Imani Coppola

Wordplay and hooks remained fixtures throughout the stylistically shifting path taken by Imani Coppola, a performer whose roles as singer, rapper, violinist, songwriter, and producer yielded a Top 40 pop breakthrough via the 1997 Columbia single “Legend of a Cowgirl.” Within three years she found herself edged out of the major-label system, yet she reestablished herself independently through a series of vivid solo projects—Post-Traumatic Pop Syndrome (2002), The Black & White Album (2007), and Hypocrites (2017)—while also issuing a trilogy of streetwise pop-soul albums alongside Adam Pallin under the name Little Jackie. Two decades of work were surveyed on the 2018 anthology Unsung, which traced her trajectory from the initial hit to later material, and she pressed onward with The Protagonist (2019).

Born into a musical working-class household on Long Island, Coppola took up the violin at age six. After a short stint in the studio composition program at the State University of New York at Purchase, her demos reached producer Mike Mangini, whose résumé already included Digable Planets and Omar. Further sessions with Mangini and members of Digable Planets secured a Columbia deal, resulting in the 1997 debut album Chupacabra. That set spotlighted the free-spirited, Donovan-sampling “Legend of a Cowgirl,” which peaked at number 36 on the U.S. pop chart. Label pressure to chase further hits through prominent samples clashed with Coppola’s preference for original songwriting, leading to the shelving of her planned follow-up Come and Get Me...What?!; after her release from the roster she eventually offered the album as a free digital download.

Uncredited but audible on the Mangini-produced Baha Men track “You All Dat” in 2001—a chart success in the U.K. and Australia—she also appeared on David Byrne’s Look Into the Eyeball. Through the mid-2000s she assumed the lead role in the film The Singing Biologist, contributed occasional background vocals in the studio, and issued a run of unrestricted independent albums: Post-Traumatic Pop Syndrome, Little Red Fighting Mood, and Afrodite, all released between 2002 and 2004. The 2005 projects Small Thunder and The Vocal Stylings of Imani Coppola preceded her association with Ipecac Recordings, which issued The Black & White Album in 2007. Her first widely distributed full-length since the Columbia debut, it featured pointed material such as “Woke Up White” and “I Love Your Hair,” addressing white privilege and racial micro-aggression. Around the same time she and Adam Pallin formed Little Jackie, signed with S-Curve, and delivered their debut duo album The Stoop in 2008.

Coppola opened the 2010s with the solo release Free Spirit, offered as a free download, then rejoined Pallin for the independently issued streetwise pop-soul albums Made for TV (2011) and Queen of Prospect Park (2014). Between those Little Jackie projects she assembled The Glass Wall, an energetic electronic-pop collection that incorporated traces of commercial dubstep. Although she took her longest interval between solo albums, she arranged and performed strings for Dido and Hanson while co-writing and appearing on Blackalicious’ “The Sun.” Her seventh solo album, Hypocrites, surfaced in 2017 and was followed the next year by the retrospective Unsung; just before the decade closed she returned to Ipecac with The Protagonist.