Audio Premiere: Fore - "Hometown"

Fore releases "Hometown"

Brooklyn-based rapper Fore’s new single, “Hometown” is much more than the sum of its parts: haunting piano, lonely bass and an emotive voice to guide it. "Hometown" is what happens when you spend your youth living between four continents. It’s what happens when your interests range from the Scotland’s Cocteau Twins, New York’s Nas and Mali’s Amadou & Miriam. After spanning the globe and the musical spectrum, Fore’s musical influences would seem dizzying if it weren’t for the provocative sense of loneliness central to his music and particularly "Hometown."

“Hometown” rises and falls with swelling horns and distant synths as Fore evocatively describes the struggles of being an immigrant in New York. From experience, Fore warns that while your home praises you as a “hero” for coming to America, New York will disregard you as another foreign face in a city full of them-- A cab driver with a PhD is just a cab driver / A dishwasher's with JD a JD is just a dishwasher.

As Fore’s new album, The Stranger, approaches release, he has positioned himself as a valuable voice in the hip-hop community. But an important distinction needs to be made: Fore isn’t first and foremost an immigrant rapper. Fore is first and foremost an honest rapper. The song’s despondent hook-- I’m a man, little did they know / A man without a country, little did they know-- is met with his vivid description of an expired visa prompting NYPD to violently and unjustly detain him-- Neglected to mention my visa suspension / I was sitting alone in detention. As the audience listens to a single austere beat carry away Fore’s pantheon of live horns, the rapper is left to wonder if he’ll ever be free, let alone free enough to reclaim the life he once had. Strem "Hometown" below and hit the link to hear more of Fore's sound via Okayafrica.

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