Liv.e and Karriem Riggins Want You to Love Each Other and Go Outside
The singer-producer duo known as GENA speak on romance, comfort, the relationship between rap and R&B, and creating their debut album, The Pleasure Is Yours
When I first connected with Texas-born singer Liv.e and Detroit producer and multi instrumentalist Karriem Riggins last week, they were both in states of transit. Riggins has just touched down in LA on a flight from his hometown of Detroit, beaming in from a hotel room with a beige-colored archway behind him. Also in LA, Liv.e is holed up in a dimly lit Pirate studio pushing herself through a trial DJ set. She’s taken up the practice in recent years and is set to spin at the release party for her and Riggins’s duo GENA’s debut album The Pleasure Is Yours later that night. “I’m just tryna get my chops up and these niggas is stressing me the hell out,” she says before putting on a fake exasperated voice not too far removed from Courage The Cowardly Dog: “Make sure everyone’s dancing! Make sure everybody dances! Don’t let them leave! I’m like Niggas is probably gonna leave after a certain time because they old, bro. Don’t nobody wanna be out on a Thursday. It’s not summertime.”
Ironically, whenever Pleasure is playing, it might as well be 86 degrees and blazing hip-hop, jazz, and R&B outside. The touchstones and experience are there: the son of keyboardist and jazz royalty Emmanuel Riggins, Karriem is a producer, DJ, and session drummer extraordinaire whose 30-plus-year resume includes being a bandleader for Common, forming a jazz band (Jahari Massamba Unit) with Madlib, and offering soul-food-thick beats to everyone from Erykah Badu and J Dilla to Kaytranada. Liv.e, who counts Georgia Anne Muldrow and Badu as influences, is a similarly fluid polymath who’s become a major player within the bustling modern indie rap and R&B space; she pulls from R&B, soul, garage, funk, and whatever else fuels her musings on love, grief, and other forms of the human condition. (Our interview just so happened to fall on Badu’s birthday. Near the beginning of the call, Liv.e sent birthday wishes to “E-Money”.)
Liv.e and Riggins are both ferociously talented, and the looseness they bring to their music have made them emissaries for both sides of the age gap in the scene. So when they met in the throes of an unnamed collaborative project, they instantly clicked. “After that, I went down this rabbit hole of listening to all her music,” Riggins says. “I was working on a solo album featuring different artists at the time, and I reached out to her to be on it. I sent her a song, she sent it back, and it was amazing. So I sent another, and it was even more amazing, and I was like, Hey, let’s just do an album.”
That space where talent meets vibes is what birthed GENA—an acronym for God Energy Naturally Amazing, inspired by the character Gina Payne from the ’90s sitcom Martin. Pleasure is a humid blend of soul, jazz, and rap flirting with the past and the future without spilling its drink. It’s stacked to the brim with grown and sexy capital-L love songs swaying between post-breakup blues (“Theybetterbegladihavetherapy”), otherworldly yearning (“Unspokerrn,” “Circlez”), and bouncy doo-wop-indebted dives into the unknown. Each song is dripping with sweat and passion, but never in a self-serious way.
Take the rap-ish cadences that give “Unspokerrn” and “TGD” their bounce. Or the moment at the beginning of “Readymade” where Liv.e floats in on Riggins’s keyboards and light drum brushes to croon the opening verse in a soft alto—”I like it when it’s tailored/I like it when it fit me”—before asking “Am I in the wrong key?” and shifting her vocal to a belt that nearly blows the roof off. That’s the GENA experience in a nutshell: self-aware without being self-conscious, never light but always loose and playful. Pleasure is more than just nostalgia bait for the generation raised on Who Is Jill Scott? - Words and Sounds Vol. 1 or New Amerykah Part Two: Return of The Ankh. It cracks those rosetta stones open and uses them to decorate the walls of the studio where the future will be crafted.
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What are your favorite songs by each other?
Karriem Riggins: I don’t have favorites. There’s so many different moods with Liv.e that I need all of the moods, all the time.
Liv.e: Felt. Same here. You got some fucking bangers, though.
If I had to pick, Karriem, mine for you would be the beat you made for Elzhi’s “Two 16s.”
Riggins: He picked that off a batch of beats from my album Headnod Suite. The beat was originally called “Bahia Dreamin’.”
Liv.e: Oh yeah, that’s a good one.
Riggins: I was doing all these tours in Brazil, and people were saying Bahia was the spot I needed to go to.
Liv.e: Did you ever end up going?
Riggins: Never [laughs]. I was supposed to hook up with Sérgio Mendes down there. I was in contact with him for a while. I was gonna produce his album, and he kept telling me, Before we work on the album, you’ve gotta go to Bahia. That was the vibe he wanted me to experience.
And he just passed away recently, too. So that’s just never gonna happen.
Nope. A gang of texts and emails and correspondence, but yeah, never.
And Liv.e, my favorite song of yours is definitely “She’s My Brand New Crush.” Such a simple idea executed so beautifully and infinitely replayable.
Riggins: And you sang that at a wedding recently, right?
Liv.e: Yeah, for the homie Naomi Blue. That shit was cool as fuck, actually. I’d never did that before. It was my first time.
Riggins: They still married?
Liv.e: As fuck! Hell yeah.
On the topic of weddings, The Pleasure Is Yours is an album that feels like the kind you really fall in love with and live with over the course of a relationship. The kind that soundtracks first dates, nights in, fights, makeups, and, yes, weddings.
Liv.e: That’s where the name GENA came from. Specifically how Martin [Lawrence on Martin] would say Gina [Payne’s] name. That’s how these songs make me feel.
Riggins: She took the lead on the name. And that name came about halfway through the project. Otherwise, we woulda been nameless!
Do y’all remember the first song that came together?
Riggins: “Thatsmylvr.” You shoulda seen me blasting that one. When she sent that back to me, I was like “What the hell?” I was breaking some speakers with that joint.
Liv.e: That’s what I’m sayin’, I was like Gahdamn!
Riggins: That’s when I knew we had something special. And the second one was “Circlez.”
Karriem, were you sending stuff back-and-forth with Liv.e, or were y’all spending significant time in the studio?
Riggins: Liv.e was definitely on my mind when I was making everything. I would send certain things to her from my studio, and then she did her vocals from her studio.
Liv.e: We weren’t in the same space together until we started mixing and mastering the album. That shit is so fucking fire. I think that’s one of my favorite facts. Makes me feel like “Na-na-na boo-boo, you niggas can’t do that!”
The platonic ideal is for something like this to be made in close quarters, but making it sound like you did for this debut is impressive. It reminds me of what Phonte and Nicolay did when making the first Foreign Exchange album, or Syd and Matt Martians piecing together the first Internet record.
Riggins: I feel like if I have people looming over me in the studio—it could be my mom up in there—it’s gonna be a different output than when I’m in my solitude. When I’m by myself, it’s a different thing. Not to say that it’s better or worse, but I prefer the solitude, especially for what we came up with. I think we were each in our zones. I would send her an instrumental in the morning, and then the next morning, she’d send me something back.
Liv.e: It was beautiful and crazy. I was finishing shit at, like, 3 or 4 a.. I felt hella disrespectful. It wasn’t no way to schedule texts to send them ahead of time when we were making this, so I was definitely staying up listening and tweaking it a bunch. I’d wait til 4 a.m. because I know with the time difference it was like 7 a.m. for him.
Riggins: I’d wake up geeked and ready to work.
Something else I couldn’t get out of my head is the nature of the one-producer one-vocalist project. Liv.e, you may not be, strictly speaking, a rapper, but you move in those circles, and it’s hard not to think of GENA as a duo in the vein of Anderson .Paak and Knxwledge’s NxWorries. As artists who are both hip-hop adjacent in some way but made something distinctly R&B/soul, what do you think that relationship means in the modern era?
Liv.e: I don’t think we was thinkin’ about too much of anything.
Riggins: At all!
Liv.e: We know we’re creating within a certain lineage, but I don’t think it was that intentional. I do feel that, though.
Riggins: I do consider you an MC. I feel like she’s versatile, she can really go in any bag.
Liv.e: Yeah, I’m not making rap albums, but if you really think about it, I’m singing raps. That’s kinda how I look at it.
I’m blanking on which song it is, but there’s definitely a moment where you slip into a rap cadence
Liv.e: That’s “TGD” for sure.
Riggins: Oh my goodness, that one’s crazy. And “Left The Club Like ‘Really Nigga!?’,” too.
Liv.e: Ahh yeah, facts. The person who runs [British indie rap label Lex Records] told me Yo, this feels like a rap album but if a rapper was singing on melodic songs, which I thought was really funny. I love that shit.
You both have spent so much time talking about the looseness and spontaneity of this record, and the playfulness and curiosity on display deflect any doom or gloom about romance or anything, really. Talk to me about making music that speaks to those feelings, kicking back, and getting lovey-dovey over some modern soul-rap shit.
Riggins: My favorite projects are all made in fun, and I have fun making the music. That’s what we’re hearing; what we’re inspired by is the energy we’re putting into it. I grew up on Biz Markie and Parliament Funkadelic and Marvin Gaye. They could get serious every once in a while, but it wasn’t entirely that. Having fun doing music is such a blessing. I’ve been in different situations where I don’t feel about what I’ve made the way I feel right now. Comfortable is the exact word for it. No stress, all positivity.
There’s a lot to be said for comfort breeding complacency, but I don’t think that’s the case for you two at all. An album like this, created across coasts and timezones, doesn’t come together if the people making it aren’t comfortable and able to achieve flow state.
Liv.e: Exactly. Even down to the mixing process, we was turnin’ up. This link up definitely made me more inclined to be hopeful. I’ve touched on a lot of these topics, but I don’t think I’ve been in a space making a project where I was actually doing good emotionally. I feel like that was reflective of my environment. I also want people to be able to do that for themselves: create an environment that’s reflective of that positivity versus being so strung out on the world and shit. I’m telling myself The only way any of this is gonna change is if you stop being depressed, weak ass nigga. Like, turn the fucking TV off. It’s fucked up, but it’s not that damn fucked up. Shit that you wish would end is ending. Go outside, bro.
