Two weeks ago, Durham vocalist and producer Ebz the Artist announced via her Instagram that her song “Say It” had just hit two million views on YouTube. In response, the ever-watchful Durham personality and longtime WXDU 88.7 DJ Ross Grady tweeted about her milestone: “The difficulty of covering the sprawling Triangle music scene is highlighted by the fact that this tune by Ebz has 2 million views & yet she’s had zero coverage in the Indy, the N&O, the Durham Beat, Clarion Content, etc.”
He was right. We had slept on the song and the opportunity to highlight what few up-and-coming local R&B artists have achieved in the digital-streaming age, a strange time where an artist can be from somewhere but succeed on the placeless internet. Mostly by word of mouth and a few spins by some of Ebz’s overseas deejay friends, “Say It” exploded online and took on a life of its own.
“I was shocked,” says Ebz, who is twenty-two years old. “I didn’t expect for that many people to be listening to my music. I never thought music would be my first route, because I draw and paint a lot as well. It seemed surreal.”
By comparison, the viral, Durham-grown anthem “North Cack,” by rappers G. Yamazawa, J. Gunn, and Kane Smego, has leveled out at just over one million views on YouTube after two years of nationwide attention and, most recently, placement in a Nike Football commercial. And unlike Ebz, who was barely twenty when she dropped “Say It” in May last year, the stars of “North Cack” already had an established local fan base, allowing them to frequently perform the song locally and create a craze around it. When “Say It” hit the internet, Ebz was doing very little on the ground to support her self-produced single.
“I don’t know if I liked performing as much as I thought I would. So I kind of took a break from it,” she says.
Instead, during Moogfest, she found herself on the Raund Haus Stage at Parts & Labor playing her beats instead of performing her songs. Months earlier, she had met Raund Haus cofounder Nick “Gappa” Wallhauser, who encouraged her to showcase her production skills in one of Raund Haus’s experimental beat shows, which she did for the first time at a March 2018 Raund Haus Presents show at The Pinhook. She felt more comfortable in this capacity, and it would take a while before she would reconsider singing and rapping her songs in front of an audience.
Miriam Tolbert, aka WQOK 97.5 FM radio personality Mir.I.am, has been hosting the Carolina Waves Showcase and Open Mic for the past few years (see page 19). In that time span, she’s seen promising local R&B acts such as Imani Pressley, Trez Falsetto, M8alla, Will Wildfire, and Hasina matriculate from upstart amateur acts to artists with great industry potential. While most of the artists she’s worked with have been on more of a grassroots path than Ebz, gaining local fans through frequent performances, Tolbert sees the Ebz phenomenon as something useful as well.
“She’s very creative, talented, marketable, and she does a lot of different things. All around, she’s dope” says Tolbert. “But there are two sides to it. Obviously, you want to be known on a national scale. Being known locally is nice, and you’ll get the opportunity to present on a more personal level, and people like venue owners get to see what traction you have. But if those same people see your online power through an ill [electronic press kit], they deal with you anyway.”
Still, how does one explain why a locally obscure R&B artist managed to rack up so many online listens for one song without any industry help or local backing or even an EPK? “Say It” is a naturally cool, sexy jam with a downbeat energy in the same soul-pop league as leading R&B ladies such as SZA, H.E.R., Khelani, and newcomer Cleo Sol. Sonically, and by association, it’s completely fathomable that listeners would naturally drift toward Ebz’s music. She may not be following the traditional local-to-national trajectory, but there’s more than one way up these days.
“I know what my lane is now,” says Ebz. “Before I was just trying to fit in with what everyone else in Durham was doing, rather than come up with my own original concepts. I put a lot of pressure on myself. Now I’m exploring what I like to hear and what I want people to hear.”
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