Earlier this year, Bullett wrote of the New Orleans musician Boyfriend, “Teacher by day, cabaret rapper by night, we watched the 25-year-old striptease, gyrate, and motorboat on Monday night at Baby’s All Right [in Brooklyn].” As far as descriptions go, that one is as enticing as it gets, a fact reflected in the music of Boyfriend herself. The gender-bending nature of her performance name is also indicative of her satirical streak; in her words, her music “straddles the line between satire and straight-up music.”
Whether “Tomorrow”, her latest tune, falls into the former or latter camp is unclear. Certainly, the song could read as aggressively funny satire of the male objectification of women; but, then again, Boyfriend so effortlessly slips into the persona of someone only in it for one night that it just as easily could be a proclamation for the right of women to have one-night stands. That tension is what drives the song, aside from Boyfriend’s jarring hip-hop techniques.
“I thought of the hook, found the perfect beat, wrote and recorded the song all within 24 hours”, Boyfriend tells PopMatters. On the matter of the song’s lyrics, particularly the key refrain “Don’t ask me ’bout forever baby, ask me bout tomorrow”, she says, “‘Tomorrow’ is an ode to the one night stand, a rejection of the immortality mindset in favor of Carpe Fuckin’ Diem. We’re all gonna die, after all…”
Boyfriend has a new EP coming out in November, which will be followed with a tour of the US southeast.
Photography by Josh Anderson.