Liv.e and Karriem Riggins Want You to Love Each Other and Go Outside

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.