100 Greatest songs of the 20’s So Far #83 Enny – Peng Black Girls

Released: 2020

We can’t deny it, we’re programed to take our cues from who and what we see. In a world that’s become obsessively visual – and conversely lacking substance – these external stimuli shape lives in profound ways, even if they shouldn’t.

With Nigerian ancestry and from a community in South London which has strong multicultural roots, Enny used the tools available whilst outside the music industry’s often elitist bubble, uploading her work to YouTube before eventually releasing He’s Not Into You in 2020.

She emerged at a time when a group of black, female British hip hop artists including Little Simz and Greentea Peng were finding a voice. But it was Peng Black Girls that turned the idea of role models on it’s head, the rhymes about what she saw rather than what others wanted to believe. It helped that there were deftly woven threads of soul along with R&B in this slick lifting up; here then was somebody effortlessly relatable for those trapped in the belief that fate meant an endless series of closed doors.