Song Of The Week

Godric Pops Out In Pink

"Tiffany Mink" embodies the confidence and sophisticated extravagance that sets the Durham-based artist apart.

Ryan Cocca

Jun 14, 2024 — 4 min read

A lasting impression can come from the most fleeting of moments in time. Sometimes that's a product of the context; others, more a reflection of character. As it relates to my relationship with Durham-based rapper/artist GODRIC — who to this day I don't know particularly well, and yet remains intimately and forever linked to my life — it's safe to say it's a matter of both.

Two and a half years ago, there was a span of roughly 30 minutes during which only two people on Earth knew that my wife and I were engaged. One of them, because he had taken pictures of the proposal, was our friend Tommy. The other was a close friend of his, who'd agreed to pretend he was modeling for a photoshoot in the exact, pre-agreed location where we would spontaneously "run into" them. That friend was Godric.

And so it was, just moments later, that the celebratory meal immediately upon becoming engaged to my now-wife — that indelible, milestone life moment — was attended by the exact group I'd always imagined: my brother, my parents, Tommy Coyote, and someone previously known to me mostly as @godrinati on Instagram.

Were you to take a snapshot of just this one cheerful, Boricua Soul dinner to explain all of Godric, you obviously wouldn't have the whole picture — but you'd have a lot: the close kinship with Tommy, his years-long, joined-at-the-hip creative partner from photography to music production; the total comfort, warmth and ease amongst perfect strangers, befitting one of the most omnipresent and universally adored artists in the Triangle creative community; the (faux-)premise of him randomly engaged in a downtown photoshoot — characteristic of a musician defined just as much, if not more so, by his singular and seemingly effortless style.

More so than in other genres of music, it could be argued that image and presence in hip-hop is half the battle. For some, these elements take years of painstaking trial and error to fully shape. Others, depending, of course, on when you meet them, seem to arrive fully formed. It's hard to think of a North Carolina act more representative of the latter than Godric, who — in large part thanks to a unique and resplendent sartorial sensibility full of gold bracelets, fur coats, see-through blouses, designer shades and rhinestone-studded belts — has managed the celebrity-like trick of cultivating a distinct, larger-than-life look that paradoxically doesn't feel self-conscious or constructed at all.

It would be a shame if all that self-assurance didn't translate into confident, dynamic music, but for Godric, that's never been an issue. Songs from the high-energy 2021 album H8R, like "Orange Swade," call to mind the recent breakout stardom of a similarly brash, synth-drenched artist like TiaCorine, making the case that Gody remains one or two breaks away from the same slingshot trajectory.

On "Tiffany Mink," his hypnotizing, trunk-rattling new single, the magnetic musical and personal attributes displayed over the past few years — promoted with fittingly literary-chic album art of Godric in one-of-one clothing pieces and reading Toni Morrison — are all still there, just further refined. The taste for sophistication and extravagance is more blatant and assertive than ever, and the chest-thumping attitude is refreshingly dissonant from an artist who, from wardrobe to sense of community to source material (that album art was inspired by Donna Summers), has consistently challenged and subverted traditional norms of gender expression. In an Instagram post, he described his upcoming album as "a study & homage to women in art who broke barriers, pioneered fields, rejected historical stereotypes and continue to represent how a marginalized group (still) dominated by law and society effectively and in real time continue liberating themselves from it."

That's a lot to communicate over the span of an album. Thankfully for Godric, it doesn't take long to make a lasting impression.

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