own it. As a tribute to womanhood, Woman is, ultimately, more of an aspiration than a sociopolitical fact.
In a line about how she only calls on masculine support when she is “feeling lonely,” Queen Drie introduces a complication, maybe even doubts about whether she, or any woman for that matter, can be wholly self-contained. But it may be taken as evidence of her knowledge of human nature: that no one, woman or not, can be truly independent, at least not where the heart is concerned.
If loneliness is a feature in Queen Drie’s music, it is because it once was a feature in her life: she was, in her early college days, bereft of companionship. This, along with residues of trauma from her parent’s separation, plunged her down a black well of depression and caused her to withdraw from school temporarily. In those days she kept sane by writing poems, and it was poetry that, inadvertently, led her into music.
In 2019, she—on the urging of her brother Michael, now her manager; and despite having no musical background—parlayed her intuitive understanding of poetry into writing two songs for an up-and-coming Ghanaian artist. When the artist, then managed by Michael, could not give one of the songs the emotional texture it needed—“because it was not his story,” Queen Drie said—she opted to sing it herself. The result of that decision, the single Testimony, launched her career in February 2020; the song, more or less, was a progress report of her journey towards mental wellness.
Queen Drie, who turns 26 in May, has come a long way from her days of mental limbo and as a musical debutante:
“I tell people that music saved my life. Before Testimony, I was in a very dark place. I’ve come a long way from that. I’ve also evolved sonically; I’m experimenting more. I was doing a lot of Boom bap back then, but I’ve grown to appreciate Afrobeats more, and Alte and contemporary Hip-hop.”
Release date: March 2024
Production: blindforlove and Frank Moses
Label: Independent