Vel the Wonder: Trophy Wife
Released 6 Nov 2020
12 tracks

One of the first thoughts which came to my mind after listening to Vel the Wonder’s Trophy Wife (in Finnish ”Palkintovaimo”) album was ”art”. Maybe I had heard more like pop style rap music lately, so this album made the distinction as art. Why the word art then? It’s pretty difficult to say anything about music anyways, but… It gave me lots of things to think about, not just to enjoy.
Somewhere on the way when I had listened the album like 10 times (it’s so good!), some of the things to be mentioned – I heard the influences from older rap like Dr. Dre and some conventions he made popular. More like, those traits came to front in the very beginning when I listened to the album. Vel the Wonder is a G, she sings about that in her previous productions, too. She doesn’t ”copy” the style in no way, but slides to be a subject in the canon.

What is so refreshing, is that a lyricist like Vel the Wonder makes you listen. She raps about topics that touch my life in many ways. For example, in a song ”Idols” she raps about a scenario when your ”idols aren’t your idols anymore”. I’ve been thinking about similar theme myself before listening to this album. It’s good to be conscious of that someone else is thinking about same things, and you don’t have to ”translate” everything from the guys’ world into yours. I understand my position as a listener who is a white woman, I try not to fetishize the rap product, but to appreciate it. I honestly think I can identify with her songs as a woman, although I don’t possibly face the same fights than Vel the Wonder. It’s good to listen to those and learn from them.

In this album, like in her previous ones, Vel the Wonder raps a lot about interactions between women, giving space and credit to them. At the end part of Trophy Wife, there’s a song called ”Mariposa”. There’s a girl she grew up with, and the speaker of the song used to learn from her. But the present situation is different. The girl is not doing so well. The speaker has passed her by and looks at her from a different position now: the speaker is not doing that bad herself.
Honestly, I’ve been listening this album tens of times now! I don’t even listen so much music or albums all in all! Maybe listening to this is because of some coincidence, but now that I started to listen.. it ended up as one of my favorites of the year.

Listen to Trophy Wife: